Accessibility: what we found on 100 small-business sites

Maybe the text is too faint to read. Maybe the booking form confuses their screen reader. Maybe a flashing animation makes them feel sick. They do not email you to complain. They just leave, and you never know they were there.

That matters for a lot of people. Roughly 1 in 4 adults live with a disability. Accessibility just means people can use your site no matter how they browse: with a keyboard instead of a mouse, with a screen reader that speaks the page aloud, with the text zoomed up large, or with animations turned down.

Here is the big picture. Across everything we looked at on these sites:

In total, 20.7% of the things we looked at were a problem, about one in five. The best site got everything right, and the weakest got only 40 out of every 100 right. Most small-business sites are not a disaster. But most have a few quiet problems turning real customers away.

Three reasons to care, and none of them are abstract:

• Real customers. Every barrier is a person who wanted to give you money and could not.
• Legal risk is real. Small businesses do get demand letters over inaccessible websites, and "we are small" is not a defense.
• This work pays off twice over. The same fixes that help people also make your site easier to use for everyone and easier for Google to find. So fixing these problems makes your site better, helps more people discover you, and protects you, all at once.

Some fixes you can do yourself. A few are technical and best handed to whoever built your site. We will be clear about which is which.

How we did this

Each percentage below is out of the sites where that particular thing actually applied, not always out of all 100. That matters, because some things only come up for some businesses. Captions only matter on sites that have video. Grouped form options only come up on sites that have them. So the numbers below are sometimes out of a smaller group, and we say so plainly, for example "of sites with video" or "of sites with a form." The examples are real notes from what we found, with the businesses kept anonymous.

Reading, color, and motion: can people take your page in?

This group covers the most basic thing a website does: show information so a human can actually take it in. If the words are too faint, the captions are missing, or the motion is overwhelming, the content might as well not be there.

Color contrast people can actually read

54% of sites had text that was too faint to read easily. This was the single most common problem we found, hitting more than half the sites. Contrast is just how clearly your text stands out from the background behind it. Pale gray text on white, or thin light type over a photo, becomes invisible to an older customer or to anyone reading on a phone in daylight.

On the sites with this problem, anywhere from a couple of bits of text to eight or more were too light to read comfortably. There is a widely accepted standard for "readable enough by most people," and this text fell below it.

Why it matters: your most important words are often the ones people cannot read. Your phone number. Your hours. Your prices. Your main button. Faint text there quietly costs you calls and sales.

How to fix it: make your text darker and your backgrounds simpler. Dark gray or black text on white or very light backgrounds is safe. Avoid putting text directly over busy photos, or add a shaded panel behind the words. Paste your text and background colors into a free online "contrast checker" to see if they pass. In a website builder, this is often just a theme color setting. Build your site on Frontpage and readable contrast comes baked into every theme, so your phone number, hours, and main button stay legible by default.

Captions on your videos

91% of sites with video had no captions on it. Only 23 sites had video at all, but among those, almost every one left it uncaptioned. Captions are the words shown on screen as someone speaks. They help people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they help the much larger group who watch with the sound off at work, on a quiet bus, or late at night.

Why it matters: if your video explains your service or your offer, an uncaptioned version only reaches the people who turn the sound on. That is a minority of viewers. Captions also give search engines text to read, which helps you get found.

How to fix it: on YouTube, turn on auto-generated captions, then edit them so names and prices are correct, because auto-captions get details wrong. For video on your own site, ask whoever manages it to add a caption file (a small text file, usually ending in ".vtt," that holds the words and their timing). And if a video does not really need to be a video, a short written version works for everyone instantly.

Heavy animation that respects "reduce motion"

65% of sites with a lot of animation had no calmer version. Some people get genuinely ill from on-screen motion: dizziness, nausea, headaches. Phones and computers have a setting that says "I prefer less movement," and a well-built site quiets things down automatically for those visitors. On these sites that did not happen, so anyone who gets motion sickness was left to suffer it.

Why it matters: a visitor who feels sick on your homepage leaves. They will not push through nausea to read your menu. Large sweeping animations, parallax scrolling (where the background slides at a different speed from the foreground), and auto-playing motion are the usual culprits.

How to fix it: this one is mostly technical, so hand it over. Ask whoever built the site to respect the "prefers-reduced-motion" setting, which automatically reduces or removes big animations for visitors who have asked for calmer pages. It is a small, well-known piece of code. In the meantime, they can dial back anything that moves the moment the page loads.

Buttons, links, and labels: can people tell what things are?

This group is about meaning. A button that says nothing. An image with no description. A form field with no label. To a person using a screen reader (software that reads the page aloud for people who cannot see it), these are blank spaces. The page can look fine and still be useless by ear.

Buttons and links that announce themselves

52% of sites had buttons or links with no name a screen reader could read. A screen reader reads out the words on a button or link as the visitor lands on it. A button that is only a little picture (a cart, a magnifying glass, a menu icon) has no words to read. So the visitor just hears "button," with no idea what it does.

