Web accessibility has a branding problem. The phrase sounds like paperwork - something for government departments and big corporates with legal teams. So most small businesses never think about it at all.

Here's the reframe: accessibility just means your website works for everyone who tries to use it. People with low vision reading in bright sunlight. Older customers with reading glasses and a tremor. Someone browsing one-handed while holding a toddler. A tradesperson's client using a screen reader. Every one of them is a potential customer, and an inaccessible site turns them away silently.

The scale of the problem

Every year, the non-profit WebAIM scans the homepages of the top one million websites. Their 2026 analysis found that 95.9% of homepages had detectable accessibility failures, averaging 56 distinct errors per page. The most common failure - found on 83.9% of pages - was text with contrast too low to read comfortably.

Read that list again as a business owner rather than a developer. These aren't exotic technical failures. They're things like grey text on a white background, images with no description, and forms with unlabelled fields. Ordinary sloppiness, at enormous scale.

And the audience it affects is not small. Stats NZ's Disability Survey has consistently found that one in six New Zealanders - 851,000 people - is disabled. Add everyone with temporary or situational impairments - a broken wrist, a cracked screen, glare on a job site - and "edge case" stops being the right description.

The part nobody mentions: accessible sites perform better for everyone

Almost everything that makes a site accessible also makes it better for every other visitor. High-contrast text is easier for everyone to read. Descriptive headings help everyone scan. Properly labelled forms produce fewer abandoned enquiries. Alt text on images helps search engines understand your pages. There is no trade-off here - it's the same work as building a good website, done properly.

What the basics look like

  • Text you can actually read: dark enough, large enough, and not laid over busy photos.
  • Every image has a short written description (alt text), so screen readers and search engines know what it shows.
  • Forms with visible labels - not just grey placeholder text that vanishes when you click.
  • The whole site usable with a keyboard alone, no mouse required.
  • Headings used in order, like a document outline, rather than for decoration.

None of this is expensive when it's part of the build. It only gets expensive when it's retrofitted - which is one more reason to get it right the first time.

Accessibility is baked into every site we build, not sold as an add-on. If you're curious where your current site stands, the free site check covers several of these basics as part of its foundations score.