I’m going to tell you something that will make this topic make more sense than any legal compliance framing ever has:

About 1 in 4 adults in the United States has some kind of disability. Many of those disabilities affect how people interact with the internet. If your website isn’t accessible, you are excluding roughly 25% of your potential audience. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But effectively.

That’s not a small margin. In what other context would you shrug at losing a quarter of your potential customers?

What accessibility actually means

Accessibility is not one thing. It’s a collection of design and development decisions that determine whether your website can be used by people with a range of disabilities — visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, and neurological.

For people with visual impairments, accessibility might mean: does your site work with a screen reader? Do your images have alt text that describes what’s in them so someone who can’t see the image still gets the information? Is your text large enough to read? Is your color contrast high enough that someone with low vision or color blindness can distinguish between text and background?

For people with motor impairments, accessibility means: can this website be navigated with a keyboard instead of a mouse? Can someone using a switch device or adaptive technology get through the navigation without getting stuck?

For people with cognitive differences — including dyslexia, ADHD, autism, and a range of other neurological profiles — accessibility means: is the layout clear and predictable? Is there too much visual noise? Does the content have headers and structure that help people scan and find what they need? Are there walls of text where a bulleted list or some white space would help?

I’m autistic. I think about this one a lot. I’ve left websites because the visual design was genuinely too much for my brain to parse, even when I wanted the information on them. That business lost me not because their product wasn’t right for me but because their website was sensory chaos.

The legal angle (because I’d be doing you a disservice not to mention it)

The Americans with Disabilities Act has been applied to websites by courts with increasing consistency, particularly for businesses serving the public. There have been thousands of lawsuits against businesses for inaccessible websites. The legal landscape is still evolving and it is not entirely uniform, but the direction of travel is clear: website accessibility is increasingly considered a legal obligation, not just a nice-to-have.

I am not a lawyer. Please do not interpret anything in this post as legal advice. What I will say is that the businesses most at risk are typically those in industries with high public-facing service requirements — retail, hospitality, healthcare, education — and that having an inaccessible website is an unnecessary legal vulnerability when accessibility is genuinely achievable.

The good news: accessibility and good design are not opposites

This is the misconception I encounter most often. People hear “accessible” and think “clinical” or “boring” or “designed to a checklist rather than a vision.” That is not true, and it has never been true.

Good accessibility is good design. Clear visual hierarchy helps everyone. Readable fonts help everyone. Sufficient color contrast helps everyone. Predictable navigation helps everyone. Fast load times help everyone. Images with descriptive alt text help the visually impaired and also help your SEO because search engines read alt text. (Yes, really.)

Most of the things that make a website accessible are things that make it better for every single person who uses it. They’re not accommodations bolted on afterward. They’re the foundational design decisions that distinguish a thoughtfully built website from one that was put together quickly without thinking about who’s going to be using it.

Where to start if this is new territory for you

If you want to check your current website’s accessibility, there are free tools. WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) will run a scan on any public URL and flag issues, with explanations that don’t require a computer science degree to understand. Google Lighthouse, built into Chrome, includes an accessibility audit. These are starting points, not complete solutions — automated tools catch maybe 30-40% of accessibility issues — but they’ll give you a picture of where you stand.

The most common issues I see on small business websites: missing alt text on images, low color contrast, form fields without proper labels, and content that’s only navigable with a mouse. None of these are catastrophic to fix. Most of them are genuinely quick, once you know where to look.

If accessibility feels like a lot and you’d rather have someone walk through your site and tell you specifically what needs attention — that’s something I do. Because I care about this, both as a developer and as an autistic person who has personally experienced what it’s like to be excluded by a website that wasn’t built with people like me in mind.

The internet is supposed to be for everyone. Let’s make sure your corner of it actually is.