Is your website accessible? A plain checklist for small business owners.

If you have ever been told your website needs to be "accessible" and quietly hoped it did not apply to you, you are in good company. The word turns up mostly in alarming emails from companies selling audits, and it rarely arrives with a plain explanation of what it means or whether you are actually on the hook. So let us clear it up. An accessible website is simply one that a person can still use if they cannot see well, cannot hear, cannot use a mouse, or cannot make sense of a wall of small grey text on a bright screen. That is the entire idea. Everything else is detail.

The practical side matters more than the theory. A meaningful share of people live with some form of disability, and that share grows steadily as the population ages, which means a real slice of the people looking you up right now are affected. Here is the part owners miss: a customer who cannot read your phone number, cannot reach your quote form with a keyboard, or cannot tell which button submits it does not send you a complaint. They just leave and call the next name on the list. Below is who legally has to comply in Ontario, who does not, and a checklist you can run yourself without buying a thing.

What accessible actually means in practice

Think about the different ways people take in a web page. Someone with low vision may run the text at double size, or use a screen reader that reads the page aloud in order. Someone with a tremor or an injury may navigate entirely with the keyboard, tabbing from link to link instead of pointing and clicking. Someone who is colour blind cannot rely on red text alone to spot an error. Someone who is deaf needs your video to carry captions. None of these people are unusual. They are ordinary customers using ordinary devices in the way that works for them.

An accessible site is one that does not break for any of those people. It has enough contrast between text and background. It labels every form field so a screen reader can announce it. It lets you zoom without the layout collapsing. It gives every meaningful image a short written description. Crucially, none of that requires an ugly or stripped back design. Almost every fix on this page is invisible to a sighted mouse user, which is exactly why so many good looking sites quietly fail.

Who legally has to comply in Ontario, and who does not

Here is the honest answer, because the fear based version costs owners money they did not need to spend. Under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, public sector organizations of any size, and private organizations with 50 or more employees, must make their public facing websites meet the WCAG 2.0 Level AA standard. That requirement had a deadline of 1 January 2021, so it is already in force. It applies to web content created or significantly refreshed since 1 January 2012. Two parts of the standard are excepted, success criterion 1.2.4 covering live captions and success criterion 1.2.5 covering audio descriptions.

Read that threshold again, because it is the part the scare emails leave out. If you are a private business under 50 employees, and most local trades, clinics, shops and studios are, you are not legally required to meet that web standard. There is a separate obligation worth knowing about though. Private sector businesses and non profits with 20 or more employees have to file an accessibility compliance report, and the current filing deadline for that is 31 December 2026. Obligations depend on your organization, so confirm yours with the Ontario government's own guidance for businesses or with a professional rather than with a sales pitch. If you want the full breakdown, we covered it in AODA and your website.

Why bother if the law does not require it

Because the law is the floor, not the point. If a customer cannot use your site, they cannot buy from you, and that is true whether or not anybody is legally counting. Every barrier on this page has a direct dollar cost attached to it, and unlike most marketing problems you can fix these once and be done. The population is also getting older, which means the number of your customers who need bigger text and clearer buttons is going up every year, not down.

The other reason is that accessibility work overlaps almost completely with plain good usability. Bigger tap targets, readable text, clear labels and sensible headings help everyone on a phone in the sun holding a coffee. Search engines read the same structure, so clean headings, descriptive links and image descriptions help there too. You are not doing charity work, you are doing the same work we recommend in six ways to improve your website's user experience, from a slightly different angle. And if you ever cross that 50 employee mark, you will already be there.

A customer who cannot use your website does not file a complaint. They quietly call somebody else, and you never find out it happened.

Colour, contrast and text size

Start here, because contrast is the single most common failure on small business sites and the easiest to fix. Light grey text on a white background looks refined on a designer's monitor in a dark room. On a phone screen outdoors it is close to invisible. The rule of thumb is that normal body text needs a strong, obvious difference between the text colour and the background behind it, and large headings can get away with a little less. Pale grey on white, white on a light photo, and thin light type over a video are the three classics.

Text size matters just as much. Body copy that looks fine at arm's length on a laptop is often too small on a phone, and the fix is simply to set it bigger and stop being precious about it. Also check that a visitor can pinch to zoom. Some older templates deliberately disable zoom on mobile to protect the layout, which is a genuinely hostile thing to do to anybody with less than perfect eyesight. Finally, never let colour alone carry meaning. If a required field turns red when it fails, add text that says what went wrong, because a colour blind visitor sees no change at all.

