The accessibility mistakes we see on almost every small business site

After running enough scans, patterns become obvious fast. The same handful of mistakes show up on small business sites built on completely different platforms, by completely different developers, over and over. The good news embedded in that pattern: most of these take minutes to fix once someone points them out.

1. Icon buttons with nothing for a screen reader to announce

A hamburger menu icon, a magnifying-glass search icon, a shopping cart icon — these get built as an image or an SVG with no text alternative constantly. A sighted visitor sees the picture and understands; a screen reader user hears nothing, or just the word "button," with zero information about what it does.

2. Text that fails contrast — usually on purpose

Light gray text on a white background is a deliberate, trendy design choice almost everywhere, and it's one of the single most common WCAG failures that exists. The fix is almost always as simple as darkening a hex code a few shades.

3. Form fields with placeholder text standing in for a real label

Placeholder text ("Enter your email") inside a field looks like a label, but it disappears the moment someone starts typing — and it's often not programmatically connected to the field at all, so a screen reader user who tabs into the field hears nothing describing what to enter.

4. Images with no alt text, or meaningless alt text

Decorative images need alt="" so screen readers skip them quietly. Meaningful images — a product photo, a team headshot, a diagram — need a real, specific description. What actually happens most often is neither: the alt attribute is just missing, or it's the literal filename ("IMG_2847.jpg"), which is arguably worse than nothing.

5. A page with no heading structure at all

Visually, a page can look perfectly organized using font size and bold text alone, with no actual <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags underneath. Screen reader users navigate long pages by jumping between headings — without real heading markup, that navigation simply doesn't exist for them, no matter how organized the page looks.

None of these require a redesign. They require someone to actually look — which is the entire reason an automated first pass is worth doing before anything else.