Why it matters: your "Call now," "Book," "Add to cart," and "Send" controls are exactly where you make money. If a blind or low-vision customer reaches one and hears nothing useful, that is a lost sale at the finish line.

How to fix it: make sure every button and link has real words attached, even when it only shows an icon. For icon-only buttons, ask your builder to add a hidden text label (an "aria-label") so the search icon announces "Search" and the cart icon announces "Cart." Where you can, include a short visible word next to the icon. It helps everyone. Sites built with Frontpage give every button and link a real, screen-reader-friendly name automatically, so your money-making controls always announce themselves.

Images and icons with text alternatives

22% of sites had images with no written description. A written description, often called "alt text," is a short line of text attached to an image. A screen reader reads it aloud, and Google reads it too. Without it, a meaningful photo is just "image" to a blind visitor, and invisible to Google.

Why it matters: if a photo carries information (your dish, your finished work, a map of how to find you), the people who most need that description are the ones who cannot get it. Alt text also quietly boosts your image search rankings.

How to fix it: for every image that means something, write one short, plain sentence describing what it shows, for example "Slice of pepperoni pizza on a wooden board." Most builders have an "alt text" box where you upload the image. For purely decorative images, mark them as decorative or leave the alt text empty on purpose, so the screen reader skips them.

Forms with real labels, not just gray placeholder text

24% of sites with a form had fields with no real label. They used faint hint text inside the box instead of a proper label. A label is the wording that stays next to a field and tells you what to type, like "Email" or "Phone number." The faint gray hint inside the box disappears the moment you start typing. So if it is your only label, the reminder vanishes the second someone clicks in.

Why it matters: your contact and booking forms are how leads reach you. If a customer forgets which box was for their phone number, or a screen reader cannot announce the field at all, they abandon the form and you never learn they tried. That gray placeholder text usually fails the contrast test too, so it is a double problem.

How to fix it: give every field a clear visible label that stays put above or beside the box. Keep placeholder text only as an extra hint ("e.g. you@example.com"), never as the only label. Most form builders have a label setting for each field. When you build your forms with Frontpage, every field gets a clear, properly connected label out of the box, so leads reach you instead of abandoning a confusing form.

Form fields with programmatic labels

4% of sites had labels that were not properly connected to their fields. This is the more technical version of the problem above, and it was rare. The label might sit right next to the box on screen, but behind the scenes it is not linked to it in the page's code. That hidden link is what lets a screen reader say "Email, edit text" when the cursor lands in the box.

Why it matters: without that connection, a screen reader user hears an unlabeled box and has to guess. On a checkout or booking form, guessing means errors and abandoned orders.

How to fix it: hand whoever built the site the notes above and ask them to connect each label to its field in the code (commonly by matching a "for" attribute to the field's id).

Form option groups with proper grouping

40% of sites with grouped options did not group them correctly. When a form offers a set of related choices, like "Pick a service: haircut, color, or beard trim," those options should be bundled together under a shared heading. Done right, a screen reader says "Pick a service" before reading out the options.

Why it matters: without the grouping, a screen reader reads off a string of loose options with no idea what they belong to, so the customer cannot tell what they are choosing.

How to fix it: ask whoever built the form to wrap each set of related radio buttons or checkboxes in a fieldset with a legend that states the question.

The page's structure and behavior: can people move through it?

This last group is about getting around the page and the structure underneath it. Many of these are technical and best handed to your developer. But several were near-perfect across the sites we looked at.

Navigable by keyboard alone

20% of sites could not be used with a keyboard alone. Plenty of people never use a mouse. Some have hand tremors or limited movement. Some use a special switch device. Many people simply prefer it. They move through a site with the Tab key, jumping from link to button to field in order. On these sites that order was jumbled, so pressing Tab jumped around the page instead of moving in a sensible line.

Why it matters: if pressing Tab jumps around in a jumbled order, or a customer cannot reach your "Book" button without a mouse, those visitors cannot finish the task. Keyboard access is also the foundation most screen readers rely on, so breaking it breaks more than one group at once.

How to fix it: test it yourself in two minutes. Open your site, put the mouse away, and press Tab over and over. The highlight should move through links and buttons in a sensible top-to-bottom order. If it leaps around, hand the page to whoever built your site and ask them to fix the tab order so it follows the page from top to bottom.

The page can be zoomed

13% of sites stopped people zooming in on their phones. They blocked pinch-zooming by switching off zoom in a hidden line of phone settings. When zoom is turned off, a customer who pinches to make small text bigger gets nothing.

Why it matters: many people, especially older customers and anyone reading fine print like your hours or address, rely on pinch-to-zoom. Blocking it tells a large, loyal group that your site is not for them, on the device most of your traffic uses.

How to fix it: ask whoever built the site to stop disabling zoom, by removing the settings that lock the scale or set "user-scalable" to no. It is a one-line change, and there is almost never a good reason to keep it.

