A boutique owner in Grand Rapids got a letter last spring that she didn’t understand at first. It wasn’t from the city, and it wasn’t from her landlord. It was from a law firm, informing her that her website violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because a screen reader couldn’t make sense of her product pages. The letter listed the specific problems and gave her thirty days to fix them, along with a request to cover the attorney’s fees for flagging it. Ignore the deadline, it warned, and the next letter would come from a courtroom instead.
She hadn’t done anything unusual. Her site looked good, loaded fast, and had been built by a reputable local shop a few years earlier. It just hadn’t been built with accessibility in mind, and almost nobody’s is, unless someone specifically asks for it.
Stories like hers are becoming common enough that it’s worth business owners across West Michigan paying attention, whether you’re running a shop in Grand Rapids, a service company in Lansing, or a small studio in Grandville. Web accessibility lawsuits have climbed steadily for years, and small and mid-sized businesses are increasingly the target, not because they’re doing anything wrong on purpose, but because almost no one thinks about accessibility until it becomes a problem.
What Accessibility Actually Means
The term gets thrown around loosely, so it helps to ground it in something concrete. Web accessibility means a person using a screen reader, a keyboard instead of a mouse, or a device with limited vision or motor control can still use your site the way anyone else would. They can read your menu, fill out your contact form, buy your product, and find your hours.
About one in four adults in the United States lives with some form of disability, according to the CDC. That’s not a niche audience. It’s a meaningful slice of the people who might otherwise become your customers, and right now, a lot of them are hitting walls on small business websites that were never built to let them in.
Where Most Small Business Sites Fall Short
Nobody sets out to build an inaccessible site. It happens by omission, one small decision at a time, usually because accessibility was never part of the conversation.
The most common issues we see fall into a handful of buckets:
Images without alt text. A screen reader can’t describe a photo that has no description attached. If your product photos, team headshots, or infographics don’t have alt text, a visually impaired visitor gets silence where an image should be.
Color contrast that’s too subtle. Light gray text on a white background looks clean on a designer’s monitor. For someone with low vision, it can be unreadable.
Forms that don’t label their fields properly. A sighted user sees “Email” next to a box and knows what to type. A screen reader user needs that label coded into the form itself, or they’re guessing.
Sites that can’t be navigated by keyboard alone. Some visitors can’t use a mouse. If your dropdown menus or booking widgets only respond to clicks, you’ve locked out anyone who tabs through a page instead.
Video without captions. If you’re running client testimonials or how-to content, captions aren’t just for the hearing impaired. A lot of people watch video muted, on their phone, in a waiting room or a break room.
None of these are exotic problems. They’re the kind of thing that gets missed when a site is built fast, on a budget, without anyone checking a box for accessibility along the way.
It’s Not Only About Avoiding a Lawsuit
The legal angle gets attention because it’s the part with a dollar figure attached, but it’s worth stepping back from it for a second. An accessible website is simply a better website.
Search engines and screen readers rely on a lot of the same signals. Alt text that describes your product photos helps a screen reader user, and it also gives Google more context about what’s on the page. Clear heading structure helps someone navigating with a keyboard find their way around, and it helps search engines understand what your page is actually about. Fast, clean, well-labeled forms convert better for everyone, not just visitors using assistive technology.
We’ve watched this play out with clients more than once. A site gets cleaned up for accessibility, and the SEO numbers move too, not because anyone chased rankings directly, but because a more usable site is a more crawlable one. The two goals overlap more than most business owners expect.
There’s also the simple matter of who you might be turning away without realizing it. A restaurant in downtown Grand Rapids that can’t be navigated by keyboard is invisible to a segment of diners who would otherwise book a table. A Lansing accountant whose intake form doesn’t work with a screen reader loses a client before the conversation even starts. That’s lost revenue, not just legal exposure.
How to Check Where You Stand
You don’t need to overhaul your entire site this week to make progress. A few starting points:
Run your homepage and one or two key pages through a free accessibility checker like WAVE. It won’t catch everything, but it’ll surface the obvious gaps fast.
Try tabbing through your site using only your keyboard, no mouse. If you can’t reach your navigation, your forms, or your call-to-action buttons this way, neither can a lot of your visitors.
Look at your images. If you were describing your homepage to someone over the phone, what would you say about each photo? That’s roughly what your alt text should capture.
Check your contrast. Tools like the WebAIM Contrast Checker will tell you in seconds whether your text meets accepted readability standards.
If any of this turns up more than you’re prepared to fix on your own, that’s a normal place to land. Accessibility work touches design, code, and content all at once, and it’s easy for it to fall through the cracks on a DIY site or one built years ago under a different set of priorities.
A Problem Worth Fixing Before It Finds You
The boutique owner in Grand Rapids made the fixes within her thirty days and paid the legal fees the letter asked for, then went further and rebuilt her site with accessibility built in from the start. She told us afterward that the part that bothered her most wasn’t the cost. It was realizing how many customers had probably tried to shop with her and simply couldn’t.
That’s the piece that’s easy to miss in all of this. Accessibility isn’t a compliance exercise bolted onto a finished website. It’s part of whether your website actually works, for everyone who might want to use it. The businesses that treat it that way tend to end up with sites that are not just safer from a legal standpoint, but genuinely better at doing their job.
