Somebody Could Not Use Your Site and Left

The complaint that never arrives

A customer who cannot complete your form does not send a message explaining the problem.

Sending that message would require the same site that just failed them, and they have no reason to do your testing for you.

They go to a competitor, which takes less effort than explaining anything.

So the entire cost of an unusable site is paid silently, and the absence of complaints is read as evidence there is no problem.

How many people this is

• Vision: low vision is common with age.
• Motor: tremor, arthritis, injury.
• Hearing, for anything with audio.
• Cognitive and reading differences.
• Temporary: a broken arm, bright sun.

The last category is the one that widens this beyond what people assume. Somebody using one hand while holding a child, or reading a screen in direct sunlight, hits many of the same barriers as somebody with a permanent condition.

The demographics make this a business question

Which is worth stating plainly rather than as an appeal.

Vision, hearing, and dexterity all decline with age, and the age group with the most property, the most money, and the most need for trades is the one where that is most common.

A small business site with text that cannot be enlarged, buttons that cannot be tapped reliably, and contrast that fails in sunlight is filtering out its best customers.

That is not a moral argument at all, and it is simply a description of who is being excluded.

Most owners are surprised by this framing, because the mental image of an accessibility problem is a wheelchair rather than a sixty-eight-year-old squinting at a phone in a driveway.

The sixty-eight-year-old is very often the customer with the roof that actually needs replacing this year.

A worked example

A business had a contact form with pale grey labels inside the fields, which vanished as soon as anybody started typing.

Their form completion rate was low and had been attributed to people not being ready to enquire.

An older customer mentioned in passing that she had given up on it twice and telephoned instead.

They changed the labels to sit above the fields in ordinary dark text, which took twenty minutes.

Completions rose by about a third over the following months.

Nobody had ever complained, and one person mentioning it in conversation was the only reason they ever found out.

Estimate the size rather than guessing

Since a number changes how this gets prioritised.

Take your monthly visits, and consider that a meaningful share of any general audience has some barrier to using a typical site.

Even at a conservative estimate, a site with two thousand monthly visits is being used by a substantial number of people for whom something is harder than it needs to be.

You cannot know how many left, and you can know the order of magnitude, which is enough to justify an afternoon.

Compare that against what an afternoon of fixes costs, which is the actual decision in front of you.

Almost every business that does that arithmetic honestly concludes the afternoon is worth spending, and the reason it stays unspent is that nobody does the arithmetic.

The fixes are small and boring

Which is the encouraging part.

Text that can be enlarged, labels that stay visible, contrast that works in sunlight, buttons big enough to tap, and a form that says clearly what went wrong.

None of that requires a redesign, specialist knowledge, or a consultant.

Most of it improves the site for everybody, since a form that is clear for somebody with low vision is clear for somebody in a hurry.

That overlap is why this is worth doing on ordinary business grounds and not only on principle.

There is also a legal dimension here

Which is worth knowing without overstating.

British Columbia has accessibility legislation, and requirements have been phasing in across the public sector, with wider obligations expected over time.

For a small private business the immediate legal requirement is limited, and the direction of travel is clear.

Anybody doing work for a public body will encounter accessibility requirements in procurement long before any general obligation arrives.

So the practical reason to start now is commercial rather than legal, and the legal position is a reason not to leave it indefinitely.

Start with the form

Since that is where the loss is concentrated.

Every barrier on a page costs you a reader, and every barrier on the form costs you an enquiry.

Labels above the fields, in dark text, that do not disappear.

Error messages that say what to fix in words.

And fields that can be reached and completed using only a keyboard, which is a two-minute check.

Fix the contact form this week, and leave the rest of the site until next month when there is no deadline attached.

That ordering matters, since a page somebody cannot read costs you a reader and a form somebody cannot complete costs you a job.

The same fixes also help everybody using a phone outdoors, which for a trade's customers is most of them.

The counter-case

The size of the loss is genuinely unknown.

Nobody can tell you how many enquiries a small business loses this way, and any specific figure offered is an estimate presented as a measurement.

Some businesses also serve customers who overwhelmingly arrive by telephone, where the site matters less.

And a business with a completely broken form is losing everybody, which is a more urgent problem than losing some.

Test that first, from a phone, before spending an afternoon on anything subtler.

Fix the form labels, the contrast, and the tap targets this week, and treat the rest as a monthly item.

This week

1. Move form labels above the fields.
2. Use dark text on light backgrounds.
3. Check contrast in sunlight.
4. Make buttons big enough to tap.
5. Write error messages in words.
6. Complete the form with a keyboard only.
7. Enlarge the text and check it holds.

Step one is the highest-return item on this list, since a label that vanishes when somebody starts typing defeats anybody who is interrupted, which is everybody.

The full list of quick fixes is covered in the cheapest accessibility wins.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.