Check your website's accessibility before buying a widget

Start with a customer’s task: finding a service, asking for a quote, booking, or paying. Can someone complete it with a keyboard, enlarged text, or a screen reader? A beautiful homepage does not answer that question.

This is a first review, not a compliance certificate. W3C warns that a page can pass its Easy Checks and still have substantial barriers. A template, an AI review, or a clean automated scan does not establish conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Choose the journeys that matter

Write down your homepage, main service page, contact form, booking route, checkout, and confirmation page. Include third-party embeds and the pages they open. Test the actual published route rather than only the builder preview.

Download the accessibility review checklist. Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet app. Replace the fictional example, then record the page, task, device, steps, problem, evidence, owner, and retest result. Keep customer details out of screenshots shared with suppliers.

Run these first checks

Check	Try this	Record a barrier when…
Keyboard	Use Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, and the controls’ appropriate keys without a mouse.	Focus disappears, skips an essential action, or gets trapped.
Text	Enlarge text and zoom; inspect a narrow phone layout.	Essential text or controls overlap, disappear, or become unusable.
Contrast	Check text and important controls against their backgrounds with a contrast tool.	The relevant contrast requirement is not met; appearance alone cannot settle it.
Images	Review the alternative text for meaningful pictures and image buttons.	The purpose is missing, misleading, or available only in an image.
Structure	Inspect page titles and headings; read links in context.	A page or action is hard to identify.

These are starting checks based on W3C’s preliminary review. Do not label decorative images with irrelevant descriptions: they normally need empty alternative text. Missing-alt scans cannot judge whether a description is useful.

Test forms and media separately

Use a fictional enquiry to try blank required fields, an invalid email, error correction, and a successful submission. Fields need understandable labels and errors. Check that success is communicated, and that a keyboard user can reach the submit control and escape an embedded dialog. A placeholder that disappears as you type is a poor substitute for a persistent label.

For video, review captions for accuracy. Important visual information may also need an audio description or another appropriate alternative. Check moving content and its controls. The applicable detail depends on the content; use the WCAG quick reference to match each issue to a criterion and version.

Test your contact form, booking service, payment screen, and spam challenge as a complete journey. The same quick reference covers keyboard traps, focus, labels, errors, and status messages. Passing one page does not clear the next supplier’s embed.

Fix a reproducible problem

Give the responsible person a report they can act on:

On [page], using [browser/device] and [keyboard or assistive technology], I tried to [task]. After [steps], [what happened] prevented [action]. Expected: [usable result]. Evidence: [sanitized screenshot or recording]. Please correct this and tell us how to retest.

Prioritize barriers that stop customers completing tasks. Keep a working email or phone alternative visible while a broken form is repaired, and monitor it. An alternative contact route helps customers; it does not automatically satisfy an accessibility obligation.

Retest the original steps after each correction. Save the date and outcome, including anything still unresolved. Invite feedback about barriers without requiring someone to disclose a disability or send medical information.

Canada and the United States have different legal contexts

When paying makes sense

Pay for assessment and remediation when a critical journey remains blocked, your supplier cannot explain a fix, you need a documented conformance assessment, or applicable obligations require specialist work. Ask for the scope, WCAG version and level, manual and assistive-technology testing, deliverables, retesting, and what happens when content changes. Involving people with disabilities can reveal barriers a checklist misses.

Be cautious about an add-on promising automatic legal compliance. In April 2025 the FTC approved a final order concerning accessiBe’s unsupported claims. This concerns that company’s claims; it does not establish that every accessibility tool is fraudulent. Buy evidence of useful testing and fixes, rather than a badge.

Your useful outcome: the main customer journeys have been reviewed, each known barrier has an owner, and corrections have been retested. Continue checking after changes to forms, templates, booking, checkout, or content.