Day 9: Making Your Website Accessible for Everyone: A Guide to ADA Compliance
The holiday season often brings a surge in website traffic, online research, reservations, purchases, and inquiries. That makes it an especially important time to ensure your website is easy to use for as many people as possible.
Website accessibility helps remove barriers that can prevent people with disabilities from navigating, understanding, or interacting with your site. It can also improve the overall user experience for everyone.
For businesses, accessibility is more than a seasonal consideration. It should be part of an ongoing website strategy that supports usability, customer experience, search visibility, and a stronger digital presence.
Why Website Accessibility Matters
People interact with websites in many different ways. Some visitors use screen readers, keyboard navigation, voice controls, magnification tools, or other assistive technologies. Others may have visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive disabilities that affect how they use digital content.
If your website is difficult to navigate, understand, or operate, those visitors may be unable to complete important actions such as:
- Finding business information
- Reviewing products or services
- Making a reservation
- Completing a contact form
- Making a purchase
- Reading important policies
- Calling or requesting more information
During high-demand periods such as the holidays, those barriers can translate directly into missed opportunities.
Accessible design helps create a website that is more usable, understandable, and welcoming to a broader audience.
ADA, WCAG, and Website Accessibility
The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, and website accessibility has become an increasingly important consideration for businesses with a digital presence.
There is not a simple website setting that automatically makes a site “ADA compliant.” Instead, businesses should work toward reducing accessibility barriers and following recognized accessibility standards and best practices.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, commonly known as WCAG, provide the primary technical framework used to evaluate website accessibility.
WCAG organizes accessibility around four core principles:
Perceivable
Website information should be presented in ways users can perceive.
Examples include:
- Providing descriptive alternative text for meaningful images
- Maintaining sufficient color contrast
- Providing captions or transcripts for multimedia when appropriate
- Avoiding information that depends solely on color
Operable
Visitors should be able to navigate and interact with the website using different methods.
This includes:
- Supporting keyboard navigation
- Providing visible keyboard focus states
- Avoiding keyboard traps
- Making buttons, links, menus, and forms usable without a mouse
- Providing users enough time to interact with content when time limits are present
Understandable
Content and website functionality should be clear and predictable.
Examples include:
- Using clear headings and page structure
- Writing understandable instructions
- Providing meaningful form labels
- Clearly identifying form errors
- Keeping navigation consistent
Robust
Website content should work across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies.
Proper semantic HTML, accessible form structures, and well-developed interactive components can help improve compatibility as technologies change.
Website Accessibility Best Practices
Accessibility involves more than adding alt text to images. A comprehensive review should consider the complete user experience.
Here are several areas businesses should evaluate.
Use Descriptive Alternative Text
Meaningful images should include alternative text that communicates the purpose or relevant information contained in the image.
Alt text can help visitors using screen readers understand visual content. It can also provide search engines with additional context about an image when used appropriately.
Decorative images, however, generally should not receive unnecessary descriptive text.
Make the Website Keyboard Accessible
A visitor should be able to navigate important website features using a keyboard alone.
Test whether you can:
- Move through menus
- Follow links
- Activate buttons
- Complete forms
- Open interactive elements
- Reach important calls to action
You should also be able to clearly see which element currently has keyboard focus.
Maintain Adequate Color Contrast
Text needs sufficient contrast against its background to remain readable for visitors with low vision or color-vision deficiencies.
This is especially important for:
- Navigation
- Buttons
- Form fields
- Promotional banners
- Text placed over photographs
- Footer content
Beautiful design should not come at the expense of readability.
Use Clear Heading Structure
Headings help both visitors and assistive technologies understand how information is organized.
Use headings logically rather than selecting heading levels simply because of their visual appearance.
A strong page structure usually includes one clear primary heading followed by descriptive subheadings that help users scan the content.
Make Forms Easier to Complete
Forms are a frequent source of accessibility barriers.
