Most website problems are easy to spot. A page loads slowly, a form doesn't send, a logo looks stretched on a phone. But there's a whole category of problem that never shows up in your own browser: the parts of your site that quietly don't work for some of the people trying to use them.
Roughly 5.5 million Australians — about one in five of us — live with disability, and that number climbs to more than half of people aged 65 and over. If your website is hard for them to read, tap or navigate, they don't complain. They just leave and buy from someone else.
The good news is that accessibility isn't the vast, expensive project it's often made out to be. A handful of small fixes covers most of the ground.
Where sites actually go wrong
Every year, WebAIM tests the home pages of the top one million websites. In its February 2026 analysis, 95.9% of those pages had detectable accessibility failures — and the average page had 56 separate errors, up 10% on the year before. Australian (.au) sites sat slightly worse than the global average.
That sounds bleak, but there's a silver lining buried in the data: 96% of every error found fell into just six categories. Fix those six things and you've dealt with almost all of it. They are:
- Low contrast text — pale grey type on white, found on 83.9% of pages
- Images with no alternative text — 53.1% of pages
- Form fields with no labels — 51% of pages
- Empty links — links with no readable text, usually icons, 46.3%
- Empty buttons — same problem, 30.6%
- No page language set — 13.5%
None of these are hard. Most are a designer or developer noticing them once and never letting them creep back in.
The fixes worth doing first
Contrast: the one almost everyone gets wrong
Light grey text on a white background looks elegant in a design mockup on a big bright monitor. On a phone, outdoors, held by someone in their sixties, it's close to invisible.
The standard asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 between normal-size text and its background (3:1 for large headings). You don't need to do the maths yourself — WebAIM's free colour contrast checker will tell you in seconds whether a pair of colours passes.
Worth checking beyond body text: placeholder text inside form fields, captions under images, the small print in your footer, and any text sitting over a photo. Those are the usual offenders.
Alt text: describe the picture, don't name the file
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image. Screen readers speak it aloud, and it appears if an image fails to load. Search engines read it too, so it's one of the rare accessibility jobs with a direct SEO benefit.
The rule of thumb: describe what the image shows and why it's there. "Our team fitting a hot water system in a Brunswick laundry" is useful. "IMG_4472.jpg" is not, and neither is "image" or "photo".
One exception worth knowing — purely decorative images, like a background texture or a divider swirl, should have empty alt text (alt="") so screen readers skip them rather than reading out noise.
Forms, buttons and links that make sense on their own
Your contact form is the single most valuable page on your site, and it's also where accessibility problems cost you the most. Every field needs a visible label sitting above or beside it — not just placeholder text inside the box, which vanishes the moment someone starts typing and disappears entirely for screen reader users.
The same idea applies to links and buttons. A link that just says "click here" or "read more" tells someone navigating by screen reader nothing about where it goes; roughly one in seven pages still does this. "See our hosting plans" works far better, for humans and for Google.
And watch the icon-only buttons — the little search magnifier, the hamburger menu, the social icons in your footer. To a screen reader, a button containing only an icon and no text is simply a button with no name. Adding a hidden text label fixes it in a line of code.
Two tests you can run yourself in five minutes
Not everyone uses a mouse. Some people navigate entirely with the Tab key, some use voice control, some have limited fine motor control on a touchscreen.
Two quick checks, right now, with no tools at all:
- Open your home page and press Tab repeatedly. Can you reach every menu item, link and form field? Can you always see where you are — is there a visible outline on whatever's currently selected? If the highlight disappears somewhere, that's a dead end for keyboard users.
- Open your site on your phone and try to tap every button with your thumb. Anything cramped, tiny or stacked too close together is a problem for far more people than you'd think.
The current guidelines (WCAG 2.2) added a few requirements along these lines — a clearly visible focus indicator, and not forcing people to re-enter information they've already given you in a multi-step form.
Why this matters beyond doing the right thing
There's a legal dimension in Australia. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies to websites and digital services, and the Australian Human Rights Commission points to WCAG Level AA as the benchmark. It applies regardless of business size — there's no small-business exemption.
But honestly, the commercial case is the stronger one. An accessible site is a clearer site. Better contrast helps everyone reading on a phone in the sun. Properly labelled forms get filled in more often. Descriptive links help search engines understand your pages. Clean, well-structured headings help every visitor skim. Most of what makes a site work for people with disability makes it work better for everybody.
Where to start this week
You don't need an audit to begin. Run your home page and your contact page through the free WAVE tool from WebAIM, then fix whatever it flags in those six common categories. Do the Tab-key test. Check your contrast. That'll take an afternoon and will put you ahead of the vast majority of small business sites.
If you'd rather someone just handled it, we build accessibility into everything we make at EkkoByte — and we're happy to take a look at an existing site and tell you plainly what's worth fixing and what isn't. No jargon, no scare tactics. Get in touch and we'll have a proper look.
