Website Accessibility for Small Businesses: What You Need to Know About ADA and WCAG

Website accessibility means people with disabilities can use your site, including people using screen readers, keyboards or zoom. It's the right thing to do, it reduces legal risk, and it overlaps heavily with good SEO. This isn't legal advice, but here's the practical picture.

The standard

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the common benchmark; level AA is the usual target.

Most common issues on small business sites

• Images without alt text.
• Low contrast text.
• Buttons and links that don't say what they do ("click here").
• Forms without labels.
• Sites that can't be navigated by keyboard.
• Videos without captions.
• Headings used for styling instead of structure.

Quick wins

1. Add descriptive alt text to every meaningful image.
2. Check contrast with a free checker.
3. Label every form field.
4. Caption every video (you should anyway; most social viewers watch muted).
5. Use a logical heading structure.
6. Test by tabbing through your site.

Why it helps SEO and AI search

Alt text, clean headings, labels and captions are exactly the structure search engines and AI assistants read. Accessible sites are easier to understand.

Every site we build starts with these fundamentals. See websites.