Accessibility Fixes You Can Ship in an Hour
Accessibility work stalls because it is presented as an all-or-nothing standard. It is not. A handful of changes cover the issues that affect the most people and show up most often in demand letters, and none of them require a redesign.
1. Give every meaningful image alt text
Describe what the image conveys, not what it contains. A photo of your team at a job site is "Our crew installing a rooftop unit in Wilmington," not "IMG_4471." Decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them. Most sites have a few dozen images and this takes twenty minutes.
2. Fix your heading order
One H1 per page, then H2s for sections, H3s beneath them. Do not choose a heading level because of how big it looks. Screen reader users navigate by heading, and a page whose headings jump from H1 to H4 is a page they have to read linearly.
3. Make links describe their destination
"Read more" repeated eleven times is meaningless out of context. "Read our hosting plan details" is not. This one also helps search engines and improves click-through rates, so it pays twice.
4. Check color contrast on buttons and body text
Light gray text on white is the most common failure on modern sites, and it hurts anyone in bright sunlight, not only people with low vision. Aim for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text. Any browser's developer tools will tell you the ratio.
5. Make sure you can operate the site with a keyboard
Press Tab through your homepage. You should see a visible outline moving through links and buttons in a sensible order, and you should be able to open and close your mobile menu without a mouse. If the focus ring is invisible, someone removed it in CSS; put it back.
6. Label your form fields
Placeholder text is not a label. It disappears when typing starts and is invisible to assistive technology. Every input needs a real label element, and error messages need to say what went wrong in words.
What this does not do
This is not a conformance audit and does not make anyone compliant with a legal standard. It fixes the majority of the issues real visitors hit, on the pages they actually use. Do these six, then decide whether a full audit is warranted for your risk profile.
