When most businesses think about web accessibility, they picture a checkbox: add some alt text, maybe run an automated scanner, tick the box, move on. But accessibility isn’t a checkbox exercise, it’s a fundamental part of how well a website actually works, for whom, and at what risk to the business behind it.
At Storm, we build Rails and WordPress applications for startups, scale-ups, and corporate innovators, and accessibility comes up in every project. The issues below are the ones we see most often: quietly ignored, rarely flagged by a quick glance at a site, and each carrying real consequences.
Why “It looks fine” isn’t the same as “It works”
A website can look polished and still be unusable for a meaningful share of its audience. Around 1 in 5 people in the UK live with a disability, and many more experience temporary or situational impairments such as a broken arm, bright sunlight on a phone screen, a noisy environment that makes video content unwatchable without captions. Accessibility isn’t a niche concern; it’s a baseline requirement for reaching your actual audience, not just the audience you imagined when you commissioned the design.
That’s the ethical case. There’s also a commercial one, and it’s getting harder to ignore.
The legal and commercial risk is real
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 places a duty on service providers — including websites — to make reasonable adjustments for disabled users. Public sector bodies have explicit accessibility regulations to follow, and private companies increasingly find themselves exposed too, particularly if they serve EU markets where the European Accessibility Act of 2024 is tightening requirements. In the US, ADA-related web accessibility lawsuits have become commonplace, with thousands filed every year against companies of all sizes.
Beyond legal exposure, there’s the quieter cost: missed audience. Every user who abandons a site because a form won’t submit, a menu won’t open with a keyboard, or text is too small to read at a glance is a lost enquiry, a lost sale, or a lost customer relationship.
Here are the five areas where we see the gap between “looks accessible” and “is accessible” most often.
1. WCAG compliance: Treated as a finish line, not a foundation
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the internationally recognised standard, and most legal frameworks reference them directly. The problem isn’t that businesses don’t know WCAG exists, it’s that it often gets treated as a final audit step rather than something baked into design and development from the start.
Retrofitting accessibility after launch is slower and more expensive than building it in from the outset. A site built with WCAG’s four principles in mind — perceivable, operable, understandable, robust — tends to be a better-built site overall, because those same principles (clear structure, sensible interaction patterns, resilient code) are good engineering practice regardless of who’s using the site.
2. Colour contrast: The issue hiding in plain sight
Low-contrast text is one of the most common accessibility failures yet one of the easiest to miss, because designers and developers testing on high-quality monitors in controlled lighting rarely experience the problem themselves. Light grey text on a white background might look “clean” and “modern” in a design file, but it can be genuinely unreadable for users with low vision, colour vision deficiencies, or simply anyone using their phone outdoors.
WCAG sets minimum contrast ratios for a reason: they’re based on how legibility actually degrades for real users, not on aesthetic preference. Checking contrast ratios during design, not after a complaint, is one of the cheapest fixes with the highest impact.
3. Keyboard navigation: The feature everyone assumes works
Not everyone uses a mouse or a touchscreen. Users with motor impairments, some users with visual impairments using screen readers, and even power users who simply prefer it, navigate entirely by keyboard. Yet it’s astonishingly common for interactive elements such as dropdown menus, modal pop-ups, custom-styled buttons, to be built in a way that a keyboard user simply cannot reach or operate.
This one is particularly telling because it usually isn’t intentional exclusion; it’s an oversight that happens when testing is done exclusively with a mouse. A simple test can be done by trying to complete a core user journey using only the Tab, Shift+Tab, and Enter keys — revealing problems on a huge proportion of live websites almost instantly.
4. Alt text: More than a formality
Alt text often gets treated as an SEO nicety rather than what it actually is: the only way a screen reader user knows what an image contains. Missing alt text, or alt text that just says “image123.jpg,” effectively deletes that content for anyone relying on assistive technology.
The nuance that’s often missed: decorative images should sometimes have empty alt attributes (so screen readers skip over visual noise), while meaningful images like charts, diagrams, a product photo showing a key feature, all need alt text that actually conveys the information, not just describes the pixels. Getting this distinction right takes a bit more thought than a blanket policy, but it’s the difference between genuinely functional content and a tick-box gesture.
5. Font sizing: Small text, big consequences
Fixed tiny font sizes, especially ones that don’t scale when a user zooms in or adjusts their browser settings, quietly shut out anyone with low vision, ageing eyesight, or a smaller screen. It’s a problem that’s invisible to most testers because default browser settings and healthy young eyesight mask it entirely.
Using relative units (like rem instead of fixed pixel values) and testing at multiple zoom levels ensures text remains legible for users who need it larger, without breaking the layout for everyone else.
The bigger picture
None of these issues are exotic or expensive to fix in isolation. What makes them dangerous is that they’re invisible to the people building and approving the site, a sighted developer with full mobility, testing on a well-lit monitor with a mouse, will simply never encounter most of them. That’s exactly why they need to be checked for deliberately, rather than assumed away.
Getting this right isn’t just about avoiding legal risk, real as that risk is. It’s about building something that actually does its job: reaching the whole audience it was built for, and standing up to scrutiny, legal, ethical, and reputational, without needing a retrofit six months after launch.
If you’re not sure where your own site stands, an accessibility audit is a relatively quick way to find out and is far cheaper than finding out the hard way. Get in touch to book yours in today.
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