Your website probably works fine for you. You can read it, click around, find what you need.
That covers about 75% of the population.
The other 25% might be having a completely different experience. And you’d have no idea.
One in four Americans lives with some kind of disability. Visual, hearing, physical, cognitive. Something that affects the way they interact with the world, including your website. That’s roughly 61 million people in the US alone. And a significant percentage of them run into barriers every single day when trying to use websites that weren’t built with them in mind.
I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. Most business owners aren’t excluding people on purpose. They built a website, or paid someone to build one, and nobody asked the question. Nobody brought it up.
That’s usually where we come in.
What “Accessible Website” Actually Means
An accessible website is one that works for people who experience the world differently than you do.
Someone who can’t read small text without straining. A person who relies on software that reads the page out loud to navigate the web. Someone with a motor impairment who uses a keyboard instead of a mouse. Someone who processes information more slowly and needs the layout to be clean and consistent, not chaotic.
Making a site accessible means building it in a way that works for all of them. Bigger text options. Enough contrast between the text color and the background that people can actually read it. Images that include a written description for anyone who can’t see them. Pages that you can move through without a mouse.
None of this is exotic. It’s good building practice. And most business websites are nowhere close to it.
More of Your Customers Are Affected Than You’d Think
This is where most business owners I talk to do a mental double-take.
Sixty-one million adults. That’s not a number concentrated in one age group or one region of the country. It’s spread across everyone — young people, older adults, your actual customers. Some have been managing a condition their whole life or developed it recently. Some wouldn’t even describe themselves as having a disability, they’d just say their vision isn’t what it used to be or their hands shake a little. And they’re all trying to navigate your website the same way everyone else is.
Think about the people looking for your business online right now. Some of them have low vision or are colorblind. Some can’t comfortably hold a phone for more than a few seconds. If your site requires sharp vision, precise mouse control, and no help from any kind of assistive tool, you’ve made it harder than it needs to be for a real chunk of the people who are actively looking for what you do.
Most of them won’t say anything. They’ll just leave.
The Legal Side You’d Rather Not Have to Find Out About Later
I don’t love leading with lawsuits, because honestly the business case for fixing this is strong enough on its own. But this is something you need to know about now rather than later.
Web accessibility lawsuits targeting businesses have been climbing for years. In 2023, there were over 4,600 cases filed in federal court, and small businesses are not exempt from any of it. If anything, they’re more frequently targeted because they’re less likely to have anyone reviewing their web presence for this kind of exposure.
The cases tend to follow a pattern. A plaintiff claims they couldn’t use a business’s website because it wasn’t built to accommodate them. The business settles. It’s not always dramatic, but it’s real, it’s expensive, and it’s almost entirely avoidable with the right setup.
The standard most courts reference is a set of guidelines that govern how websites should be built to be accessible. You don’t need to memorize them, that’s what developers are for, but knowing they exist and that courts actually use them to evaluate websites is useful context. Because “I didn’t know” is not a great legal defense, and it’s definitely not a comfortable position to be in.
Here’s the Part Nobody Expects: Accessible Sites Rank Better on Google
This one catches people off guard, and I find it endlessly useful to bring up.
Google’s goal is to send people to websites that give them a good experience. Clear structure. Text that’s easy to follow. Images that are labeled. Pages that load and work regardless of how you’re accessing them. That list is also, more or less, a checklist for an accessible website. The overlap is not a coincidence.
When you make a site more accessible, you end up doing a lot of the same things that help it rank better in search results. Page speed works the same way, it’s another thing Google uses to decide how visible your site should be, and most small business owners don’t know their site is slow until someone shows them. Better page structure means Google can understand what your site is about and match it to the right searches. Descriptive labels on images help your photos surface in image search. Cleaner, leaner code is easier for everyone to get through, including the software Google uses to crawl and index your site.
It’s not a silver bullet. But accessible sites consistently perform better in organic search, and that means more people finding you without paying for every click. That’s a real business outcome, not a side benefit.
The Most Common Accessibility Problem on Small Business Websites
I’ve reviewed a lot of websites at this point. And if I had to pick one thing that shows up more than anything else, it’s text that’s too hard to read.
Usually it’s some combination: the text is too small, or the color is too light against the background, or there’s not enough space between lines so everything feels compressed and dense. Sometimes it’s a font that looks interesting but makes letters hard to tell apart from each other. Gray text on a white background. White text on a photo where the image underneath shifts depending on the screen.
Here’s what most business owners don’t realize: this doesn’t only affect people with visual impairments. It affects everyone reading your site on a bright day, on a phone with auto-brightness turned down, or just anyone who isn’t staring at a top-of-the-line screen in a perfectly lit room. Legibility is not a niche concern. It’s basic usability, and a lot of sites fail it quietly without anyone saying a word.
What We Put on Every Site We Build
Every website we deliver includes two things that most agencies don’t offer as standard.
The first is an accessibility plugin. It’s a small toolbar visitors can open to adjust the experience to suit their needs, text size, spacing, contrast, highlighted links, and more. A lot of people with visual or cognitive differences use tools like this every day when they’re navigating the web. Most websites don’t provide anything like it. We put it on everything we build, without clients having to ask.
The second is a dedicated ADA accessibility page. It explains the steps taken to make the site accessible, provides a contact option for anyone who runs into a barrier, and documents the standard the site was built to meet. It signals to visitors and, if it ever came to it, to courts, that this wasn’t an afterthought.
I bring this up with clients and they’re almost always surprised. Most of them didn’t know it was something their site should have. A lot of them didn’t know they were exposed without it. And they definitely didn’t realize it was something they could have been asking their web team about.
It’s not complicated to implement. It just has to be on someone’s list. For us, it’s on every list.
How to Know Where Your Site Actually Stands
Start with the obvious stuff, because the obvious stuff is usually the problem.
Pull your site up and look at it honestly. Is the text actually readable, not “readable for you,” but readable for someone who struggles with small print? Is there enough contrast between your text and your background? Does the page have a clear, logical order to it, or does it jump around?
WebAIM’s contrast checker is free and takes about 30 seconds. Enter your text color and background color and it tells you immediately whether the contrast meets the accessibility standard. Small thing, real information.
Then ask whoever built your site a direct question: what have you done for accessibility? Is there an accessibility plugin installed? Does the site have an ADA compliance page? You’ll get a sense very quickly of how much thought went into it, and whether anyone thought about it at all.
The Thing About This Is It Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
Most business owners haven’t thought about web accessibility because nobody told them they needed to. It’s one of those areas that doesn’t come up until it’s already a problem, a lawsuit, a customer who gave up on the page, a Google ranking that’s soft for no obvious reason.
The fix isn’t a huge lift if you catch it early. A plugin, a page, a little attention to contrast and text size. Whether it needs that or something more significant depends on how the site was originally put together. It’s mostly a matter of whether someone on your web team is paying attention and cares enough to bring it up. A lot don’t. We do.
And given that 61 million potential customers are navigating the web with some kind of disability, it seems worth at least knowing where you stand.
Guerrilla Bee is a creative design agency that builds websites designed to work for everyone and to perform. Every site we deliver includes an accessibility plugin and a dedicated ADA accessibility page as standard. Want to know where your site stands? Get in touch here.
