The internet's whole promise is that distance stops mattering. You can talk to someone on another continent, buy from a shop in a city you've never visited, learn from a teacher you will never meet. Physical borders were supposed to stop being the thing that decides who gets in.

For a lot of people, the border just moved.

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

That sentence comes from the person who invented the web, and the idea behind it was there from the start. Most of the web still falls short of it.

Who gets shut out

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people experience significant disability (external site). That is 16% of the world's population, roughly one person in six.

Disability on the web takes many forms. It includes people who are blind and use a screen reader that reads the page aloud, people with low vision who zoom in or need strong contrast, people who cannot use a mouse and move through a page with a keyboard or a switch, people who are deaf and rely on captions, and people for whom a cluttered, confusing page is a wall rather than an inconvenience.

Many people move in and out of these groups. A broken wrist, a migraine, bright sunlight on a phone screen, getting older: sooner or later, accessibility matters to almost everyone.

What the web actually looks like

Every year, WebAIM runs automated accessibility tests on the home pages of the top one million websites. In its 2026 report (external site), 95.9% of those home pages had detectable failures of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, with an average of 56 errors per page.

The six most common were all basic problems:

Problem Home pages affected
Text with too little contrast 83.9%
Images with no text description 53.1%
Form fields with no label 51.0%
Links with no readable text 46.3%
Buttons with no readable text 30.6%
Page language not declared 13.5%

Each of these has a concrete effect on a real person. An image with no description is read out as a file name, or skipped entirely, so a screen reader user does not know what the product looks like. A button with no text is announced as just "button", so nobody can tell whether it adds to the basket or deletes it. A form field with no label means typing an address into a box that could be asking for anything.

And these are only the problems a machine can find. Automated testing catches a part of what goes wrong; the rest only shows up when a person tries to use the site.

Why small stores matter most

Large companies have accessibility teams, audits and legal departments. Much of the web, though, is made up of small businesses: the shop selling handmade ceramics, the local bookshop's online catalogue, the one-person brand on a Shopify theme.

Those stores are built from templates, and templates repeat. One unlabelled search button in a header template is on every page of the site. That also means a single fix in that template clears the problem across the whole store at once. The work is usually smaller than the list of findings suggests.

Where to start

You can work through it in stages. A sensible order:

  1. Find out what is broken. Run an automated scan across your whole store, not just the home page, so product and checkout pages are included.
  2. Fix the problems that block people first. Missing labels on buttons and form fields, and images with no description, stop people from completing a purchase at all.
  3. Fix templates, not pages. If the same problem appears on every page, look for the one theme file that produces it.
  4. Check it with a keyboard. Put the mouse aside and try to buy something using only Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. You will learn more in five minutes than from any report.
  5. Keep a record. Note what you found and what you fixed, with dates. It shows the work you have done, and it shows you whether things are drifting.

The web was meant to be a place where physical limits stop deciding who can take part. Making a store accessible is how a small business keeps that promise, for the one customer in six who would otherwise be turned away at the door.

Sources