Images, links and form labels

Every image that carries information needs alt text, which is a short written description read aloud by a screen reader. Describe what matters, not what a camera saw. "Refinished oak staircase in a Windsor home" beats "IMG_4471" and beats "staircase photo". Purely decorative images, a background texture or a divider flourish, should have empty alt text so a screen reader skips them instead of announcing noise. If a photo contains words that appear nowhere else, like your phone number baked into a banner, those words are invisible to a lot of people and to search engines both.

Link text needs to make sense on its own, because screen reader users often jump through a page link by link. A page full of "click here" and "read more" tells them nothing. "See our pricing" and "book a free estimate" tell them everything. Forms are the same story. Every field needs a visible label attached to it, not just faint placeholder text inside the box that vanishes the moment someone starts typing. Placeholder only forms are a quiet disaster, they fail screen readers, they fail anyone who gets interrupted mid form, and they lose you enquiries from people who simply were not sure what the box wanted.

Keyboard, zoom and video

Put your mouse down and press the Tab key repeatedly on your own homepage. You should be able to reach every link, button and form field in a sensible order, and you should always be able to see where you are, usually as a visible outline around the focused item. If the outline is invisible, or the tab order jumps around the page at random, or you get trapped inside a pop up with no way out, you have found a real barrier. This one test catches more problems than any paid scan.

Video and audio need a little thought too. If you have a testimonial video or a walkthrough of a job, captions make it usable for deaf and hard of hearing visitors, and honestly for the large number of people who watch with the sound off. Auto playing audio is worse than useless, it is disorienting for screen reader users because it competes with the voice they are listening to. If something moves, flashes or scrolls on its own, give people a way to pause it.

Free ways to test it yourself

You do not need to buy an audit to find the obvious problems. Chrome has a built in tool called Lighthouse in its developer tools with an accessibility report that runs in about thirty seconds. The WAVE browser extension from WebAIM flags contrast failures, missing alt text and unlabelled form fields directly on the page. WebAIM also publish a free contrast checker where you paste in two colour codes and get a straight pass or fail. All three are free and none of them require you to understand code.

Treat automated tools as a smoke alarm, not an inspection. They reliably catch contrast, missing labels and missing alt text, which is most of what goes wrong on a small business site. They cannot tell you whether your alt text is meaningful, whether your tab order makes sense, or whether your error messages are actually helpful. That is why the manual keyboard test above matters, and why the checklist below is written for a human rather than a scanner.

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Common mistakes that quietly lock people out

These are the ones we find over and over on otherwise decent sites:

• Pale grey body text on white, which looks elegant on a laptop and disappears on a phone outdoors.
• Zoom disabled on mobile so the layout stays tidy, at the cost of anyone with weak eyesight.
• Contact forms with placeholder text instead of real labels, so fields are unnamed once you start typing.
• Menus of links that all read "click here" or "learn more" out of context.
• Phone numbers, prices or service areas baked into an image with no text version anywhere.
• Pop ups with no visible close button reachable by keyboard, which trap a visitor completely.
• Error messages shown only as a red outline, with no words explaining what went wrong.

The checklist you can run today

Open your site on a phone and on a laptop, then work through these in order:

1. Read your body text at arm's length in bright light. If you squint, it is too small or too pale.
2. Pinch to zoom on your phone. If nothing happens, zoom has been disabled and needs turning back on.
3. Press Tab through the homepage. Can you reach every link and button, and always see where you are?
4. Check every meaningful image has a short, honest description, and decorative ones have none.
5. Read your link text out of context. Does each one say where it goes?
6. Check every form field has a visible label sitting above or beside it, not just inside it.
7. Submit your form with a field missing. Does it tell you in words what to fix, not just a red box?
8. Confirm any video has captions, and that nothing plays sound automatically.
9. Run Lighthouse or WAVE on your three most important pages and fix whatever it flags.
10. Make sure your phone number is real text and a tappable link, not part of an image.

What genuinely needs a professional

Most of the list above is a settings change, a colour swap or ten minutes of writing. Where you want help is anything structural. Rebuilding a navigation menu so it works by keyboard, fixing heading structure across a whole template, making a booking widget or a third party review embed accessible, or getting a site to hold together at double zoom, those are build level jobs rather than content edits. If your site was made on a page builder with a heavy theme, the theme itself is often the barrier, and patching it costs more over time than rebuilding lean, which is worth weighing against what a small business website really costs.

None of this is glamorous work, and none of it will show up in a portfolio. It just quietly widens the group of people who can hire you, and it makes the site better for everybody else at the same time. Run the checklist, fix the three worst things this week, and confirm your own legal obligations with the province rather than with anyone trying to sell you something. That is the whole job.