No Barriers, More Business: A Simple Guide to Web Accessibility

Sarah Ayers
Yes. Good afternoon everyone. It’s so great to see you all here today. Like Fern mentioned, my name is Sarah Ayers. I’m an attorney with Danna McKitrick, and I’m a transactional attorney, which means I do fun “sit at my desk, paperwork” law, not “stand in front of a judge, argue” law. And I advise many small businesses just like yourself.

And this presentation today, what we’re going to cover is website accessibility. It’s been a bit of a hot topic in recent years, and it’s been coming up more and more, and it can be confusing on what that means, what’s required. So this is just to give an overview of why accessibility matters, how your website can be accessible, and different things to check for when making your website accessible.

So this matters because if your website is not accessible, you are losing out on a huge potential portion of a consumer base. More than one in four adults in the US have some form of disability. For those over the age of 65, that is 43.9%. And if your website is inaccessible, then those potential people are not able to use your website.

They can’t find out about your services or your goods and your wonderful business, and they can’t hire you. In addition to that, it is also a legal requirement that your website is accessible because, of the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s also been more of a forefront recently because there’s been a rise in accessibility lawsuits. So this is something called a “sue and settle” scheme, where someone might take a legitimate law that has a an actual purpose behind it and use it to sue someone.

But the purpose is not to resolve that issue. It’s to get a settlement check. And for accessibility, this has been happening quite a bit, especially with small business owners, because to go to fight it, even if your website is accessible, go to court, fight it, it’s very expensive. Litigation is very expensive versus if someone sends you a demand letter [that] says, “we can skip all of that. Don’t worry about it. Just give me $5,000.” It’s a lot easier, but you shouldn’t have to do that. So it puts your business at risk.

There has actually been a very specific rise in Saint Louis and Kansas City in the past three years. And it’s been targeting e-commerce websites and restaurants more than other types of industries. It also targets non-profits. There’s some non-profits think that they might be exempt from this because they’re nonprofit. That is not true. Your website still has to be accessible. So they also find themselves becoming victims to these sue and settle lawsuits.

So Missouri has ranked sixth in the nation for these filings in 2025. And it became such an issue with these demand letters that the— Missouri issued a safe harbor act in just May this year. And what this safe harbor act means — it’s how they were addressing the sue and settle lawsuits — is it is the Act Against Abusive Websites or Web Content Access Litigation. Businesses now have 90 days from when they receive notice, whether that is a letter or a actual lawsuit to fix whatever the issue is on their website. So this helps address actual issues and actual problems with accessibility, and without giving an incentive to people to abuse the law.

At the same time, there is still a consequence where if someone has sent you multiple letters saying “please change this, please fix this, I can’t access your website” and you haven’t respond. They can still have a recourse for their damages. So there must be substantial good faith steps in that 30— or in those 90 days to fix that issue.

That doesn’t mean it needs to be completely fixed. It doesn’t need to be solved. It just needs to be that you’re in the process of fixing it. Because sometimes these issues take a bit. The other half of the act is that the Missouri attorney general can now go after frequent fliers. So if there is a specific law firm or a specific attorney where they are filing and sending out lots of these letters, because some of them do do that, they can now personally be sued and by the attorney general, and they can have consequences for that, for bringing these abusive accessibility claims.

And whenever— before this act was signed into law, something that I thought was very interesting was there was an interview, I think on channel five in Saint Louis with one of these attorneys, and he admitted in that interview that he actually wasn’t sure if his client ever visited the website they were suing over because it was, the client lived in Kansas City, and the small business was all the way over here in outside of rural or outside of Saint Louis.

And it just goes to show that that was what was happening, really brought it to light to the legislator. And so now we have this safe harbor. And the safe harbor is really changed the tone of these presentations. [audience laughter] It used to be a lot more scary. Now it’s a big anxiety relief. So why must you be accessible with the legal requirement? The Americans with Disabilities Act: so under Title III, all public accommodations must be accessible, and that includes websites. Has anyone been out of the country recently?

It is— once you start noticing differences with the ADA, you really start to appreciate it. So my family was in Europe last spring with my 88 year old grandmother, my father who just had a knee replacement, and my sister who tore her calf muscle two days before we left. So we had three wheelchairs. And it really made you realize about just ramps and stair requirements and different things like that, like ways to make it accessible.

And it makes you appreciate the ADA. And it is the same thing with website accessibility. Once you know what makes a website accessible, I know I start to see it more. Our marketing manager who does our website, he will point it out sometimes on other sites like, oh wait, no, this is not accessible. So it is one of those things that once you start seeing it, you start seeing it a lot.

