Roughly 1 in 4 adults lives with a disability that can affect how they browse the web — low vision, color blindness, motor impairments, or reliance on a screen reader. If your site isn't built to work for them, you're not just risking an ADA demand letter, you're turning away a quarter of your potential customers before they even see what you sell. Here are the 8 fixes that matter most in 2026.
1. Add Real Alt Text to Every Image
Every meaningful image needs alt text that describes what it shows, not just a filename or "image1.jpg". Screen readers announce this text aloud — it's often the only way a blind visitor knows your product photo exists at all. Decorative images should use an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them cleanly.
2. Make Every Feature Reachable by Keyboard Alone
Many visitors with motor impairments navigate entirely with a keyboard, tabbing between links, buttons, and form fields instead of clicking. Test your own site by unplugging your mouse: if you can't reach the menu, open a modal, or submit a form using only Tab and Enter, neither can they.
3. Fix Low-Contrast Text
Light gray text on a white background looks clean in a design mockup and is unreadable for anyone with low vision or color blindness. WCAG requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text — a free contrast checker tool takes seconds to run against your color palette.
4. Label Every Form Field Properly
A placeholder that disappears when you click into a field is not a label. Every input needs a persistent, programmatically-linked <label> so a screen reader can announce what it's asking for — especially critical on your checkout and contact forms, where confusion costs you a lead.
5. Use Real Headings, Not Just Bold Text
Screen reader users often navigate a page by jumping between headings, the same way sighted users skim. Bold, larger text that isn't marked up as an actual <h2> or <h3> is invisible to that navigation method, even though it looks identical on screen.
CODECAN standard: every website we build ships with proper alt text, keyboard-navigable menus and forms, and checked color contrast — accessibility built in at launch, not patched in after a complaint.
6. Give Videos Captions or a Transcript
Any video with spoken content needs captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors — and it doubles as a usability win for the huge share of mobile users who watch with the sound off in public. A plain text transcript underneath is a fast, low-cost way to cover both.
7. Write Link Text That Makes Sense Alone
Screen readers can pull up a list of every link on a page out of context. A page full of "click here" and "read more" links tells that visitor nothing about where they lead. Use link text that describes the destination, like "View our Shopify pricing" instead of "click here".
8. Run an Automated Scan, Then a Manual Check
Free tools like WAVE or Lighthouse's accessibility audit catch a large share of issues in minutes — missing alt text, contrast failures, unlabeled forms. They won't catch everything, so follow up with a real keyboard-only pass and, ideally, feedback from an actual screen reader user before calling the job done.
The Bottom Line
Accessibility isn't a compliance checkbox bolted on at the end — it's a property of how a site is built from day one. Fix these 8 things and you lower your legal exposure, improve your SEO, and open your business to millions of customers who would otherwise bounce off a site they can't use.
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