By Bianca Frank, Creative Director · Bianca Frank Design, Anchorage
Originally published August 2024. Rewritten and updated October 2026.
An accessible website is one that a person can use with a screen reader, with a keyboard and no mouse, with low vision, with shaky hands, with a slow connection or an old phone, and with the sound off. Most of what makes a site accessible is a dozen specific fixes, and each one is checkable. This guide lists them in order of impact, says how to do each one, and covers the two things people get wrong: PDFs and overlay widgets.
It matters here for plain reasons. Alaska has an older population than it did ten years ago, a lot of people working outdoors in gloves and glare, and communities where the phone is the only computer. The person who can’t use your site is often a customer, a patient or a tribal member, not a hypothetical.
In short:
- Accessibility is mostly twelve concrete fixes. The first six solve most of the real problems on a typical business site.
- The standard everyone measures against is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Public entities now have a legal deadline; businesses are held to it in practice through complaints and lawsuits.
- PDFs are the hidden problem. A site can pass every check and still fail because its forms are scanned images.
- Accessibility overlay widgets don’t make a site accessible, and sites using them have been sued.
- You can test most of this yourself in twenty minutes with a keyboard, your phone and a free checker.
What the law actually requires
For state and local government sites (agencies, boards, school districts, housing authorities, municipalities), the ADA Title II web rule sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard with compliance dates in 2027 and 2028 depending on population. The dates and what they mean for Alaska agencies are in our government website design post.
For businesses, there is no equivalent federal web rule with a date. In practice, the ADA’s public-accommodation requirements are applied to websites through complaints and lawsuits, and WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard courts and settlements use. Thousands of these suits are filed every year, mostly against small and mid-sized businesses, mostly over the same handful of problems: missing alt text, forms that can’t be completed with a keyboard, low contrast, unlabeled buttons. The fixes below address exactly those.
Tribal governments aren’t covered by the ADA in the same way, but federal funders often require accessibility in grant terms, and the members who need it don’t care which law applies.
The twelve fixes, in order of impact
1. Alt text on every meaningful image. A screen reader reads the alt text aloud; without it, the user hears “image” or a file name. Describe what the image shows and why it’s there (“Our crew installing a metal roof in Eagle River,” not “roof”). Decorative images get empty alt text so they’re skipped. In WordPress: Media Library, click the image, fill the Alt Text field; it carries everywhere the image is used.
2. Headings that reflect structure. Screen-reader users navigate by headings the way sighted users skim. One H1 per page (the title), H2s for sections, H3s inside them, in order, with nothing skipped. Never pick a heading level because it looks the right size; style the size separately. In Elementor, every Heading widget has an HTML Tag setting; check it.
3. Color contrast of at least 4.5 to 1 for text. Light gray on white and thin white text over photos are the most common failures. Check your brand colors against white and against each other once, write down the passing pairs, and use only those for text. The WebAIM contrast checker is free. If a brand color fails, use it for large elements and a darker version for text.
4. Everything works with a keyboard. Menus, buttons, forms, sliders, popups: all reachable with Tab, activated with Enter or Space, closable with Escape, with a visible outline showing where you are. Most failures come from fancy menus and popups a theme or plugin added. If you can’t get to it with Tab, neither can a lot of people.
5. Forms with real labels. Every field needs a visible label attached to it (not just placeholder text that disappears when you type), clear instructions before the field, and error messages that say which field and what to fix. Mark required fields in words, not only with a red asterisk. Most WordPress form plugins do this correctly if you fill in the label fields instead of relying on placeholders.
6. Links and buttons that say what they do. “Click here” and “Read more” are meaningless when a screen reader lists all the links on a page. “Download the 2026 rate sheet (PDF)” is not. Icon-only buttons (a magnifying glass, a hamburger menu, social icons) need a text label the screen reader can read even if it’s hidden visually.
7. Text that can be resized. Users zoom to 200 percent. The layout should reflow, not overlap or cut off. Set type in relative units and test by zooming your browser. Avoid putting important text inside images, where it can’t be resized or read aloud at all.
8. Captions and transcripts. Any video with speech needs captions; audio needs a transcript. Auto-captions are a start and need correcting. The transcript also makes the content searchable, which is the one place accessibility and SEO are the same job.
9. Nothing conveyed by color alone. “Required fields are in red” fails for anyone who can’t see red. Add a word, an icon or a pattern. Same for charts, status indicators and links that differ from body text only by color; underline them.
