Ask a small business owner what "website accessibility" means and most will guess it involves mobile friendliness or page speed. It does not. Accessibility is about whether a person who is blind, has low vision, cannot use a mouse, or is colorblind can actually use your site to read your menu, book an appointment, or check out. More than one in four adults in the United States report living with a disability, according to the CDC, a large group of potential customers shopping online every day.

Treat that as an opportunity rather than a checkbox. The 2026 WebAIM Million report, an annual scan of the top one million home pages, found 95.9 percent had detectable failures against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, with the average page carrying 56 distinct errors. Most business sites have a problem, so a handful of targeted fixes can put you ahead of the competition.

How accessibility earns you customers

A more accessible site tends to be a better site for everyone, not just for visitors using assistive technology. Clear labels, readable contrast, and sensible navigation reduce confusion for every shopper, and much of that work overlaps with what search engines reward, since screen readers and search crawlers both rely on clean structure and descriptive text. It builds on the same foundation covered in our brand consistency guide and our compliance based SEO guide.

The businesses that get the most value from accessibility build it in as a normal part of how a site gets maintained, rather than a one-time audit. Every Grey Mountain Software website ships with a content management system that runs a live accessibility audit as changes are made, catching problems before they go out.

What actually causes most of the trouble

The WebAIM data points to a short list of repeat offenders. Low contrast text, hard to read for people with low vision or in bright daylight, appears on nearly 84 percent of home pages and is the single most common issue. Missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, empty links, and empty buttons round out the six most frequent failures, and a designer can fix each one directly in the page.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, now in version 2.2, organize the fix around four ideas: perceivable, operable with a keyboard as well as a mouse, understandable, and robust enough to work with assistive technology like screen readers. Most businesses aim for Level AA conformance, the tier most practical guidance treats as the sensible target.

One shortcut worth skipping is the accessibility overlay widget, a bolt-on script that claims to fix everything instantly. Accessibility professionals have criticized these tools for patching symptoms rather than underlying code, and in 2025 the FTC fined widget maker accessiBe one million dollars for overstating its product.

A short checklist to start with

You do not need to hire a specialist to make real progress this week.

1. Run your homepage through WAVE or the Axe browser extension, both free and easy to read.
2. Check your text and button colors with a contrast checker like the one from WebAIM.
3. Tab through your site using only your keyboard and confirm you can reach every link, button, and form field.
4. Add real alt text to product photos and graphics, describing what the image shows rather than its file name.
5. Make sure every form field has a visible label, not placeholder text that disappears once someone starts typing.

None of these require a redesign. They fit into a normal update cycle and chip away at the errors that show up most often in audits.

We are also building a broader checker for the client portal that scans a site for accessibility, SEO, and general design issues in one pass, coming in the next few weeks.

A tax credit that can help offset the cost

The federal government offers two incentives that can help cover accessibility work, including website updates. The Disabled Access Credit under Section 44 covers 50 percent of eligible expenditures between 250 and 10,250 dollars, for a maximum credit of 5,000 dollars, and is open to businesses with 1 million dollars or less in prior-year revenue or 30 or fewer employees. Section 190 lets any business deduct up to 15,000 dollars a year in barrier removal expenses, and the two can combine in the same year.

This is general information, not tax advice. Grey Mountain Software is not an accounting firm and the author is not a certified public accountant, so talk to a qualified tax professional about whether your expenses qualify.

If you want a second opinion on your site, or are planning a rebuild with accessibility handled from day one, take a look at our website services or reach out through our contact page. And if this was useful, pass it along to another owner.