And so it’s the Americans with Disabilities Act. The actual requirements for what makes a website accessible, however, is intentionally flexible. So there are two ways that they can have a requirement in law. You can have— you need to do A, B and C and you will be compliant. Or we can judge it on a case by case basis.

And they have chosen with the Americans with Disabilities Act to make it a case by case basis. Because of some of these sue and settle and constantly moving targets, there’s been a discussion about changing that. However, part of why it is a flexible standard is because the law just cannot keep up with technology and how it changes.

Law can be very slow to change. Technology changes very quickly. So what we use instead is something called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or the WCAG. And this is a international standard of what makes a website accessible. And it is endorsed by the Department of Justice. It’s not the official standard of accessibility, however, it is what most courts will use. And if you bring it to a court and say we are accessible with the WCAG, then they will say, okay, well, case by case, you did what you could.

So what is the WCAG? That is also complicated. It has 13 guidelines organized under four general principles. So, information, your website needs to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. This means that your information needs to be presented so other users can perceive it. It cannot be invisible. And that sounds obvious, but once we get into some of the things about common errors on websites, you start to see how information can be invisible to some users.

This second piece is it needs to be operable. So if you— users need to be able to use the interface without requiring an interaction from another user, which means your website needs to be able to be used in multiple different ways, such as only using a keyboard. You might not be able to use a mouse if you have limited hand mobility, so to use a website, you would only be able to use a keyboard, and that is one of the ways that they measure if a website is operable.

Third, it needs to be understandable. So it needs to be just easy to understand. Something that is not in all massive— or as we call it, legalese, where it’s all of these big legal terms all the time. So it needs to be more simple. And then, it needs to be robust, so as technologies change, the website needs to evolve with it. Just like ten years ago or even five years ago, where AI was just kind of starting to become a thing, but now it’s everywhere. Technologies, it needs to evolve with the technology.

But how you are compliant with WCAG, I call it a bit of a choose your own adventure. Because there are— you get to kind of choose how compliant you want to be. There are three levels to it. The more As you have, the more compliant you are and the more accessible you are. So if you are a level A, that is the minimum requirements. There is only 25 criteria, only 25 measurable criteria to reach that. If you go up to a AA, which is what most courts in the DOJ use to assess accessibility, there is 38 measurable criteria. The highest level of compliance and accessibility is a AAA, and that’s 61 measurable criteria. If you can’t reach AAA, that is perfectly okay.

Sometimes— it’s great if you can, but AAA can take investment into a website and technology that’s sometimes small businesses just don’t have. And if you can just at least get to a level AA, you’re good. So different types of content have different requirements based on these levels. So a video could have captions if it’s a level A, if it’s a AA, then that means the live streaming version of that video, as it’s being live streamed onto the website, also has captions.

You don’t have to wait for those captions. And AAA is that you would have a live sign language interpreter and company the video. So that’s kind of how it it’s just constantly raising the bar. So there are a few common examples of barriers that come up that can be an easy fix. And one of the big ones that I see a lot is color contrast. So can anyone in the back read that red line?

Audience 1
I mean, I can.

Sarah Ayers
Is it hard though?

Audience 1
[inaudible agreement] Yeah.

Audience 2
I can’t read it right here.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah. It is— with poor color contrast, it can make it very difficult to read. And especially if someone has— if they’re colorblind or if they have reduced vision or low vision. So the set— the minimum contrast ratio is this 4.5 to 1. And there are engines, there is website resources where you can put in, ‘okay. This is the color background that I’m using. This is the color hex for my font. What’s the color ratio?’ And it will tell you if what that color ratio is. And if you meet this 4.5:1 ratio.

And sometimes you can get very close and think you’re close without checking, but it’s still just not enough. So for example, this, gray text on a white background, that is a very big trend right now. I see it a lot, but it is just barely misses it. It’s 4.41 or it’s 4.41:1 ratio. So this for someone with low vision it might be difficult to read.

Another really common barrier is alternative text. And what alternative text is is that if there’s a photo image it basically gives a screen reader an option of, okay, so instead of reading this image, because how can you do that, this is what you should say instead. So for this example it is the Tower Grove website. And it has a picture of their frosted 5K, I think from last year. And the alternative text is a group of costume runners pose for a photo against a decorative snowy background. So it describes what that photo is to someone who might be blind or have low vision, and he’s using a screen reader. So it’s a way to describe it.

But think about how many images that might be on your website that include information on it. It might be a flier about, ‘come join us at this event,’ or we’re having, for restaurants, what comes up a lot is PDFs and that they will put their PDFs on the website, no alternative text, and so then if someone with a screen reader goes to look at that, they— to see the menu, nothing is read to them. To them it’s just menu. Copyright 2026. That’s it. So it is a, very common barrier that people should address and know about.

