How to Make Your Business Website Work for Everyone

Your booking page either works for someone, or it doesn’t. There’s no half-credit. A client who uses a screen reader, or who can’t use a mouse, or who needs bigger text to read your deposit policy, hits your site and gets in or gets stuck. If they get stuck, they book somewhere else. You never even know they came.

That’s the whole case for accessibility, and it’s a business case before it’s anything else. A site that locks people out is leaving money on the table every day it stays that way.

The lawsuits are real and they’re climbing

In 2024, more than 4,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the U.S. alone, a 22% jump from the year before, per Accessibility-Test.org. Most target small businesses, not just the big chains. A studio with an online booking form is a website that collects payments and personal info, which is exactly the kind of site these cases go after.

You don’t have to be a target to feel this. The point is that the legal floor is rising, and “we didn’t know” stopped being a defense a while ago. Building the site right from the start is cheaper than getting a demand letter and retrofitting under pressure.

How much business this actually costs

The money is easy to miss because the lost customers leave quietly. U.S. e-commerce retailers lose roughly $6.9 billion a year to competitors with more accessible sites, according to Netguru. That’s people who tried to buy and couldn’t, so they bought elsewhere.

This isn’t a U.S.-only problem either. When researchers tested European homepages, 94% failed at least one basic accessibility check, Lumar reported on a study covering 260,000 sites. Color contrast, missing alt text, links you can’t see. The common stuff, everywhere.

Here’s what that means for you. Some chunk of the people who find your work and want to book can’t finish the booking. They’re not telling you why. They just disappear. Fixing the page is the only way to get them back.

The fixes that catch most problems

You don’t need to rebuild anything. Most accessibility wins come from a handful of basics.

Write real alt text for your images. Your portfolio shots, your flash sheets, your healed-work photos. A blind client using a screen reader hears whatever you wrote, so “tattoo1.jpg” tells them nothing and “black-and-grey rose forearm piece, healed” tells them plenty.

Use high contrast and readable type. Faint grey text on a tan background looks moody and reads like nothing to half your visitors. Bump the contrast. Make the deposit policy and the booking instructions impossible to squint at.

Make the whole thing work with a keyboard. A lot of people can’t use a mouse. Tab through your own booking flow and see if you can complete it without touching the trackpad. If you get stuck, your clients are stuck too.

Use plain, semantic structure. Real headings, real buttons, real form labels. This helps screen readers and it helps the people skimming on their phone at 11pm trying to grab your last open slot.

If you run your booking through Apprentice, a lot of this is handled in the page itself, so you’re not fighting your own site to make it usable. Less to get wrong on your end.

Test it like a real person would

Automated checkers are worth running. They catch missing alt text, weak contrast, and broken labels in a couple minutes, and there are free ones. Run one. It’ll find things you didn’t know were broken.

But automated tools miss a lot. They can tell you a button has no label. They can’t tell you the booking flow is confusing or that the date picker is a nightmare on a phone. For that you need an actual human, ideally someone who uses assistive tech day to day. If you know a client who uses a screen reader, ask them to try booking and watch where they snag. That ten minutes is worth more than any score.

Then do it again every few months. Sites drift. You add a new form, swap a theme, change your deposit copy, and something quietly breaks. Treat it like cleaning your station. Routine, not a one-time event.

Why shops are spending on this now

The mood among businesses has shifted. About 68% of organizations plan to hold or grow their accessibility budgets next year, and 89% see accessibility as a competitive advantage, QualityLogic reported from the Level Access survey. They’re not doing it out of guilt. They’re doing it because accessible sites convert better, rank better, and don’t end up in court.

As Danny Trichter of AccessibilityChecker.org put it, investing in accessibility isn’t merely an ethical choice, it’s sound business strategy. He’s right, and the cheapest version of that strategy is building it in from the start instead of bolting it on after a complaint.

For a tattoo studio, the bar is low and the payoff is direct. Make the booking page readable, keyboard-friendly, and clearly written, and you stop losing clients you never even saw arrive. That’s it. That’s the whole job.

Want a booking page that’s built to be usable from the start? Start your free trial of Apprentice and set up booking, deposits, and your portfolio without fighting your own site to make it work.