No other automated WCAG violations

12% of sites had other smaller accessibility problems. This is the catch-all for issues that did not fit the named problems above. These are the smaller things most businesses are expected to get right, and on their own each is minor, but they still add up.

Why it matters: these leftover issues are exactly the small barriers a customer cannot name but can feel, and they tend to be the cheapest to fix.

How to fix it: give your builder the specific notes (the count of elements is the clue) and ask them to resolve each flagged item. Because these come straight from an automated checker, the fixes are usually quick.

Valid ARIA roles and attributes

9% of sites had broken behind-the-scenes labels. Fewer than one in ten, which is encouraging. These are extra labels developers add to help screen readers understand custom parts, like a slider or a pop-up menu, that are not ordinary buttons or links. Used correctly they help. With a mistake or a typo, they confuse the screen reader instead.

Why it matters: a broken label here is worse than no label at all. It can take a button that would have worked fine and make it announce nonsense, leaving the customer stuck.

How to fix it: this is purely technical. Ask your developer to check these labels and either fix or remove the broken ones.

Lists structured correctly

9% of sites had lists that were not built correctly. A small group had lists that were technically broken in the page's code. When a list (your services, your menu, your features) is built correctly, a screen reader says "list of 5 items" and lets the visitor move through them cleanly. When it is broken, that structure falls apart.

Why it matters: lists are how you present the things people came to see. If the structure is broken, a screen reader user loses the "5 items" framing and the content gets harder to follow.

How to fix it: this is a tidy-up for your builder. Share the notes and ask them to correct the list markup so each list is properly formed.

Page language is declared

4% of sites did not say what language the page was in. Nearly every site got this right. Every page should state, in its code, what language it is written in (for most of these sites, English). It is one small setting near the top of the page, and screen readers use it to pick the right voice and pronunciation, so your English page is not read aloud in a French accent.

Why it matters: without the language declared, a screen reader may mispronounce your whole page. It also gives search engines a clearer signal about who your content is for.

How to fix it: this is a one-time, one-line fix for whoever built the site: set the page's language attribute (for example, "lang" set to "en" for English). Set it once and it covers the whole page.

Links that describe where they go

1% of sites used vague link wording like "click here." This was almost a clean sweep: just one site fell short, with a few links that said "click here" instead of saying where they go. A good link tells you its destination, like "View our menu," instead of a vague "click here." Screen reader users often pull up a list of all the links to jump around, and "click here, here, read more" tells them nothing.

Why it matters: clear link wording helps screen reader users navigate, helps everyone scan your page faster, and gives search engines useful context. It is one of the easiest wins in this report.

How to fix it: rewrite vague links to name their destination. "Click here to book" becomes "Book an appointment," and "Read more" becomes "Read our story." Make the meaningful words themselves the link.

A win worth celebrating: descriptive page titles

Every single site got its page titles right. This was a clean sweep: not one site slipped up. A page title is the short name of the page that shows in the browser tab and in Google's search results. Getting it right helps people who keep several tabs open, helps screen reader users know which page they are on, and helps you show up in search.

What to fix first

Start with the problems that hit the most sites, in rough order of how common they were:

1. Fix color contrast, the most common failure at 54% of sites.
2. Caption your videos, the worst pass rate at 91% of sites with video.
3. Give your buttons and links real names, 52% of sites.
4. Add a calmer "reduced motion" option for heavy animation, 65% of sites with heavy animation.
5. Add alt text to meaningful images, 22% of sites.
6. Put real labels on your form fields, 24% of sites with forms.
7. Make the site work with a keyboard alone, 20% of sites.
8. Stop blocking zoom on phones, 13% of sites.

After those, mop up the smaller, mostly technical items: the other small accessibility issues (12%), properly connected form labels (4%), grouped form options (40% of sites with grouped options), behind-the-scenes labels (9%), list structure (9%), the page language setting (4%), and the lone vague-link issue (1%). Hand the technical ones to whoever built your site. Most are quick.

Why this is worth your time

Accessibility sounds like a specialist subject, but the work is mostly small, simple, and a one-time job. Darker text. Captions. A label on a button. A description on a photo. None of it needs an ad budget, and most of it does not even need a developer.

The payoff is unusually broad. You stop turning away the roughly 1 in 4 adults with a disability, real customers who wanted to call, book, or buy. You lower your legal risk, because small businesses really do get demand letters. And because these same fixes also make your site clearer for everyone, every one of them makes your site easier to use and easier for Google to find.

Most of these sites were not failing on purpose. They just had a few quiet barriers no one had noticed. Pick the top two or three, spend an afternoon, and hand the technical leftovers to your builder. Your site will look more professional, work for more people, and quietly win you customers your competitors are still turning away. Want to know where your own site stands? Run a free Website Audit to see your score and a simple list of exactly what to fix.

Based on a close look at 100 small-business websites. Every number above comes from what we found, and the businesses are kept anonymous.