Audience 3
Is that just like code that it’s written into, like how do you get the alt text there?

Sarah Ayers
I think it’s code. Brett?

Audience 3
Okay, I’ll figure it out. Thank you.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah, I think it depends on the website host.

Audience 2
It’s always going to be there when you add a picture [unintelligible]

Audience 3
Fantastic.

Sarah Ayers
Yes, but good question.

Audience 4
What should you do if you like, are in a situation where you have to upload a PDF? Like I know that you can make PDFs accessible too, but like, I mean, it can’t put alt-texts with every single event detail on something, but I also want to provide a PDF for someone to be able to download and print.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Audience 4
Like what’s your what’s the alternative?

Sarah Ayers
You could have it listed twice or you could list the key details of the PDF, for the screen reader on the alt-text.

Audience 4
Considered accessible.

Sarah Ayers
Yes, as long as it’s the key details, because it is sometimes one of the other things people run into is they do want to use alt text and they go overboard, and then they will have paragraphs and paragraphs of describing a picture. And that is also not accessible because reading it to someone, they don’t want to listen to you talk for five minutes about a picture. They just want to get the content. So another barrier is keyboard navigation.

Like I mentioned earlier, some people might have limited dexterity. They can’t really use a mouse, or for other reasons they just use a keyboard to navigate. So with keyboard navigation, what you want to do is it needs to be able to be navigated through your arrow keys, your enter key and your tab key. And it should be that when you are hitting tab, whatever you’re on is highlighted. So it’s not just if you hit enter, you don’t know where you’re going. You’ll go somewhere, but no idea where. And it needs to be in a logical order. So how you read a book: left to right, top to down.

And one of the ways that you can test this is if you set up your website, turn off your mouse, or put your mouse in the other room, and then just go through it with your keyboard and see if you find any issues. [laughs] One of the— another barrier is the clear layout or design, which sounds obvious, like you want good design for your website because it just helps with your marketing. But sometimes the design aspects can create actually a barrier itself. So this is the Yale School of Art website. It’s a bit famous as being a very inaccessible website because of its design.

And it was a art project, a group art project of Yale art students. Anyone could come in and change anything at any point, however they wanted. It was a mess. So like with the Yale, they have these random pictures and then they’ll change where things are at and then they have different colors. It’s just not good. And it actually was— went viral in a few discussion boards because it’s so bad. So Yale just launched two weeks ago a brand new website that students can not change. It’s just Yale. But this is some of the issues, it’s hard for someone to navigate. It’s hard to read. It’s confusing. It’s not logical. And that can make it difficult to navigate.

So as I mentioned, the inaccessible PDFs are a very common barrier, especially for restaurant menus. Because it would only show up as a blank page. So you can use your menu as text on the page or just a different PDF built for accessibility. Another thing that comes up quite a bit is vague text links. So sometimes when a text link, if you hover on it, it’ll just say ‘click here.’ And it might be that in front of it it says like if you want to book our services book, click here. Or if you want to purchase the product, click here. But that doesn’t give enough description to a screen reader of ‘okay, so what does this link say and what is it going to?’ It just says click here.

And then the person, the user doesn’t know ‘okay, so where am I going with this?’ Or if I’m looking [for] the booking link, is this the booking link or is that the booking link. And they might just wind up on the wrong spot. So having links that at least describe what it’s going to such as book services, menu, etc. that also is another way to have your website be more accessible.

So what can you do to be more proactive? First, if you do receive a letter or a lawsuit, please respond and please look at it and assess what are they claiming you’re not accessible with? Look over your website and create at least a game plan and acknowledge the letter and let them know we received it and we are doing XYZ to fix it. And potentially consult with an attorney. Other things that you can do is discuss with your developer, ask questions about how they ensure compliance and if they design with accessibility in mind.

We had a client a year ago where we, through something else, found— we’re looking at their website and I was like, you know, this is really not accessible. There’s like 2 or 3 issues. Brought it to their attention, they took it to their developer. They said ‘our developer said it was fine, don’t worry about it.’ Went to the developer’s website and it was neon yellow with orange font that I couldn’t even read with 20/20 vision. And there was just so many issues. I don’t think it hit a single thing that was in here. It had every issue listed in here, so we told them, don’t know what they did with it, but we told them, so that is something to know. There are really good developers. I’ve seen them give presentations just like this one. And so when choosing your developer and starting either a rebrand or building your website, it’s something important to think about.

