Website accessibility means a person who is blind, has low vision, cannot use a mouse, or is colorblind can still read your site, find your phone number and send you a quote request. For most small business sites that comes down to five fixes: alt text on images, enough color contrast, real headings, labeled form fields and a site that works from the keyboard. None of them require a redesign, and all of them make the site better for everyone, including Google.
There is a legal side too, and I will cover what the official sources actually say, without the scare tactics the accessibility-overlay vendors use. First, the practical part.
This post is general information from a web and IT person, not legal advice. For questions about your legal obligations, talk to an attorney.
Why this matters beyond the law
Roughly one in four U.S. adults has some kind of disability, according to the CDC. Some of those people use a screen reader that reads the page aloud. Some zoom the browser to 200 percent. Some cannot see the difference between light gray text and a white background, or between a red "required" marker and a black one. Some navigate entirely with the Tab key.
If your contact form does not work for them, they call a competitor whose form does. That is the business case, and it would be reason enough even if the ADA did not exist.
The same fixes also help search. Alt text tells Google what your photos show. Real headings tell it how the page is organized. That overlap is why accessibility and local SEO tend to get fixed together.
The five fixes that cover most of it
1. Alt text on every image
Alt text is a short description attached to an image that a screen reader speaks in place of the picture. "Technician replacing a laptop screen" is good. "IMG_4821.jpg" or nothing at all is what most sites have.
The rule of thumb: describe what the image shows and why it is there, in a sentence or less. Purely decorative images (a background swoosh) should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them. Your logo's alt text should be your business name.
Most site builders and WordPress have an alt text field on every image. The work is going through them. On a typical small business site that is 30 to 80 images and an hour of someone's time.
2. Color contrast you can actually read
Light gray text on white looks modern and is unreadable for a lot of people. The widely used benchmark, from the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text (WCAG 2 contrast minimum).
You do not have to do the math. Paste your text and background colors into a free checker such as the WebAIM contrast checker and it tells you pass or fail. The usual offenders are footer text, placeholder text inside form fields, and text laid over photos.
Related: do not use color as the only signal. If required form fields are marked only by red text, add the word "required" too. The Department of Justice guidance uses exactly that example.
3. Real headings, in order
Screen reader users navigate a page by jumping between headings the way sighted users skim. That only works if the headings are real heading elements (H1, H2, H3) in a sensible order, not regular text made big and bold.
One H1 per page that says what the page is. H2s for the main sections. H3s under those. If your site builder lets you pick "Heading 2" from a dropdown, use it instead of bumping the font size. This is also one of the first things Google looks at to understand a page.
4. Labeled form fields
A form field needs a label that is attached to it in the code, not just a word floating nearby. Without that, a screen reader lands on the field and says "edit text" with no clue what goes in it. Placeholder text inside the box does not count; it disappears when you start typing, and it is usually low-contrast anyway.
Also check what happens when something is wrong. If a visitor leaves the phone number blank, the error should say which field and what to fix, in text, next to the field. A red outline alone fails the color-only test above.
While you are in the form, send a test through it. Broken forms are their own problem; see what happens when nobody maintains your website.
5. Keyboard navigation
Put the mouse down and press Tab. You should be able to reach every link, button and form field on the page in a sensible order, see which one is currently selected (a visible outline), and activate it with Enter or Space. If the menu only opens on hover, if a pop-up cannot be closed from the keyboard, or if the focus outline has been styled away, that is a fix.
This one takes five minutes to test and catches problems that affect screen reader users, people with motor impairments, and anyone whose trackpad died.
Two more worth doing
Captions on video. If you post videos with speech, they need accurate captions. Most platforms can generate a draft you then correct.
Text that scales. Zoom the browser to 200 percent. Text should get bigger and reflow, not get cut off or overlap. Fixed-pixel layouts and text baked into images both fail this.
What the ADA actually says about websites
Here is the part worth being precise about.
The Department of Justice published Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA in March 2022. Its position is that businesses open to the public (Title III of the ADA, which covers retail stores, restaurants, banks, hotels and similar) must provide equal access to their goods and services, and that this applies to what they offer on the web. The guidance points to WCAG and the federal Section 508 standards as existing technical references, and it says plainly that DOJ has not issued a regulation with detailed technical standards for private business websites, so businesses have flexibility in how they meet the obligation.
Separately, in April 2024, DOJ issued a rule that does set a technical standard (WCAG 2.1 Level AA) for state and local government websites under Title II of the ADA (ADA.gov Title II web rule). That rule does not apply to private businesses, but it tells you where the benchmark sits.
The practical tips in the DOJ guidance are the same list as above: color contrast, text cues beyond color, alt text, captions, labeled forms, zoomable text, headings and keyboard navigation. That is not a coincidence. The five fixes are the baseline because the government says they are.
About the lawsuits
The claim that "small businesses get sued over websites" is true, and it is worth knowing the actual numbers rather than the version in a sales email.
UsableNet, which tracks these filings, counted 5,114 ADA digital accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025 across federal courts and the New York and California state courts. Companies with under $25 million in annual revenue made up 64 percent of defendants. About 70 percent of cases targeted e-commerce sites, and 1,427 suits went after companies that had already been sued before.
What that tells a Connecticut service business: the risk is real but concentrated. If you sell online, you are squarely in the group that gets targeted. If you are a contractor with a brochure site and a quote form, the odds are lower, and the fixes above are cheap enough that the cost-benefit is not close.
What I would not do is buy an "accessibility overlay" widget that promises to fix everything with one line of code. The lawsuit reports have for several years noted that sites running overlays still get sued, and the widgets do not fix headings, labels or alt text in the actual page. Fix the page.
How to check your own site in 20 minutes
- Run the homepage and your contact page through the free WAVE checker. It flags missing alt text, unlabeled fields and contrast failures, with the location of each.
- Tab through the contact page without the mouse.
- Zoom to 200 percent and see if anything breaks.
- Open the page on your phone and turn on the screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) for two minutes. It is uncomfortable, and it is the fastest way to understand what a screen reader user hears.
If the checker comes back with a long list, most of it will be the same two or three issues repeated. Fixing the template fixes them everywhere.
The bottom line
Alt text, contrast, real headings, labeled forms and keyboard access cover most of what website accessibility means for a small business, and they are the same items the Department of Justice lists in its guidance. They cost an afternoon on an existing site and nothing extra when a site is built right. The lawsuit numbers are real and concentrated on e-commerce, and no widget substitutes for fixing the page.
The sites we build at CT Tech Express are built this way from the start, on the same page as the rest of our web solutions. If you want your current site checked, contact us and we will run it and tell you what we find. And if the result makes you wonder whether the site is worth fixing or replacing, is it worth updating your website is the next thing to read.
Again: general information, not legal advice. For your specific obligations, ask an attorney.