Make sure:
- Every field has an understandable label
- Required fields are clearly identified
- Instructions are easy to understand
- Error messages explain what needs to be corrected
- Visitors can complete the form using a keyboard
- Buttons clearly describe the action they perform
This is particularly important for reservation, inquiry, checkout, newsletter, and contact forms.
Use Descriptive Link Text
Avoid relying heavily on vague links such as “click here” when a more descriptive label would provide better context.
For example:
Less helpful:
Click here.
More helpful:
View our website optimization services.
Descriptive links help users understand where a link will take them before activating it.
Review Video and Audio Content
If important information is delivered through video or audio, consider whether captions, transcripts, or other alternatives are appropriate.
This helps ensure the information is available to visitors who cannot hear the audio or who prefer reading the content.
How Website Accessibility Supports SEO and User Experience
Accessibility and SEO are not the same discipline, and accessibility should not be treated simply as a ranking tactic.
However, many accessibility practices also contribute to a stronger website structure and user experience.
For example:
- Logical headings help organize content
- Descriptive alt text provides context for meaningful images
- Clear navigation helps users and search engines understand site structure
- Semantic HTML improves how content is interpreted
- Descriptive links provide better contextual signals
- Mobile-friendly design improves usability across devices
- Clear content can make information easier to understand and act upon
These improvements can make it easier for both visitors and search engines to understand your website.
That is why accessibility should be viewed as part of the broader website foundation rather than as an isolated technical checkbox.
Why Accessibility Matters During the Holiday Season
Holiday traffic often includes visitors who are unfamiliar with your business and may be navigating your website for the first time.
They may also be moving quickly between multiple businesses, comparing options, shopping from mobile devices, or trying to complete a transaction under time pressure.
Small usability barriers can become significant conversion barriers.
Before a busy season, businesses should review important customer pathways such as:
- Homepage to product or service information
- Homepage to contact
- Homepage to reservations
- Product to checkout
- Service page to inquiry form
- Mobile navigation
- Promotional landing pages
- Gift certificate or holiday offer pages
Accessibility testing should be part of that review.
A Simple Holiday Website Accessibility Checklist
Before holiday traffic increases, review these basics:
- Can the website be navigated by keyboard?
- Is text easy to read against its background?
- Do meaningful images have appropriate alt text?
- Are headings organized logically?
- Are buttons and links clearly labeled?
- Are forms properly labeled and understandable?
- Are form errors easy to identify and correct?
- Is important content accessible on mobile devices?
- Are videos appropriately captioned when needed?
- Can users zoom or enlarge content without breaking the page?
- Are menus and interactive elements usable with assistive technology?
- Have you tested more than just the homepage?
Automated accessibility tools can identify many common issues, but they cannot detect every barrier. Manual review and real-world testing remain important parts of an accessibility strategy.
Accessibility Is an Ongoing Process
Website accessibility should not be treated as a one-time project completed before the holidays and forgotten afterward.
Websites change continuously.
New pages are created. Images are uploaded. Forms are replaced. Plugins are updated. Promotions are launched. Content editors add headings, links, and media.
Any of those changes can introduce new accessibility issues.
Regular monitoring, testing, and improvement can help businesses maintain a stronger website experience over time.
Quick Takeaways
- Website accessibility helps more people navigate, understand, and interact with your business online.
- WCAG provides a widely used framework for evaluating accessible website design.
- Important accessibility considerations include keyboard navigation, color contrast, alt text, forms, headings, and interactive elements.
- Many accessibility improvements also strengthen overall usability and website structure.
- Automated tools are helpful, but they should be combined with manual review.
- Accessibility should be treated as an ongoing part of website maintenance, not a one-time holiday project.
Is Your Website Creating Unnecessary Barriers?
A website can look polished and still contain technical, accessibility, search, or usability issues that make it harder for customers to take the next step.
A Digital Presence Audit can help identify gaps across your website, search visibility, user experience, and conversion journey so you can prioritize the improvements that matter most.
Start with a Digital Presence Audit
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