Another option is to have an accessibility audit annually. So this is just, there are different companies where their service is that they go through your website. They look and they see, okay, so what’s accessible, what’s not accessible. They can range in price. Some of them can be more expensive. And small businesses are sometimes on a very tight budget. So if it can’t be annual, if it is at least on a schedule, that’s better than nothing. So if you’re going to say, okay, every four years we’re going to have an accessibility audit, then that is, a good schedule to have to make sure that you’re addressing those changes

Audience 5
Can I add—

Sarah Ayers
Yeah.

Audience 5
The AI does a really good job of accessibility audits

Sarah Ayers
Oh, cool.

Audience 5
So you can, say, you know according to WCAG. Whatever standard. You know, like, tell me where I need to fix and it’ll be like really don’t have enough contrast here. This isn’t. Okay. Awesome.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah. So that’s quick too. Yeah. To just go through it and find like okay, so here are these points that we need to update now. Yeah that is a good resource as well. You can also create an accessibility statement. This is something that would be free to you. And it’s easy. The WCAG has a generator for this. It just says okay, we are this business. We are striving to hit this compliance level, level AA, and if you have an issue, you run into an accessibility problem, please contact us at this email or this address.

The key to this is, is to watch the email and watch the address. There has been, I just saw last week, an opinion from a judge. Not about this, but something similar where the business had an email. There was like an info email. So all of the complaints were being sent to the info email. And the business said, well, we have this email set up so they could reach us at XYZ. And the judge’s response was, yeah, but you never look at it. Like no one had access to this email, so they had no idea about these complaints. So if you do have a separate email set up, make sure it is going to someone else or it’s monitored in some way.

And then finally be wary of accessibility widgets. They can sometimes have the— they can be very good resources and very helpful. They can also have a counter effect and make your website actually less accessible. AccessiBe is a very common accessibility widget. They got fined by the FTC in 2025. $1 million? Yeah, $1 million for false advertising because they were saying they made websites accessible and they actually put a cover over the whole website that made it completely unreadable to screen readers.

So the people would log on to these websites using this widget, and then it would just say so-and-so business at this link. Nothing. So it’s something to be wary of. There are good ones out there. Just double check, look at the reviews, resources, see if there’s any assessments of them by an industry standard— industry leader.

Sometimes the other problem with accessibility widgets is you have to somehow navigate to that accessibility widget to turn on what you need accessible, which is fine if your website is still accessible to reach it that way. If you can’t use Tab to navigate your website, and your accessibility widget is at the bottom to turn it on to be accessible in other ways, then no one can reach it and it doesn’t really help you. So accessibility, it is a legal requirement, but it is also a smart business strategy. It helps make sure that you lower your litigation risk and the risk of getting a sue and settle demand, or just a cease and desist, while also expanding your potential customer base and consumers that can come to you. And it’s just a good thing to have accessibility for everyone. Yeah?

Audience 6
So is this for, like, you’re building a site, but like, I think a lot of small businesses use, like Shopify or something.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah.

Audience 6
Are these things are already built into like those type of services or like how does that work? Where, these are already established like website builders?

Sarah Ayers
It is to some degree, sometimes the problem— you need to basically what you can control, you need to see if you can make it accessible. And then it would be up to the developer after that. But what can happen sometimes, I know it’s happened with our website, is that there will be updates where you might make something accessible on your end, and then if it’s not, they might do an update and then it’s not accessible anymore. So you just need to monitor it and watch. But if it’s that your website is going through another party, then it’s on that, the third party. It’s wherever the website is then. Yeah?

Audience 7
So I move on to Square.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah.

Audience 7
Square says that they have made some effort making it compliant. But it is really up to the individual who purchases Square to make sure that it’s 100% compliant. They only do a certain portion.

Sarah Ayers
I could see it.

Audience 7
Something to look at when you sign up for Shopify or Square or Wix or whatever. They’ll do the very basic. And then they say if the small print, that is your responsibility. And to do the rest.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah. To be fully compliant.

Audience 7
That’s what they said in Square.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah.

Audience 6
You can still upload text pictures with text, and then, you know, they can’t control that.

Audience 7
Right. Right. Yeah. It makes sense to me.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah.

Audience 7
Yeah. So I’m just saying there’s some small print when you go— because I saw these lawsuits popping up. And so I did a query too. So that was [unintelligible]. So you might query Shopify […] or Wix or—

Sarah Ayers
Yeah. And see what their policies are.

Audience 7
So that way you have a base to start with.

Sarah Ayers
Yeah. Because it probably is— that is a probably a common clause of shifting liability because they want to have the least amount of liability as possible. As everyone does. Any other questions? No? Well, thank you for having me!

Audience
[Applause]