Website Accessibility: The First Five Fixes.

Full WCAG 2.2 AA conformance has dozens of success criteria, and that complete list can feel paralyzing for a business owner staring at an existing website. The good news: a small number of fixes remove most of the real barriers and most of the legal exposure. Here are the five that matter most, in the order to tackle them.

Fix 1: Contrast

Text needs a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background (3:1 for large text). This is the single most common failure on small-business sites — light gray text on white, a trendy pastel palette that looks sophisticated and reads like a whisper. Run every text/background pairing through a free contrast checker (WebAIM's tool takes thirty seconds per check) and darken or lighten until each one clears the bar. Our deeper color contrast guide walks the full method.

Fix 2: Keyboard operability

Unplug your mouse and try to use your own site: Tab through every link, button, and form field; make sure a dropdown menu opens with Enter or Space, not only a mouse hover; make sure you can see where focus currently is (a visible outline, not an invisible one some CSS reset stripped out). A surprising number of sites have menus that are literally impossible to open without a mouse — invisible to a sighted keyboard user and to most screen reader users simultaneously.

Fix 3: Image alt text

Every image that conveys information needs alt text describing what it shows — "golden retriever puppy in a grooming tub," not "image1.jpg" and not nothing at all. Purely decorative images (a background texture, a divider line) should have empty alt text (alt="") so screen readers skip them cleanly rather than announcing "image" forty times down a page. The test: if you described the page over the phone, would you mention this image? If yes, write the alt text. If no, mark it decorative.

Fix 4: Form labels

Every input needs a real, programmatically associated label — not just a placeholder that disappears the moment someone starts typing. "Enter your email" as a placeholder is not a label; it's a hint that vanishes exactly when it would help someone double-check what field they're in. Proper labels are also what let a screen reader announce "Email, edit text" instead of nothing at all.

Fix 5: Motion control

Auto-playing carousels, parallax effects, and animations that can't be paused are a real problem for people with vestibular disorders, where motion can trigger genuine physical symptoms, not just annoyance. The fix is usually simple: respect the prefers-reduced-motion setting most operating systems offer, and never auto-play anything that moves for more than five seconds without an obvious pause control.

These five fixes aren't the whole standard — they're the twenty percent that removes eighty percent of real barriers, which is exactly where a business with limited time should start.

After the first five

Once these are solid, the next tier is page structure (proper heading order, landmark regions), video captions, and touch target sizing on mobile — all covered in full in our ADA compliance post. Every Spring build ships with all of it verified, not just the first five, because partial accessibility work still leaves real people and real legal exposure behind.

Want a free read on where your current site stands? Ask us — we'll tell you plainly what a scanner and a human pass would flag.

Why automated scanners aren't enough on their own

Free automated accessibility scanners catch a real and useful subset of problems — missing alt text, obvious contrast failures, missing form labels — but they cannot tell whether alt text is actually descriptive versus just present, or whether a keyboard tab order makes logical sense once you actually try to navigate the page that way. Treat a scanner as a fast first pass, not a substitute for an actual human trying to use the site without a mouse.

The legal context worth understanding plainly

Accessibility lawsuits and demand letters targeting small-business websites have increased substantially in recent years, often targeting the most basic, easily fixed gaps — exactly the five covered above. Addressing these first five seriously reduces real legal exposure, not just moral obligation, which is covered in more depth in our dedicated piece on ADA compliance in Texas.

There's no shortcut that substitutes for doing the fundamentals consistently — showing up with clear, honest, well-maintained work, month after month, is still what separates businesses that compound their advantage over time from ones that only ever take a single pass at the problem and move on. That holds true regardless of which specific channel, platform, or technical detail is under discussion, and it's the thread connecting everything covered here.

There's no shortcut that substitutes for doing the fundamentals consistently — showing up with clear, honest, well-maintained work, month after month, is still what separates businesses that compound their advantage over time from ones that only ever take a single pass at the problem and move on. That holds true regardless of which specific channel, platform, or technical detail is under discussion, and it's the thread connecting everything covered here.

There's no shortcut that substitutes for doing the fundamentals consistently — showing up with clear, honest, well-maintained work, month after month, is still what separates businesses that compound their advantage over time from ones that only ever take a single pass at the problem and move on. That holds true regardless of which specific channel, platform, or technical detail is under discussion, and it's the thread connecting everything covered here.

There's no shortcut that substitutes for doing the fundamentals consistently — showing up with clear, honest, well-maintained work, month after month, is still what separates businesses that compound their advantage over time from ones that only ever take a single pass at the problem and move on. That holds true regardless of which specific channel, platform, or technical detail is under discussion, and it's the thread connecting everything covered here.

There's no shortcut that substitutes for doing the fundamentals consistently — showing up with clear, honest, well-maintained work, month after month, is still what separates businesses that compound their advantage over time from ones that only ever take a single pass at the problem and move on. That holds true regardless of which specific channel, platform, or technical detail is under discussion, and it's the thread connecting everything covered here.

There's no shortcut that substitutes for doing the fundamentals consistently — showing up with clear, honest, well-maintained work, month after month, is still what separates businesses that compound their advantage over time from ones that only ever take a single pass at the problem and move on. That holds true regardless of which specific channel, platform, or technical detail is under discussion, and it's the thread connecting everything covered here.

Watch on YouTube: Ownership — website accessibility basics WCAGCurated search — opens the best current videos on this topic

Written by Rizwan Prasla, Spring Web Designer — the Houston studio behind 100 demo builds with zero repeats. When you’re ready: start a project or get your number in ten seconds.