The CDC reports that 28.7% of US adults (over 70 million people) live with a disability. That number gets thrown around a lot in accessibility pitches, usually stretched further than it should be. Not all 70 million have a disability that affects whether they can use a website. A mobility disability that only limits stairs has nothing to do with your checkout flow.
The types that actually matter for web accessibility are narrower, and still significant: vision (5.5%), hearing (6.2%), and cognitive disabilities (13.9%, the largest single category), plus anyone with a motor impairment that affects how they use a keyboard or mouse. Layer those together, and you’re looking at a meaningful share of your traffic, easily in the range of 15 to 20% of adults, who hit friction on a site that wasn’t built with them in mind.
Most businesses treat accessibility as a legal checkbox or an afterthought for the “someday” list. That’s backwards. Accessible design is good design. It’s faster, clearer, and easier for everyone, not just the users it was built to serve first.
Here’s why it matters and what to actually do about it.
Why accessibility matters for users
Accessibility means your site works regardless of how someone experiences it. Someone using a screen reader because they’re blind. Someone navigating with a keyboard because they can’t use a mouse. Someone with color blindness who can’t tell your “click here” button from the background. Someone with a cognitive disability who needs clear structure, not a wall of dense text.
When a site isn’t accessible, none of that is a minor inconvenience. It’s a locked door. The person can’t book the appointment, can’t read the pricing page, can’t complete the checkout. They don’t file a complaint. They leave and go to a competitor who got it right.
Why accessibility matters for business
Legal exposure is real and growing. ADA-related website lawsuits have climbed every year, and small and mid-size businesses are increasingly the target, not just enterprise brands. A demand letter costs a fraction of what a redesign costs, but it still costs you money, time, and a bad headline.
It’s an SEO advantage, not a tradeoff. The same practices that make a site accessible, clean semantic structure, descriptive alt text, logical heading hierarchy, are practices search engines reward. Google can’t see your site any better than a screen reader can. Fix one, help the other.
You’re leaving revenue on the table. People with disabilities and their households represent significant spending power. An inaccessible site doesn’t just create legal risk, it actively turns away paying customers before they get a chance to buy.
It’s cheaper to build in than to bolt on. Retrofitting an existing site for accessibility costs more than designing for it from the start. The businesses that wait usually pay twice.
5 accessibility best practices to implement now
- Write real alt text for every image. Not “image.jpg.” Describe what the image actually shows and why it’s there. A screen reader user should understand your product photo the same way a sighted visitor does. Decorative images that add nothing should be marked so screen readers skip them entirely.
- Make your site fully keyboard-navigable. Tab through your own site right now, no mouse. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you tell where you are on the page? If you get stuck or lost, so does every keyboard-only user, and that’s a bigger group than you think: motor impairments, temporary injuries, power users who just prefer it.
- Hit real color contrast ratios. Light gray text on a white background looks clean in a mockup and is unreadable for a huge portion of your visitors. WCAG sets a minimum contrast ratio for a reason. Run your palette through a contrast checker before you fall in love with it.
- Use headings and structure the way they’re meant to be used. H1, H2, H3 aren’t font-size shortcuts. They’re a map. Screen reader users often navigate a page by jumping from heading to heading. If your structure is decorative instead of logical, you’ve broken that map and buried your content.
- Caption and transcribe your video and audio content. Captions aren’t just for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. They’re for the person watching on mute in a waiting room, the non-native speaker following along, and every search engine trying to index what your video actually says.
None of these require a full rebuild. They require intent, and someone who knows where to look.
Let’s build something that works for everyone
Accessibility isn’t a feature you add at the end. It’s a standard you build from the first wireframe. At McLeod, it’s part of how we design and develop every site, not a separate line item you have to ask for.
If you’re not sure where your site stands, get in touch, and we’ll walk through it with you, honestly, and tell you exactly what needs to change.
