What is web accessibility?
Web accessibility means a website works for people who use it differently: someone enlarging the text, someone blind reading it with a screen reader, someone who cannot use a mouse, someone reading a phone in bright sun. In practice it is ordinary build choices — readable contrast, real text, labelled buttons, keyboard-reachable links.
Why it matters to a shop
Your customers are not all twenty-five with perfect eyesight on a new phone. A regular in her seventies is holding your menu at arm's length in reading glasses: pale grey text on white simply is not there for her, and she will ring you to ask the price, or go somewhere she can read. Two habits cause most of this. Putting the menu or price list up as a photograph means it cannot be enlarged, selected, translated or read aloud — and a search engine cannot read it either. Unlabelled buttons mean a screen reader announces "button" and nothing more. Some markets also require certain businesses to meet a published standard, so check what applies where you trade.
Three checks you can run today
- Contrast. Dark text on a light background or the reverse — no pale grey on white, no white text sitting on a photograph. A free contrast checker gives you a number; the usual target for body text is 4.5 to 1. Naratake ships fifteen design styles and switching style changes the whole palette, so check the contrast again on a real screen after you switch.
- Real text, not pictures of text. Menus, price lists, opening hours and the address belong in text on the page. A photograph of them cannot be zoomed without blurring, cannot be copied, cannot be translated, and is invisible to both screen readers and search engines.
- Put the mouse down. Press Tab repeatedly from the top of the page and see whether you can reach every link and button, activate them with Enter, and always see where you are. If the focus marker vanishes, or you get stuck inside a menu, a real person using a keyboard is stuck there too.
Common mistake: Treating it as a niche concern, or as something bolted on at the end — a separate "accessible version", or an overlay widget. Most of it is decided while the site is being built, by choices that make it easier for everyone: bigger tap targets, clearer labels, text that survives being enlarged.