What accessibility means on a small-business site, which parts of it we test on every page we publish, and the part no web designer can promise you.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is a law. Whether a particular website meets it is a legal question about your business, and it is not one a web designer can settle. This page will not pretend otherwise. What a designer can do is build to the published technical guidelines that accessibility is measured against — WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — test the things that can be tested, and tell you exactly which ones were tested and which were not. That is what we do, and this page lists it.
Text has to be readable against whatever is painted behind it. WCAG's AA level asks for a 4.5:1 ratio on normal text. Light grey on white fails; so does a button whose label happens to match its background in one colour theme.
A link or button has to be big enough to hit with a thumb. WCAG 2.5.8 sets a 24 by 24 CSS-pixel minimum. 44 pixels is the comfortable size, and it is what we hold the primary call-to-action and the demonstration builds' controls to.
Everything a mouse can reach, the Tab key can reach, and the focused control visibly changes so the person knows where they are. Focus outlines removed for looks are the usual failure.
Every meaningful image carries a written description for people who cannot see it and for search engines, which cannot either.
At a phone width of 390 pixels nothing is wider than the screen unless it sits in its own scroll container, such as a comparison table. A page that scrolls sideways hides content and buttons off the edge.
Text sizes that do not need pinching, and animation that stops when the reader's device asks for reduced motion — without hiding the content the animation was going to reveal.
These are automated checks that run against the live site you are reading, builtbykerr.com, and against the three demonstration builds linked from the home page. They are not a promise about someone else's site; they are what we hold our own work to, in public, and the same method is what a client build is scoped against. Each check also plants a deliberate defect and must catch it, because a test that has only ever returned zero is indistinguishable from a test that cannot see.
Named text and named buttons — headings, body lines, the payment line, the hero button, the navigation button, the package buttons — are measured against the colour actually painted behind them, walking up through transparent parents to find it, in both the dark theme and the light theme. Anything under 4.5:1 fails. The reason it runs in both themes is that the failure it was written for only showed in one.
The test presses Tab thirty times and records whether each control it lands on changed in any visible way: outline, box shadow, border, background or underline. A planted link with its outline suppressed must be caught, so a real link with the same problem cannot slip past. It uses real key presses rather than scripted focus because the visible-focus style is only guaranteed for keyboard focus, and that is the state a keyboard user is actually in.
The page is loaded with the reduced-motion preference on and deliberately not scrolled. Every element that would normally animate into view must already be visible, and the background animation must be stopped. The specific failure this guards against is honouring the preference by removing the transition while leaving the hidden starting state in place — which makes content permanently invisible to exactly the people who asked for less motion.
Nothing on the page may be wider than the viewport unless it is inside a container that scrolls on its own, and the page must not scroll sideways. Every link, button, input and select must be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels unless it sits inline in a sentence, which is the exemption the guideline itself makes. A planted 14-pixel link must be caught.
At 320, 375, 390 and 412 pixels — which include the two most common phone widths in the United States — the header's Contact button must sit fully on screen and be at least 44 pixels tall. This exists because a "no sideways scroll" check cannot see a button that has been clipped off the edge by an overflow rule; only measuring the element against the viewport can.
Each of the three demonstrations is opened at 390 pixels wide. It must not scroll sideways, every tap target that is not inline text must be at least 44 pixels tall, and the page must load without a JavaScript error. They are checked on a phone first because the first version was verified only on a desktop, and a restaurant's navigation links turned out to be 29 pixels tall on the device most people book a table from.
Every page must carry exactly one h1, a title, a meta description and a canonical address. That is structure as much as search: a screen reader navigates by headings, and a page with none or with three top-level ones is harder to move through.
Being specific about the gaps is the point of this page. There is no automated check here for whether alt text is any good — the demonstration builds carry written descriptions on their photographs, but that was a person writing them, and no script can tell "a slate roof with dormer windows" from "image". There is no check of the order a screen reader announces things in, of form error messages, of video captions, or of PDFs. And none of this is an audit against the full WCAG list, which runs to dozens of criteria.
If your situation needs a formal audit against WCAG 2.2 at the AA level, that is a separate piece of work, it is agreed in writing before anything starts, and if it needs a specialist rather than a web designer, we will say so instead of taking the job.
A designer who tells you nothing ever goes wrong is not measuring. These are documented in the tests themselves.
