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Why accessibility is good business

Around one in five people in the UK lives with a disability, and many more are simply getting older. Eyesight dims, hands shake a little, hearing fades, and the mouse becomes fiddlier than it used to be. If your website is hard to read or awkward to navigate, those visitors leave quietly and ring a competitor instead.

The encouraging news is that most of the fixes are small, cheap and quick. You do not need a specialist agency or a full rebuild. A handful of sensible adjustments to text, colour and keyboard controls will open your website up to a much wider group of customers — and it will feel better for everyone else too.

Make your text big enough to read comfortably

Start with the size of your body text. Anything under 16 pixels is a struggle for plenty of people, especially on a phone in bright daylight or a laptop with a dim screen. Set your main paragraphs to at least 16 pixels, and consider 18 for anything you particularly want people to read, such as prices, opening hours and service descriptions.

Give your lines room to breathe. A line height of around 1.5 times the text size stops sentences from blurring together, and keeping lines to roughly 60 to 80 characters avoids that exhausting back-and-forth sweep across a wide screen. Left-aligned text is easiest to follow; fully justified text creates uneven gaps that slow reading down.

A few more things worth checking:

• Never switch off pinch-to-zoom on mobile. If your site blocks it, people who need to magnify simply cannot.
• Avoid light grey body text. It looks stylish in a mock-up and disappears in real life.
• Do not put important wording inside an image. Text in pictures cannot be enlarged, recoloured or read aloud by software.
• Use bold sparingly to highlight key points, rather than long stretches of italics or capitals.

Check your colour contrast

Contrast is the difference between your text and the background behind it. The widely used benchmark is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal body text, and 3 to 1 for large headings. Plenty of free online tools will check any pair of colours for you in seconds.

The usual offenders are pale grey text on white, white text on a mid-tone pastel, and coloured text on a coloured button. Be especially careful with your calls to action. If someone cannot read the words on your "Contact us" button, they cannot contact you.

Also remember that colour alone should never carry meaning. If an error message is red, back it up with a clear written explanation. If a link sits inside a paragraph, underline it rather than relying on colour to set it apart. Around one in twelve men has some form of colour vision deficiency, so this is not a rare edge case.

Make keyboard navigation work properly

Many people cannot use a mouse. They move around a page with the Tab key, the Enter key and arrow keys, or with assistive technology that does the same thing. Try it on your own site: press Tab repeatedly from the very top and see whether you can reach every link, button and form field in a sensible order.

• Check that a visible outline appears around whatever is selected. Designers often remove these focus outlines because they look untidy, but without them keyboard users are lost.
• Add a "skip to main content" link at the top, so people do not have to tab through your entire menu on every page.
• Keep your tab order logical, following the visual layout of the page.
• Make clickable areas comfortably large — around 44 pixels square is a good target for buttons and links on mobile.
• Do not rely on hovering. Anything revealed only when the mouse passes over it is invisible to keyboard and touch users.

Simplify your forms and contact details

Forms are where accessibility problems cost you real enquiries. Every input needs a proper visible label, not just placeholder text that vanishes the moment someone starts typing. Keep labels above the fields rather than beside them, and group related questions together with clear headings.

Write error messages in plain English and place them next to the field they relate to. Say "Please enter your email address in the format [email protected]" rather than "Invalid input". Never make someone start the whole form again because of one mistake.

Finally, give people more than one way to get in touch. A phone number, an email address and a postal address, all as plain selectable text, cover far more situations than a contact form alone. Some visitors will use a screen reader, some will dictate their message, and some will simply prefer to ring you.

Test it yourself, then keep testing

You do not need an expert panel to catch the worst problems. Zoom your browser to 200 per cent and see whether the layout holds together. Navigate your homepage using only the keyboard. Turn your phone screen brightness right down, or step outside into the sun, and read your own content as a stranger would.

Then ask a few real customers, including any who are older or who wear glasses, to find your phone number or send you a message while you watch. Ten minutes of that is worth more than any checklist. Accessibility is not a one-off project — it is a habit of paying attention, and every small improvement makes your business easier to find, easier to trust and easier to buy from.