Is Your Company’s Website Accessible Enough? A Practical Guide for Website Managers

As a project manager at New Theory, one of the many questions I hear is, “How do I know if our website is accessible?” It’s a simple question with a big impact, especially for ecommerce businesses. If users can’t read your product details, navigate the site with their keyboard, or use assistive tools to complete their purchase, they are going to leave your site. Accessibility is not just about meeting legal standards and avoiding lawsuit-triggering liabilities, but about making sure everyone, regardless of ability, can engage with your company online. Many websites fall short without realizing it, and there is a broad spectrum of accessibility standards. So, how can you tell if your company’s website is accessible enough? Let’s break it down.

Why accessibility matters

Let’s start with the “why”. Web accessibility isn’t just about compliance but inclusion, usability and making it as easy as possible for users to visit and use your website. The World Economic Forum reports that 62% of adults globally that have a reported disability own a laptop or desktop. Further, 72% of those with a disability own a smartphone. But how big an issue is this?

• 4.9% of U.S. adults have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses, requiring screen readers.
• 5.7% of U.S. adults are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing.
• 10.8% of people with a disability have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions.

For business owners, this directly impacts your revenue. Accessibility helps expand your audience, reduce website abandonment rates and builds trust with all users. It’s a smart business strategy, not just a legal consideration.

Inclusive design benefits everyone

One of the greatest misconceptions about accessibility is that it only helps a small segment of people. But, in reality, it affects your entire business, including legal risk. A well-known example is the Robel’s v Domino’s Pizza lawsuit, where a blind user sued Domino’s because their website and app weren’t compatible with screen readers, making it impossible for him to order food. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld that digital accessibility falls under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This wasn’t just a wake up call for Domino’s, it signaled to all businesses that online experience must be inclusive. Accessible websites don’t just protect you from lawsuits, they create smoother, more usable experiences for everyone.

Legal Obligations in the U.S.

In the U.S., web accessibility is increasingly seen as a legal requirement, not just a best practice. For business owners, non-profits, and e-commerce platforms, ignoring accessibility can lead to a legal risk, damage to reputation and lost revenue. While the ADA Act does not spell out technical standards, there are many legal cases that reference two standards. Let’s take a look at those.

Understanding accessibility standards

The main framework used to evaluate web accessibility is the WCAG. As we mentioned earlier, there is a spectrum of accessibility. WCAG provides international standards that define how digital content can be more usable to all visitors, regardless of whether they have a disability or not. There are 3 levels of conformance:

• WCAG 2.1 A: The minimum level of accessibility. Covering only the most basic issues and does not meet most legal standards.
• WCAG 2.1 AA: The standard most websites aim for as it aligns with the ADA guidance and provides good accessibility for most users.
• WCAG 2.1 AAA: The highest level. This is difficult to achieve without designing it from the start. This is typically for government and accessibility focus organizations to meet Section 508 laws.

Here are the 4 principles of accessibility as defined by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG):

• Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
• Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable.
• Understandable - Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.
• Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Real people, real examples

Here are some real world examples that include a couple of the key principles and the type of users they impact:

• Jasmine, a screen reader user who is blind, relies on alt text (textual description of images to help convey content and context) to understand the purposes of images - like product photos or icons.
• Sherri, who just had her eyes dilated at the eye doctor and unable to read up close for the rest of the day.
• Mark, who has limited mobility due to cerebral palsy, uses a keyboard (not a mouse or trackpad) to navigate online stores. If he can’t tab through the menus or buttons, he is stuck.
• Juan, who is hard of hearing, needs captions to understand your brand videos or product tutorials.
  
• Lila, has color vision deficiency and is doing some online shopping but due to the low contrast interface, can’t actually read the text leaving her stuck.

The accessibility standards exist not to meet arbitrary technical requirements, but to support typical, everyday users like these who are often overlooked.

Common accessibility red flags you can spot without special tools

You don’t have to be a web developer to spot accessibility red flags. Some of the most common accessibility issues are visible to anyone.

Color contrast affects the ability to read text.
‍

Forms missing labels, missing instructions and lacking a clear call-to-action make it impossible for those using screen readers to understand what is being asked of them.
‍

Links that are not descriptive
‍

Images that contain text without alt tags or description
‍

No caption options on videos - People with hearing issues need captions to understand your brand videos or product tutorials.

Can't "tab" through the navigation - Try it with your keyboard, see if it works. If you can’t tab through the menus or buttons, you are stuck.

Text too small - We have all experienced this as some point, text that is too small will just be overlooked.

… and lots of other things that live in code that you can't see but are required for assistive technologies to work properly. For those, we have... tools!

Accessibility Tools to get a more detailed picture

While manual reviews are always the best, there are several tools that you can use to get a general sense of your website’s accessibility. These are widely used in the industry and can help you catch some low-hanging issues. Keep in mind that many of these tools are also lead generators for their respective companies. We are not specifically recommending one over another, but they can be a great starting point.

• WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool - This site and browser extension provides visual feedback by highlighting areas of your site that may need attention.
• PageSpeed Insights powered by Lighthouse - This site offers a quick snapshot of your site’s accessibility, performance, SEO and Best Practices
• Deque Axe Dev Tools - This is a browser extension that flags issues and provides suggestions for fixing them.
• NVDA (PC) / Voiceover (Mac) - These are screenreaders within computers that will read aloud the content of websites for blind and visually impaired users.
  

These online tools can be useful to help identify some issues on your site and get an idea of how much needs to be done to bring your site into compliance, but they generally only find 1/4 - 1/2 of accessibility issues and often flag things that aren't actually issues. Manual testing is important to catch those.                                                                                     - Geoff Mortstock, developer at New Theory

If you spot one or more of these issues, what do you do about them? The good news is updating a website to be more accessible doesn't have to be a complete overhaul. You can make incremental improvements.

How we approach accessibility at New Theory

At New Theory, we provide accessibility audits to existing sites, and build new sites with accessibility in mind. We view it as a technical task and an educational task for our clients as they manage their websites in the years to come. We use a mix of manual and automated tools to spot concerns, then prepare recommendations and pricing for your project. Our in-house design and web development staff then implement that work on your site, and provide training for your staff to maintain standards into the future.

Accessibility is a journey, not a checkbox

We believe that great websites are inclusive since they reach more people, make the internet a friendlier place, and grow your business. If you are not sure where your website stands, we are here to help you assess and prioritize what matters most. Whether it is a new build or updates to an existing site, we can help make it part of your corporate and web strategy.

Want help reviewing your site’s accessibility?

We have audited and implemented accessibility changes for our client's websites for over a decade. Contact us to review your website.

‍