Accessibility Quick Wins Before Your Next Website Redesign

A dental practice we worked with got an email from a patient who used a screen reader to browse the web. She'd tried to book an appointment through their site three times and given up each time because the date picker widget didn't announce anything to her screen reader — it just looked like a blank, unlabeled box. The practice had no idea. Nobody on staff used assistive technology, so the problem was invisible to everyone who'd ever reviewed the site.

Accessibility isn't a redesign problem — it's mostly a details problem

Web accessibility, often shorthanded to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), covers how usable a site is for people with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities. The instinct is to treat it as a big project that requires a full site rebuild. In reality, the highest-impact fixes are usually small, specific, and can be done without touching the overall design.

The fixes with the best effort-to-impact ratio

• Alt text on images — a short, accurate description of what the image shows, so a screen reader can convey it
• Color contrast between text and background — light gray text on a white background looks clean but is unreadable for many low-vision users
• Descriptive link text — 'click here' tells a screen reader user nothing; 'view our pricing page' does
• Keyboard navigation — every interactive element (menus, forms, buttons) should be reachable and usable without a mouse
• Form labels — every input field needs a real, programmatically associated label, not just placeholder text that disappears when you start typing
• Video captions — anyone who's watched a video on mute in a waiting room understands why this matters even for hearing users

Why this is worth doing even without a legal push

Some businesses only think about accessibility after a complaint or demand letter. That's a real risk worth understanding with a lawyer if it applies to your situation — but it's also the wrong reason to lead with, because it treats accessibility as a liability question instead of a customer experience one. A meaningful share of any local market has some degree of visual, motor, or cognitive impairment, whether temporary (a broken arm, bright sunlight on a phone screen) or permanent. A site that works well for assistive technology tends to work better for everyone — clearer contrast, more descriptive links, and forms that are easy to fill out benefit every visitor, not just the ones using a screen reader.

A simple self-audit you can run this week

1. Unplug your mouse and try to navigate your own homepage using only Tab, Shift+Tab, and Enter
2. Turn on your phone's built-in screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and try to book an appointment or fill out your contact form
3. Zoom your browser to 200% and check that nothing overlaps or gets cut off
4. Run your homepage through a free automated accessibility checker to catch missing alt text and contrast issues
5. Watch one of your own videos with the sound off and see whether it makes sense without captions

None of this requires a developer for the first pass — a business owner or marketing coordinator can walk through this list in under an hour and come away with a concrete punch list.

What a full redesign should still get right from day one

If you are planning a full site redesign, the cheapest time to build in accessibility is at the design stage — choosing a color palette with sufficient contrast up front, building forms with proper labels from the start, and structuring headings logically (H1, then H2s, then H3s, in order) rather than picking heading levels for visual size. Retrofitting these later is possible but always more expensive than getting them right the first time.

Accessibility fixes that make a site easier for a screen reader user almost always make it clearer for every other visitor too.

Getting a second opinion

Automated checkers catch maybe half of real accessibility issues — the rest require an actual human trying to use the site with assistive technology, or a specialist who knows WCAG well. If your business operates in a regulated or higher-risk category — healthcare, financial services, education — it's worth having a conversation with a lawyer about what level of compliance applies to you specifically. For the practical side, our free website audit flags common accessibility gaps as part of a broader technical review, and our website services can help fix what it finds.

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