Your Next Customer Is Stuck Behind a Button You Think Works

Your Next Customer Is Stuck Behind a Button You Think Works

A customer finds your business, reads your service page and decides to contact you.

They navigate using a keyboard. Your form’s submit button cannot be reached. The enquiry ends before your team sees it.

Your dashboard may record a visit. It will not necessarily explain the barrier that ended the conversation.

This is a website accessibility problem: whether people with different abilities and ways of interacting can actually use your site.

A Global Problem With a Measurable Gap

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people experience significant disability worldwide. Their access needs vary.

Meanwhile, WebAIM’s February 2026 automated analysis of one million popular homepages detected accessibility failures on 95.9% of them. Common issues included low-contrast text, missing image alternatives and unlabeled form fields.

That finding concerns the sampled homepages and automatically detectable errors. It is not a complete accessibility assessment of every website.

For business owners, the practical starting point is the customer journey. Can someone find information, request help or complete a booking using the tools they rely on?

Use this website accessibility checklist to investigate five common barriers.

1. Buttons That Only Work With a Mouse

Put the mouse aside. Use Tab and Shift+Tab to move through links and controls, then activate them with the appropriate keyboard key.

Can you reach the menu, enquiry button and form? Is there a visible indicator showing which control has focus?

Ask your developer to fix unreachable controls, illogical focus order and missing focus indicators. Test the complete task, including opening menus and correcting mistakes.

Make task completion part of your website design brief.

2. Text That Disappears Into the Design

Pale text, busy image backgrounds and clipped content can prevent people from reading essential information.

Check your service description, prices and contact details. Increase text size to 200% and inspect whether text remains readable and controls remain usable.

Have your designer measure text contrast against the relevant accessibility requirements. A colour combination that suits the brand still needs to be legible.

Prioritize information people need to make decisions.

3. Forms That Leave People Guessing

A field needs an understandable label that is associated with it in the code. Placeholder text disappearing as someone types is a poor substitute.

Identify required information clearly. When an entry fails, explain which field needs attention and how to correct it. Avoid relying on a red outline alone.

Check whether assistive technology announces errors and successful submission. Preserve information already entered where possible, so correcting one mistake does not require restarting the form.

4. Important Information Available Only in Images or Audio

A price list uploaded as an image can leave information inaccessible to people who cannot see it.

Provide essential information as readable web text. Give informative images appropriate text alternatives and supply captions for relevant video speech and sounds.

Decorative images need different treatment from images carrying meaning. Ask your developer to handle them appropriately.

A customer should be able to understand the offer without guessing what an unseen image contains.

5. Popups That Block the Journey

Open your cookie notice, chat widget and booking popup using a keyboard.

Can you operate the controls, close the window and continue from a sensible place? Modal dialogs need deliberate focus management.

Test these additions after changes. They are part of the experience customers encounter.

Include these checks in your website maintenance routine when forms, themes or third-party tools change.

Start With Evidence, Then Verify the Fix

Run WAVE to identify some detectable issues. Combine its findings with keyboard checks, informed screen-reader testing and feedback from people with disabilities.

Automated results provide evidence for investigation; a clean report alone does not establish accessibility.

Offer a way for customers to report access problems, including an alternative contact method. Their reports can reveal barriers that a scheduled technical review or automated scan may miss.

Record the affected page, the task attempted and what prevented completion. Fix task-blocking barriers first, then repeat the same journey to confirm the result.

When arranging a website audit, ask which manual checks are included.

The question worth testing is simple: Can the person ready to contact you actually finish the task?