A website passes the accessibility checks that matter most when 18 things are true: contrast is strong enough to read, images carry meaningful alt text, everything works from a keyboard, forms are labelled and forgiving, headings describe the page structure, and media has captions or transcripts. This checklist walks through all 18 in priority order, with a free test for each — no specialist software required for the first pass.
Accessibility is usually framed as a legal obligation, and in many markets it increasingly is one. But the commercial framing is more persuasive day to day: the visitors affected by low contrast, unlabelled buttons and keyboard traps include your oldest customers, your customers on phones in bright sunlight, anyone with a broken arm or a sleeping baby, and every search engine trying to understand your page. Accessible sites are simply usable sites, measured honestly.
Seeing the Page: Contrast, Text and Layout (Checks 1–5)
1. Text contrast at least 4.5:1 for body text (3:1 for large headings) — light grey text on white is the most common failure on modern sites, and it fails your best customers first. 2. Text resizes to 200% without content overlapping or disappearing. 3. Nothing is conveyed by colour alone — a form error shown only as a red border is invisible to colour-blind users; add an icon or a sentence. 4. Tap targets are at least roughly 44px — small links packed together punish every thumb, not just unsteady ones. 5. Layout survives a narrow screen and landscape phone without horizontal scrolling.
Test free: browser zoom to 200%, a contrast checker from the free tools page's colour utilities (the Color Picker helps sample the exact colours), and simply squinting at your homepage in daylight on a phone — low-tech, brutally informative.
| Check area | The check | Free test |
|---|---|---|
| Contrast | Body text ≥ 4.5:1 against its background | Contrast checker + daylight phone test |
| Alt text | Every informative image described; decorative ones emptied | Screen reader or alt-text viewer extension |
| Keyboard | Full journey possible with Tab / Enter / Esc | Unplug the mouse and try to buy something |
| Headings | One H1, logical order, no skipped levels for styling | Headings outline extension |
| Forms | Visible labels, clear errors, no time-out traps | Submit the form empty and wrong on purpose |
| Media | Captions on video, transcripts for audio | Watch your own video muted |
Understanding the Page: Alt Text, Headings and Links (Checks 6–11)
6. Alt text describes the image's information, not its file name — 'Team fitting a heat pump in a Leeds semi' , not 'IMG_2043'. 7. Decorative images have empty alt so screen readers skip them instead of announcing clutter. 8. One H1 per page, with headings in order — a screen reader user navigates by headings exactly as a sighted user scans them. 9. Link text says where it goes — pages of 'click here' are useless read aloud in a list, and vague for everyone else too. 10. Page titles are unique and descriptive — the first thing announced on arrival. 11. Language is declared in the page code so pronunciation is right, which matters doubly on bilingual sites.
These checks overlap happily with SEO: unique titles, descriptive links and structured headings are the same work our meta tag analysis guide covers from the ranking side.
Where accessibility failures most often appear on small sites (illustrative ranking) — hover or tap each bar for details.
Using the Page: Keyboard, Forms and Motion (Checks 12–18)
12. The whole journey works by keyboard, including menus, pop-ups and checkout — and 13. a visible focus outline shows where you are (deleting the outline for aesthetics strands keyboard users completely). 14. No keyboard traps — Esc closes dialogs. 15. Forms have persistent visible labels, not placeholder-only fields that vanish as you type, and 16. errors are described in words with the field named and the fix suggested, keeping the user's entries intact. 17. Autoplay and moving content can be paused, and flashing content is avoided entirely. 18. Time limits warn and extend rather than wiping a half-finished application.
Test free: complete your own most important journey — enquiry, booking, purchase — using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and Esc. Every place you get lost or stuck is a place real customers are being lost today.
The Rules in Our Four Markets, in Plain Terms
This is general information, not legal advice — but every market Asad Webs serves is moving the same direction, and the technical standard they converge on is the same one this checklist follows: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA.
