WCAG is long, and most of it does not apply to a small business site. A short list of failures accounts for the overwhelming majority of real problems — and all of them are fixable without a specialist.
WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — is the international standard describing how to make web content usable by people with disabilities. It is published by the W3C, comes in versions (2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and in three conformance levels (A, AA, AAA), and it is referenced by law in many countries, which is usually how a small business first hears about it.
It is also long enough to be genuinely off-putting, and that length is why so many small sites do nothing. The useful thing to know is that a short list of failures accounts for most of the actual barriers people meet, and that fixing those does not need a consultant.
The fastest honest test costs nothing and takes ten minutes: unplug the mouse and try to complete your main task using only the keyboard. Every menu, form and button. Most sites fail within the first minute, and what you find that way is more useful than any automated report — scanners catch roughly a third of real issues and cheerfully pass pages that are impossible to use.
Scanners are worth running and worth distrusting. They reliably catch contrast ratios, missing alt attributes and unlabelled fields, which is genuinely useful. They cannot tell whether your alt text describes the right thing, whether the keyboard order makes sense, or whether a screen reader announces your custom dropdown as anything at all. A clean scan is not compliance, and a site can pass every automated check while being unusable. Be especially wary of overlay widgets that promise compliance from one line of script: accessibility practitioners and several regulators have been consistently critical of them, and they have featured in litigation rather than preventing it.
Many jurisdictions reference WCAG in legislation covering public bodies and, increasingly, private businesses — the European Accessibility Act, national implementations across the EU, and equivalents elsewhere. What applies to you depends on where you operate, what you sell and how large you are, and the direction of travel is towards more coverage rather than less. That is a question for someone qualified in your jurisdiction; what is safe to say is that the fixes above are worth doing regardless of whether anyone is compelling you.
Ettex Sites gives you the parts this list touches — colour choices you set, real headings, labelled form fields, keyboard-reachable navigation, alt text prompts on images — and the statement you publish afterwards is covered in accessibility statement.
To be direct: we do not certify anything, do not audit your site, and do not ship an accessibility overlay. A builder can make the right thing easy and cannot stop you choosing grey text on a white background or removing a focus outline. The ten-minute keyboard test remains yours to run.
AA, at version 2.1 or 2.2. That is the level legislation typically references, and AAA is not expected across a whole site.
Insufficient colour contrast, usually light grey text chosen for appearance. It is also among the easiest to fix — it is a colour change.
No. They catch perhaps a third of real issues — contrast, missing attributes, unlabelled fields — and pass pages that cannot be used with a keyboard or screen reader.
They are widely criticised by accessibility practitioners and have featured in litigation rather than preventing it. Fixing the underlying pages is the approach that holds up.
Alt text is the shortest writing task on a website and the one most consistently done badly — either skipped entirely or stuffed with keywords for a search engine that stopped rewarding it years ago.
An accessibility statement is not a compliance badge. It says what your site does, what it does not do yet, and how someone shut out by it can reach a human — and the second part is the one that matters.
Local SEO is unusually tractable. Three things carry most of the result — a complete business listing, consistent details everywhere, and reviews — and none of them require a specialist.