Accessibility Basics: Why It Matters for Your Business

Your website has images without alt text. Your contact form can't be navigated by keyboard. Your PDFs are scanned documents, not readable text.

These aren't edge cases. They're the baseline for most small business websites, and they're exactly what gets you sued.

What this solves (in real business terms)

Accessibility isn't about doing the right thing (though it is). It's about not getting sued, not losing customers, and not having your website blocked by screen readers used by 1 billion people worldwide.

If you take credit cards, you have an online presence, or you serve the public in any way, accessibility applies to you—even if nobody's told you that explicitly.

What can go wrong

The Domino's pizza case. In 2019, a blind man sued Domino's because their website wasn't compatible with his screen reader. Domino's fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. They lost.

The ADA doesn't have a minimum employee threshold. A Galveston HVAC company with two employees got sued in 2023 for an inaccessible website. The settlement cost more than $40,000 plus ongoing remediation costs.

Walmart-scale exposure. Even if you don't get sued immediately, an inaccessible website means:

• Customers with disabilities (15% of the population) click away
• Your Google ranking suffers (Google penalizes inaccessible sites)
• You're one complaint away from a Department of Justice investigation

What it costs (honest ranges)

| What | What you'll pay | |------|----------------| | Basic accessibility audit | $500–$2,000 | | Full WCAG 2.1 AA audit | $2,000–$5,000 | | Fixing an existing WordPress/Wix/Squarespace site | $1,500–$8,000 | | Building accessibility in from scratch | $0 (it's just proper development) | | Annual maintenance | $500–$1,500/year |

The dirty secret: if you're building a new site, adding accessibility costs almost nothing. If you're retrofitting a broken site, it costs what it costs.

Minimum viable implementation

1. Add alt text to every image. This takes 30 seconds per image and covers 80% of screen reader issues.

2. Make your site keyboard-navigable. Tab through your forms and menus. Can you complete a purchase without a mouse? If not, fix it.

3. Check your color contrast. Use the WebAIM contrast checker (free). If your gray text on white background fails, it fails.

4. Audit your PDFs. Scanned documents are not accessible. Use Adobe Acrobat's OCR feature or rebuild in a real format.

5. Add a skip-to-content link. It's one line of code. It lets keyboard users jump past your navigation.

6. Test with a screen reader. Turn on VoiceOver (Mac) or NVDA (Windows) and try to complete your main conversion action.

Vendor questions (copy/paste)

When you hire an accessibility consultant, ask these:

1. "What's your process for auditing an existing site? Do you use automated tools, manual testing, or both?"

2. "Can you provide a prioritized remediation list that separates legal requirements from best practices?"

3. "Do you work with [your platform—WordPress, Shopify, custom]? Show me examples."

4. "What's your process for ongoing maintenance as we add new content?"

5. "Can you provide a Written Accessibility Statement we can publish on our site?"

Skip vendors who only run automated scans. Automated tools catch 30–40% of issues. The rest requires human testing.

When to hire help

Hire an accessibility consultant if:

• You've received a demand letter or lawsuit threat
• You're building a new website and want it done right the first time
• Your customer base skews older or includes people with disabilities (healthcare, government contractors, senior services)
• You process more than $500K/year online

For most Gulf Coast small businesses: get the automated audit done first ($500–$1,500), fix the obvious stuff yourself, then hire help for the hard parts.