Website accessibility means making sure people can use your site regardless of disability, device or circumstance. That includes people who are blind or partially sighted and use screen readers, people who cannot use a mouse, people with dyslexia or cognitive impairments and people with temporary injuries or simply a small screen in bright sunlight.
It is also good business. An accessible site reaches more customers, tends to be easier for everyone to use and often performs better in search. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that is widely understood to include websites.
A full audit against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) takes time and expertise, but you can spot many common problems yourself in about 15 minutes.
Minutes 1–4: put the mouse away
Open your homepage and use only the keyboard. Press Tab to move forward through links and buttons, Shift + Tab to move back and Enter to activate links.
- Can you always see which element is selected? There should be a clear outline or highlight.
- Can you reach and open the main menu, including any dropdowns?
- Does the order make sense, moving logically through the page?
- Can you close pop-ups, cookie banners and menus without a mouse?
- Can you fill in and send your contact form?
If you get stuck anywhere, so will people who rely on a keyboard or assistive technology.
Minutes 5–7: check the contrast
Low-contrast text, such as pale grey on white or white text over a busy photo, is hard for many people to read. Look at body text, buttons, links and text placed over images. Free contrast-checking tools and browser extensions can test specific colours against the WCAG standard, which asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text.
Also check that links can be distinguished from surrounding text by more than colour alone, for example with an underline.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Minutes 8–10: images and media
- Do meaningful images have descriptive alternative text? In WordPress, check the “Alternative text” field in the media library.
- Are purely decorative images given empty alt text so screen readers skip them?
- Is important information, such as an offer or opening hours, ever shown only inside an image? If so, add it as real text.
- Do videos have captions?
Minutes 11–13: zoom and resize
Zoom your browser to 200% using Ctrl and +, or Cmd and + on a Mac. Text should get larger without being cut off or overlapping, and you should not need to scroll sideways to read paragraphs. Then try your site on a phone held both upright and sideways.
Minutes 14–15: forms and headings
- Does every form field have a visible label, rather than only placeholder text that disappears?
- Are error messages clear and placed next to the relevant field?
- Do pages use headings in a logical order, with one main heading followed by subheadings, rather than bold text styled to look like headings?
- Do link texts make sense on their own? “Read our pricing guide” is better than “click here”.
Improving your website accessibility
Write down everything you found and fix the issues that block people completely first, such as menus or forms that cannot be used with a keyboard. Free automated tools like WAVE or Lighthouse can find more technical issues, although they cannot catch everything, so combine them with manual checks.
If you add an accessibility statement to your website explaining your commitment and how people can report problems, keep it honest and up to date.
We build accessibility into our websites from the design stage, which is far easier than fixing it later. If you would like an expert website accessibility review, get in touch.
