A woman in her sixties is standing outside your restaurant at two in the afternoon. Sun on her screen, your menu open on her phone. The prices are light grey on white, set small. She squints, gives up, and walks to the place next door, where the menu was on a board in the window.

Nothing was broken. The page loaded quickly, the food is good, the photos are lovely. She simply could not read it.

That is what accessibility means in practice for a small business. Not a compliance folder. A customer who could not finish what she came to do.

It is not a small group

The World Health Organization estimates that roughly one in six people lives with a significant disability. But the number that matters to you is larger, because it includes everyone who is temporarily or situationally limited: reading glasses left at home, one hand holding a toddler, a cracked screen, a bus that keeps braking, bright sun on a terrace.

A design that works for someone with low vision also works for your customer squinting at a phone outdoors. You are not building a special version for a minority. You are removing friction for everyone.

Contrast and text size: start here

Two fixes carry most of the benefit, and neither needs a redesign.

Contrast. The common yardstick is a ratio of 4.5:1 between text and its background for normal text, and 3:1 for large headings. Light grey on white usually fails. So does white text over a pale photo, and so does the faint placeholder text inside form fields that many templates ship with. You can check any two colours in ten seconds with a free contrast checker.

Size. Body text below 16 pixels on a phone is a squint. Also check that pinch-to-zoom still works: some older templates switch it off, and that is exactly the feature people with weaker eyes rely on.

The honest test takes five minutes. Walk outside with your phone in daylight and try to read your own prices, opening hours and phone number.

The two-minute keyboard test

Put your mouse away. Open your site and press Tab repeatedly.

You should always be able to see where you are: a visible outline or highlight on the link or button that is currently selected. You should be able to open the menu, reach the phone number, fill in the contact form and submit it, all without a mouse. If the focus vanishes somewhere invisible, or a pop-up traps you with no way out, you have found a real problem. People using a screen reader (software that reads the page aloud) hit the same wall, and so does anyone with a tremor or a wrist in a cast.

While you are in there: photos need a short text description, and buttons need real words. "Book a table" tells someone what will happen. "Click here" does not.

Forms that say what went wrong

The most expensive accessibility failure in a small business is almost always the form. Someone fills in eight fields, presses send, and gets a red bar at the top saying "Something went wrong". Which field? No idea. And half of what they typed has been wiped.

Four things fix that. Put the label above the field instead of only as grey hint text inside it, because that disappears the moment someone starts typing. Put the error message next to the field itself, in plain words: "Enter a phone number we can reach you on." Keep everything already filled in. And accept spaces and dashes in phone numbers rather than rejecting them, or explain the format you want before someone starts.

This is the point where accessibility and revenue are exactly the same thing.

What the EU rules ask of you

The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025. It covers, among other things, online shops, consumer banking services, e-books, transport ticketing and consumer devices. The technical yardstick is the EN 301 549 standard, which in practice comes down to WCAG 2.1 level AA, precisely the points above.

Microenterprises providing services, with fewer than ten staff and no more than two million euros in turnover, are exempt from the service obligations. That covers a lot of restaurants, garages and clinics. Two caveats: the rules for products work differently, and if you supply a council, a hospital or a school, that client will ask anyway, because the public sector has been under its own accessibility rules for years. If you are unsure which category you are in, check for your own sector.

What to do this week

  • Walk outside with your phone and read your own prices and opening hours in daylight. Write down what you cannot read.
  • Tab once through your contact or booking form without a mouse, then fill it in wrongly on purpose to see what the error message says.
  • Pick the three worst colour combinations and have them darkened. That is usually half an hour of work.

If you are not sure which of the things you find is actually worth fixing, we at ITSysPro are happy to take a look with you. A conversation, not a quote.