- USA: the Americans with Disabilities Act is applied to business websites by the courts, and WCAG is the benchmark used in practice; federal suppliers work to Section 508, which also points at WCAG. Private lawsuits over inaccessible sites are a routine cost of doing business online in the US.
- Spain and the EU: the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025 to a range of consumer services, e-commerce among them, with exemptions for the smallest businesses. Spanish and EU-facing stores should treat WCAG AA as the working target.
- UAE: federal law protects the rights of People of Determination, and government digital services follow national accessibility standards; commercial expectations follow the same direction, especially for businesses serving the public sector.
- Saudi Arabia: digital government runs to national accessibility standards aligned with WCAG, and the Kingdom's digital-transformation programme keeps raising the bar suppliers are measured against.
The practical reading: you do not need four accessibility strategies. Build to WCAG AA once, and you are aligned with where all four markets already are or are plainly heading.
Accessibility Is a Publishing Habit, Not a Project
The template fixes get you most of the way once; the rest is habit. Every new image needs its alt text written at upload, by the person who chose the image and knows what it shows — alt text written retrospectively in bulk by someone guessing is barely better than none. Every new video needs captions ordered with it, not as a someday task. Every new form needs its labels and error messages checked at build, not after the first complaint.
Put three lines in your team's publishing checklist — alt text, heading order, link text that makes sense — and the site stays accessible as it grows instead of drifting back. The businesses that struggle treat accessibility as a one-off remediation project every few years; the ones that do not, treat it as hygiene. Hygiene is cheaper, and it is the difference between a site that is accessible on audit day and one that is accessible every day.
Worked Example: A 90-Minute Homepage Audit
What this checklist finds in practice, on a typical small-business homepage — a fictional composite, but every fault below is one we see constantly. A home-services company, modern template, photos everywhere, online booking form.
- Minutes 0–15 (contrast and layout): the pale-grey testimonial text fails 4.5:1 at 2.9:1; the orange call-to-action button's white label fails too. At 200% zoom the sticky header eats a third of the phone screen. Two fixes noted, both in the template.
- Minutes 15–35 (keyboard): Tab reaches the menu, but the dropdown items are unreachable; the booking pop-up opens with no visible focus and Esc does not close it. The journey a keyboard user most needs — booking — is exactly the one that fails.
- Minutes 35–55 (forms): the booking form's fields are placeholder-only; submit it empty and the error is a red outline with no words — check 3 and check 16 failing together, on the page that makes the money.
- Minutes 55–75 (images and headings): fourteen images, eleven with empty or filename alt text; three H1s on one page and a skipped level where a styled paragraph impersonates a heading.
- Minutes 75–90 (media and write-up): the testimonial video has no captions. Findings scored by impact: forms and keyboard first (they block revenue), contrast second (one template change), alt text and captions folded into the publishing routine.
Ninety minutes, no paid tools, and a fix list a developer can price line by line. That is the shape of a first audit on any small site — yours will differ in details, rarely in pattern.
Testing with a Screen Reader: The 15-Minute Version
The free tests above find most failures, but fifteen minutes with an actual screen reader teaches things no checklist conveys. NVDA is free on Windows; VoiceOver is built into Apple devices. You are not learning the tool — you are sampling the experience.
Close your eyes or turn the screen away and do three things. First, jump through the page by headings and ask yourself whether the outline alone tells the page's story — that is how a screen reader user builds their picture of your site. Second, list the links and listen: a column of 'click here' and 'read more' is a menu with no labels. Third, complete your contact or booking form by sound alone, and deliberately make an error — is the mistake announced, in words, with the field named? Most first-time listeners find one moment where the page simply goes quiet or talks nonsense. That moment is your fix list, in the order a real user meets it.
What to Fix First on a Real Budget
Work in the order of visitor impact, not checklist order. Contrast and tap targets first — they affect everyone, everywhere. Then keyboard operation and focus visibility, then forms (your money pages), then alt text and headings as an ongoing publishing habit, then media captions. Most of these are one-off template fixes on a modern site: paying once to fix the template repairs every page built on it, which is why accessibility belongs in any redesign brief from day one — see the real costs in our website redesign cost guide. Build it into launch, too: the website launch checklist pairs naturally with this one.
