A plain-language WCAG checklist for small business websites

WCAG 2.1 (levels A and AA) is the benchmark most laws and standards point to — including the European Accessibility Act's EN 301 549. This checklist translates its four principles into the specific things a small business should check on its own site. General information, not legal advice or a compliance certification.

Each item is marked honestly:

• 🤖 Automatic — the free mini-audit checks this (it runs the axe-core engine, which Deque estimates detects about 58% of WCAG issues automatically).
• 👀 Human — no scanner can judge this properly; it needs a person — a keyboard walk-through, a screen-reader pass, or simply reading and looking.
• 🤖 + 👀 Partly both — the scanner flags the mechanical part; a human judges whether it's actually right.

1. Perceivable — can everyone take in the content?

• 👀 Images have meaningful text alternatives. Product photos, icons and diagrams need alt text that says what the image conveys. 🤖 + 👀 The mini-audit flags images with missing alt attributes automatically — whether the text is meaningful ("blue running shoe, side view" vs "image123") needs a human.
• 🤖 Text has enough colour contrast against its background, including buttons and links.
• 👀 Video has captions, audio has transcripts. A person has to check the captions exist and actually match what's said.
• 👀 Colour isn't the only signal. "Fields marked in red are required" fails people who can't perceive the red — errors and required fields need text or symbols too.
• 👀 The page survives 200% zoom without content disappearing or requiring horizontal scrolling.
• 🤖 + 👀 Headings describe the structure in a logical order, so the page outline makes sense read aloud. The scanner flags skipped or empty headings; whether the order is logical is a judgment call.

2. Operable — can everyone use it, not just view it?

• 👀 Everything works with a keyboard alone. Menus, pop-ups, the cart, checkout — the single most revealing test there is, and only a human walk-through can do it: unplug the mouse and Tab through your key pages.
• 👀 You can always see where the keyboard focus is. If the outline around the focused link or button is invisible, keyboard users are lost.
• 👀 No keyboard traps. Focus must never get stuck inside a widget (a chat pop-up or video player) with no way out.
• 🤖 There's a way to skip repeated blocks — a "skip to content" link or equivalent landmarks, so keyboard and screen-reader users don't wade through the whole menu on every page.
• 👀 Moving content can be paused. Auto-playing carousels and videos need pause/stop controls.
• 👀 Nothing flashes rapidly. Fast-flashing content is a seizure risk and a hard failure.

3. Understandable — does it make sense and behave predictably?

• 🤖 Every form field has a label. Name, email, search, checkout fields — the mini-audit checks this automatically, and it's one of the most common small-site failures.
• 👀 Error messages say what went wrong and how to fix it — in words, next to the field, not just a red outline or a generic "invalid."
• 🤖 The page language is declared in the code, so screen readers pronounce it correctly.
• 👀 Navigation and layout are consistent from page to page, and things don't change unexpectedly (a form shouldn't submit just because you tabbed out of a field).
• 👀 Instructions don't rely on shape, size or position alone — "click the round button on the right" doesn't work for everyone.
• 👀 The words themselves are plain. No scanner can tell you your pricing page is confusing. Read it aloud; if you stumble, customers will too.

4. Robust — does it work with assistive technology?

• 🤖 Code is clean and valid — no duplicate IDs, correctly used ARIA attributes, well-formed markup that browsers and assistive tools can parse.
• 🤖 Every button and link has an accessible name, so a screen reader announces "Add to cart," not "button" or a file name.
• 👀 A real screen-reader pass works. The ultimate robustness test: listen to your homepage and checkout with a free screen reader (NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac/iPhone) and check the experience makes sense in audio order. Automated tools flag code errors; only listening tells you whether it works.
• 🤖 + 👀 Status messages are announced — "added to cart," "3 results found," form confirmations. The scanner can flag some missing live-region markup; confirming a screen reader actually speaks them is a human check.

How to use this checklist

Start with the automatic column: run the free mini-audit on your homepage — it covers the 🤖 items there in under a minute and explains each failure in plain language. Then budget an hour for the three human checks that catch the most: the keyboard walk-through, the screen-reader listen, and a captions-and-alt-text review. If you'd rather have the whole site covered — every template, both columns, turned into one prioritised fix list for your developer — that's exactly what our $149 full audit does (currently reservable at the $49 founding price, payable only on delivery). One honest caveat: even a perfect run through this checklist doesn't guarantee compliance or legal protection — it means you've found and fixed the barriers that affect real customers, which is the point.

Sources

• W3C — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, structured on the four principles Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust (POUR).
• Deque Systems — axe-core automated detection estimate (~58% of WCAG issues detectable automatically); the remaining items require manual testing such as keyboard and screen-reader checks.