28 Oct Accessibility Isn’t Extra: Designing Websites Everyone Can Use
Part 4 of UX Foundations for Small Business Websites — a series in my own words on the UX principles I use in client work.
When I bring up accessibility with a client, I can almost see the thought cross their face: that sounds like a legal thing, or a big-company thing, or an expensive thing.
It’s none of those, really. Accessibility in my world means something plain: your website works for people, including the many people who don’t use a screen, a mouse, or their eyes the way you might assume.
Some of those people have lifelong disabilities. Some are your customer with a broken wrist, a baby in one arm, bright sun on their phone screen, or aging eyes that need the text bigger. Designing for them isn’t a special feature. It’s just not leaving people out.
The tools real people bring to your website
Your visitors are already using help to get around the web — you just don’t see it happen. A few of the most common:
- Screen readers that read a page out loud, top to bottom, for people who are blind or have low vision. For them, your site isn’t a layout — it’s a sequence of headings, links, buttons, and image descriptions, in order. If that order is nonsense, your site is nonsense to them, however pretty it looks.
- Magnification and zoom. Enlarged text, zoomed browsers, big-screen settings. If your layout falls apart or text gets cut off when someone zooms in, you’ve locked the door at exactly the moment a motivated customer tried to read your prices.
- Voice control and keyboards instead of a mouse. Some people navigate entirely by keyboard, switch device, or voice command. If a button can’t be reached and used without a mouse — or the site gives no visible clue where you are on the page — that visitor is stuck, no matter how good your service is.
- Captions and transcripts. The deaf customer watching your video is obvious. So is the parent watching it silently at 2 a.m., and the worker watching on mute in a shared office. Captions help all three.
Nothing here is exotic. This is regular people, on regular days, trying to give you business.
Three words that sound the same and aren’t
People use these interchangeably, and untangling them helped me design better, so here’s my working version:
Universal design tries to build one version that works for the widest range of people from the start. A step-free entrance instead of a beautiful staircase plus a ramp around back. On a website: one clean, flexible layout — not a “normal” site and a separate stripped-down one.
Inclusive design is about who gets a say. It means deliberately bringing in people who are usually left out — older users, disabled users, people on cheap phones and slow connections — while you’re deciding and testing, not apologizing to them afterward. The fix isn’t just technical; it’s who was in the room.
Equity-focused design goes a step further and asks who has historically been underserved or harmed by designs like this, and whether treating everyone “the same” actually produces a fair result. Same-sized steps help no one if some people start further from the door. In web terms, it might mean noticing your intake form assumes a credit card, a permanent address, or fluent written English — and asking whether that’s a requirement of your service or just a habit in your form.
You don’t need to pick one label and tattoo it on your homepage. You need all three instincts: build broadly, include people early, and check whether “equal” is actually fair in the result.
What I actually check on a site
This isn’t theory when I audit a site. I’m looking at things like:
- Can you read the text against its background, honestly, in daylight?
- Does every meaningful image have a description for someone who can’t see it — and do decorative images stay out of the way instead?
- Can the whole site be used with a keyboard alone, with a clear indicator of where you are?
- Do forms tell you what went wrong, in words, next to the mistake — or do they just shake and turn red?
- Does anything on the page move, flash, or auto-play in a way that would punish someone sensitive to motion — and is there a way to stop it? (On my own redesign, motion stays subtle, and the site respects reduced-motion settings. That’s a choice, not an accident.)
None of this requires rebuilding your business. Most of it is care, applied early, where it’s cheap.
The business case, since that’s what counts
Strip away every other argument and this one remains: inaccessible design turns away paying customers without telling you. They don’t email to complain. They don’t fill out your contact form to explain the form didn’t work. They leave, and they buy from someone whose website let them in.
Non-profits and churches feel this double, because serving everybody isn’t a marketing line for them — it’s the mission. It’s one reason accessibility work is baked into how I build, and why I keep a 15% discount for non-profits and churches: the organizations with the widest doors usually have the tightest budgets, and I’d rather help fix that math than ignore it.
So no — accessibility isn’t extra. It’s the part where you find out how many people your website was quietly saying no to, and you start saying yes on purpose.
Want to know how your current site holds up? I include accessibility checks in my site reviews and build them into every redesign. Get a free quote — non-profits and churches save 15%.
Previous in this series: The 5 Stages Every Good Website Project Goes Through · Next: Your Website Has to Work Everywhere
This article is my own take, in my own words, on UX principles I use in client work — informed in part by completing Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course on Coursera. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.