10. Motion that can be stopped. Auto-playing sliders, background video and animations should pause on request or not autoplay at all. Sliders are also the element most likely to break keyboard navigation; most business sites are better off without one.
11. A page language and a logical reading order. The site declares its language so screen readers pronounce it correctly, and the order content is read matches the order it appears. If your site includes Iñupiaq, Yup’ik, Spanish or any other language, mark those sections so they’re read correctly too.
12. Skip link and consistent navigation. A “skip to main content” link at the top (visible when focused) lets keyboard users bypass the menu on every page. Navigation stays in the same place with the same labels across the site.
The PDF problem
A site can pass every check above and still be inaccessible because its real content is in PDFs: the application, the rate sheet, the menu, the meeting packet, the permit form. A PDF that’s a scan of paper is a picture; a screen reader gets nothing from it. A PDF exported from Word without tags is barely better.
The fix, in order of preference: put the content on a web page instead of in a PDF; if it must be a PDF, export it from a properly structured document with headings, real text and tagged structure, and run the accessibility checker in Acrobat; if it’s a form, make it a web form. For organizations with hundreds of legacy PDFs, start with the ones people actually download (your analytics will tell you) and work down. This is the single biggest accessibility task for most agencies and nonprofits, and it’s rarely in the redesign scope.
Plugins that help, and overlays that don’t
There are two kinds of accessibility plugin, and they are not the same thing. The first kind works inside WordPress to fix the code itself: it adds a skip link, restores visible focus outlines, flags images with no alt text, labels search fields and icon buttons, and lets you add text alternatives where the theme forgot them. We install one on every site we build; it handles several of the twelve fixes and keeps new content honest.
The second kind is a third-party overlay: a script, usually with a little icon in the corner, that promises to make any site accessible with one line of code. It won’t. Overlays can’t repair missing alt text, broken heading structure or inaccessible forms, they frequently interfere with the screen readers and keyboard tools people actually use, and businesses running them have been sued anyway. If the pitch is one line of code and a badge, spend the money on the twelve fixes instead.
Five tests you can run today
- Keyboard only. Unplug the mouse. Tab through your home page and your contact form. Can you see where you are, reach everything, and submit?
- Zoom to 200 percent. Does the layout reflow, or do things overlap and disappear?
- Screen reader on your phone. Turn on VoiceOver (iPhone) or TalkBack (Android) and swipe through your home page. Listen for “image,” “button” with no name, and “click here.”
- Grayscale. Set your phone to grayscale for a minute. Can you still tell links from text, and errors from success?
- Automated checker. Run the page through WAVE or Lighthouse. They catch about a third of real problems, which makes them a starting point, not a certificate.
If you fail two or more, start at fix number one and work down.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean for a website to be accessible? People with disabilities can perceive, navigate and use it: with a screen reader, a keyboard, magnification, captions or other assistive tools. The measurable standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Is my small business legally required to have an accessible website? There is no federal web rule with a date for private businesses, but the ADA is applied to business websites through complaints and lawsuits, and WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard used. State and local government sites have firm compliance dates under the Title II rule.
Does an accessibility overlay or plugin make my website ADA compliant? No. Overlays can’t fix the underlying code, often interfere with assistive technology, and have not protected businesses from lawsuits.
How much does it cost to make a website accessible? It depends on how many of the twelve your site fails and how much of your content is in PDFs, video and custom features. We start with an audit that lists exactly which fixes your site needs, then quote those, so you pay for the work and not a package. Sites built on themes or page builders that were never accessible usually cost more to patch than to rebuild properly.
Does accessibility help SEO? Partly. Alt text, heading structure, descriptive links, transcripts and clean code help search engines the same way they help screen readers. It’s a side benefit, not the reason to do it.
Start with the keyboard test
Unplug your mouse and try to send yourself a message through your own contact form. If you can’t, that’s where the work starts. If you’d like us to run the full check and tell you which of the twelve your site fails, book a website audit; accessibility is part of every one we do.
Bianca Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Bianca Frank Design, an Anchorage agency that has designed brands and websites for Alaska businesses since 2007. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and leads a small in-house team covering branding, web design, SEO and content strategy, with recent work for clients including Nalaquq LLC, the Native Village of Barrow, Solstice Psychiatry and Alaska Geographic. BFD was named one of Anchorage’s best web designers by Three Best Rated (2025) and received UpCity’s Local Excellence and Best of Alaska awards (2022, 2023).