Seven style rules pointed at a colour variable that did not exist. An undefined variable does not throw or log; the whole declaration is ignored and the text inherits, which on a light surface is white on white. Three of the seven had been live for weeks. Now every named element's contrast is measured rather than assumed.
A row of product links rendered 17 pixels tall at 390 pixels wide, under the 24-pixel minimum. Nothing in the suite could have caught it because nothing in the suite had a layout engine. It was found by hand, and the phone-layout test was written the same day.
The header's main button rendered 19 pixels past the right edge on a 375-pixel phone while the sideways-scroll check passed, because an overflow rule had hidden the amputation. It was fine at 412 pixels, which is why a one-width check missed it. Now the button is measured against the viewport at four widths.
A button carried a white label on the accent colour. In the dark theme the accent is near-white, so the label measured 1.05:1. The first contrast list contained only text, and the bug that was reported was a button — which is why buttons are now in the list by name.
A web designer can build to WCAG, test against it, and hand you the evidence. A web designer cannot tell you whether your business is covered by a particular legal obligation, what standard a court would apply to it, or whether your site meets that standard. Those are questions for a lawyer, and this page is general information, not legal advice; our disclaimer says the same thing about everything on this site.
What that means in practice: we will not put "ADA compliant" on your site or ours as a badge. We will put the checks above on record, show you the results, and describe in the project agreement exactly which checks your build is held to. If you have received a demand letter, the useful thing we can give your lawyer is a factual account of what the site does now and what it would take to change.
Accessibility is not a separate product here, and there is no accessibility surcharge. The packages are the ones on the web design page: a Starter Site from $999 (up to three pages, lead form and click-to-call, on-page SEO and Google setup, or $149 a month for twelve months and then it stops), a Business Site from $2,499 (five to eight pages with copywriting, local schema, reviews and analytics), a Growth Site + Tool from $4,999 (everything in Business plus one custom tool), and a care plan from $199 a month for hosting, updates and monitoring. Half to start, half on launch; three revision rounds included; we write the copy; you own everything at the end. Photography and logo design are not included.
The demonstration builds show how we build and are held to the phone-layout and tap-target checks above. Which checks a client site is held to, and whether any formal audit is part of the scope, is agreed in writing before work starts, because a promise that is not written down is not a promise.
The Site & Business Audit is $750, paid once: every page scanned against 190-plus technical, SEO, local and conversion checks, then a person reads your copy, offer and ads, and the whole thing is ranked by impact against effort with the exact fix. It is a written report in three business days and it is yours to keep or hand to any agency. If accessibility is the reason you are here, say so when you book it, and we will tell you before you pay what the report covers on that front and what it does not. The web development page covers the engineering side — speed, forms that arrive, clean markup — which is where most of the accessibility work actually lives.
The same process as every build here, with the checks named in the proposal.
Twenty minutes. You describe the business and who your customers are, including anyone the current site is failing.
Scope, price and a date in writing, with the accessibility checks the build is held to listed by name. 50% to start.
Click anywhere on the draft and type. Three rounds of revisions are included.
Domain, hosting and logins registered to you. 50% on launch, and the test results are yours along with the site.
We will not say yes, because ADA compliance for a website is a legal question about your business and no designer can settle it. What we can say is which technical checks a page passed, and show you the tests. Anyone who gives you a flat yes is selling you a word.
Start with the $750 Site and Business Audit, a written report in three business days that is yours to keep. Tell us when you book it that accessibility is the concern, and we will say plainly what the report covers and what it does not. Fixes are then quoted against the ranked list, or, if the site is a template with the problems baked in, a rebuild starts at $999.
Open the three demonstration builds and judge. Their controls are at least 44 pixels tall on a phone and their text is readable against its background, and that is what any phone user wants anyway. Accessible and plain are not the same thing.
Talk to a lawyer. We are not one and this page is not legal advice. What we can supply is the technical side: what your site currently does on contrast, tap targets, keyboard use and phone layout, and what it would take to change it.
Much of the work overlaps with what a search engine reads: simple HTML, written alt text, readable text, and a page that works on a phone. We have not measured a ranking effect of our own and will not claim one. The overlap is reason enough to do it once rather than twice.
Send me your site and tell me who it is failing. I'll tell you what it does now on contrast, tap targets and keyboard use, and what it would take to fix — and I'll say plainly which questions need a lawyer instead of me.