Online Stores: The Checkout-Specific Checks
Stores carry extra failure points, because the money journey is the most complex one on the site. Add these to the eighteen:
- Selectors that work without a mouse: size, colour and quantity controls operable by keyboard, with the chosen option announced in text — not shown by a coloured ring alone (check 3 applies at the till).
- Checkout errors that survive: a declined card or missed field must be described in words at the top of the form and beside the field, with everything the customer already typed preserved. Re-typing a whole checkout is where assisted shoppers abandon.
- Timeouts that warn: payment and booking steps that expire should warn first and extend on request (check 18), rather than emptying the basket silently.
- Zoom alternatives: product image zoom that only works on hover locks out keyboard and touch users — provide the large images as ordinary, tappable gallery images too (the photo guide's size rules make this painless).
- Confirmation in more than one channel: order confirmations readable on screen and by email as real text — not locked inside an image or a PDF attachment.
Five Accessibility Myths That Cost Small Businesses
1. "An overlay widget makes us compliant." A toolbar that enlarges text or boosts contrast can help some visitors, but it does not repair keyboard traps, missing labels or uncaptioned video underneath it — the failures this checklist tests. Regulators and courts look at the site itself, not the badge on it.
2. "We have no disabled customers." You have no way of knowing that — and the customers who hit a wall rarely complain; they leave. Roughly one in six people lives with a significant disability, and situational limits (sunlight, a broken arm, a sleeping baby in one arm) touch everyone.
3. "Accessibility ruins design." Contrast strong enough to read, targets big enough to tap and structure clear enough to skim are what good design looks like when it is tested instead of assumed. Sites usually get cleaner, not uglier.
4. "Our template handles it." Templates handle their own markup — not your images without alt text, your placeholder-only forms, your PDF menus or your embedded video. Most failures live in content and configuration, where templates cannot reach.
5. "It is a one-off project." Covered above, and worth repeating: sites drift with every upload. The habit costs minutes per post; the remediation project costs real money every few years.
Pick three checks from part one and run them on your homepage today — fifteen minutes, no tools to buy. Whatever you find, the Asad Webs blog has the redesign and launch guides to fix it properly.
Want accessibility built in, not bolted on? Book a free consultation — we design and build websites with keyboard access, contrast and readable structure from the first mock-up, and we can audit your current site against this checklist.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most common website accessibility failure?
Low text contrast — pale grey text on white backgrounds — followed by missing or useless alt text. Both are quick to detect with free checkers and are usually one template fix.
Is website accessibility a legal requirement?
In many jurisdictions it is, or is becoming one for businesses of certain sizes and for public-sector suppliers. Requirements vary by country, so treat this checklist as good practice and take legal advice for your specific obligations.
Does accessibility help SEO?
Much of the work overlaps: unique descriptive titles, structured headings, meaningful link text and text alternatives all help search engines understand pages. Accessible publishing habits are good publishing habits.
How do I test accessibility without special software?
Zoom to 200%, navigate by keyboard only, watch your video muted, submit your form wrong on purpose, and view the page in bright daylight on a phone. Those five free tests find most real-world failures.
Do I need to fix everything at once?
No. Fix contrast, targets and keyboard operation in the template first — one change, every page improved — then forms, then build alt text and captions into your publishing routine.
Will an accessibility overlay widget make my site compliant?
On its own, no. Overlays can add useful display options, but they do not fix underlying problems like keyboard traps, unlabelled forms or missing captions, and compliance is judged on the site itself. Treat an overlay as an extra, never as the fix.
How much does an accessibility audit cost?
The first pass in this checklist is free and finds most issues on a small site. A professional audit of a small business site is typically priced like other specialist reviews — from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on pages, templates and whether testing includes assistive-technology users — and remediation is usually template work rather than a rebuild. Get the free pass done first so any quote is priced against a known list.
Be the first to share a useful question or thought.