Most accessibility guides read like a compliance checklist, which is why most of them do not get acted on. Nobody wakes up wanting to satisfy Success Criterion 1.4.3.
So here is the same work framed the way it actually pays: the fixes that make a site usable by disabled people are, almost without exception, the fixes that make it better for everyone else. Clearer forms. Faster keyboard navigation. Text you can read on a phone in sunlight. Pages that make sense when the images do not load.
This is where to start, in the order that gets you the most for the least.
First, see the problem for yourself
Before any audit, any tool, any budget conversation — spend twenty minutes on these three tests. They cost nothing and they change how the rest of this reads.
Unplug your mouse and buy something
Load your own site. Use only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. Search for a product, open it, choose a size, add it to the cart, and go through checkout.
Note where you get stuck, where you cannot tell what is selected, and where Tab jumps somewhere unexpected. Most people trying this for the first time on their own site do not reach the payment step.
Anyone with a motor impairment, anyone using a screen reader, and plenty of people who simply prefer the keyboard are hitting the same wall you just hit.
Turn off the images
In your browser settings, disable images and reload a product page. What is left should still tell you what the product is. If you see a column of empty boxes, your alternative text is not doing its job — and neither is your page for anyone on a slow connection.
Turn on a screen reader
VoiceOver is built into macOS (Command + F5). NVDA is free on Windows. You will be bad at it. That is fine — you are not testing your skill, you are listening to your own page.
Does the product name get announced? The price? When you submit a form with an error, does it say what went wrong, or just make a noise?
The fixes, in order of what they buy you
1. Make the keyboard work
Every interactive thing — links, buttons, dropdowns, modals, carousels, form fields — must be reachable and operable with a keyboard alone, and in an order that matches the visual layout (SC 2.1.1, SC 2.4.3).
The usual culprits are custom components: a dropdown built from styled divs instead of a <select>, a modal that does not trap focus, a payment iframe you cannot tab into.
Who else this helps: anyone with a tremor or repetitive strain injury, power users, and every person who has ever filled in a form faster by tabbing.
2. Put the focus indicator back
Browsers draw an outline around whatever the keyboard is currently on. A lot of themes remove it with outline: none because a designer thought it looked untidy.
For a keyboard user, that outline is the cursor. Removing it without a visible replacement fails SC 2.4.7 and makes a site genuinely unusable — you are navigating blind.
If the default is ugly, style it. Do not delete it.
3. Write alternative text that describes the thing
Not “product image”. Not the filename. What someone needs in order to decide whether they want it: colour, material, cut, what is actually shown (SC 1.1.1).
Purely decorative images should have an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them rather than reading out a filename.
Who else this helps: Google, which cannot see images either. Good alt text is one of the few accessibility fixes with a direct, measurable SEO return.
4. Make errors say what is wrong
A red border communicates nothing to someone who cannot see it, and surprisingly little to someone who can. Errors need to be in text, tied to the field they describe, and announced when they appear (SC 3.3.1, SC 3.3.3).
“Invalid input” is not an error message. “Card expiry must be in MM/YY format” is.
Who else this helps: everyone abandoning your checkout because they cannot work out which field is unhappy.
5. Fix contrast on your real brand colours
Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background; large text needs 3:1 (SC 1.4.3).
The usual failures are light grey body copy, pale accent colours on sale prices, and call-to-action buttons in a brand colour nobody ever checked. Free browser extensions will measure it in seconds.
Who else this helps: anyone over about forty, anyone on a phone outdoors, anyone with a cheap monitor. This is the single most universally felt fix on the list.
6. Use real headings
One <h1>, then <h2> and <h3> in a sensible order. Not text that is merely large and bold.
Screen reader users navigate by heading the way sighted users skim — jumping between them to find the section they want. Broken heading order removes that entirely.
Who else this helps: search engines, which read your structure the same way.
7. Caption your video
Anything with speech needs captions (SC 1.2.2). Auto-generated ones are a starting point, not a finish — they reliably mangle product names and technical terms.
Who else this helps: the large majority of people who watch video muted.
Fix the component, not the page
This is the part that decides whether the work holds.
Your site is built from templates. One unlabelled form field is not one problem — it is the same problem on every page that uses that component. Fix it in the component and it disappears everywhere at once, including on pages you have not built yet.
Teams that fix page by page are back in the same position within a year, because every new page reintroduces the same defect. Teams that fix at component level stop generating new violations.
What tools will and will not tell you
Run an automated scanner — WAVE and Lighthouse are free and worth the five minutes. They will catch missing alt attributes, some contrast failures, and structural problems.
They detect roughly 30% of WCAG failures. They cannot tell you whether your checkout can be completed with a keyboard, whether your alt text says anything useful, or whether your error messages make sense. Those need a person.
A clean scan report is not evidence your site is usable. It is evidence your site passes the checks a machine knows how to run.
The argument worth making internally
If you need to justify this to someone holding a budget, the legal framing is available and real — but it is not the strongest one.
Roughly one in four US adults lives with a disability. On an eCommerce site they are not an edge case, they are a segment currently being turned away at checkout without anyone noticing. Nobody emails you to say they could not complete a purchase. They just leave.
And every fix above makes the site better for people who have no disability at all. As I put it in a webinar with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation: making your website accessible expands your customer base, cleans up your code, and helps your SEO. Those are not side effects. For most businesses they are the return.
Where to start tomorrow
Do the keyboard test. Write down where you got stuck. That list is your priority order, and you did not need a consultant to produce it.
When you want the other 70% — the things a scanner and a self-test will not surface — that is what a manual audit is for. You get findings mapped to individual success criteria, ordered by what actually blocks a purchase, with the code change each one needs. Remediation runs through EcomBack, a court-approved accessibility provider.
If you are not sure which rules apply to you in the first place, start with which accessibility law applies to your store.
Book a consultation or read about accessibility services.
I am a web accessibility specialist and ADA compliance consultant — a participant in the W3C Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, DHS Trusted Tester and NVDA Expert certified. More about my background.
Rana Ahson
Contact Us(747) 212-0483
Email Usinfo@ranaahson.com
