Picture a beautifully designed website. Soft beige background, pale grey text, a delicate thin typeface, a subtle animation that drifts across the screen as you scroll. It looked stunning in the design review on a large, bright monitor in a quiet office.
Now picture a real customer trying to use it. She’s standing at a bus stop in bright midday sun, holding a phone with a cracked screen, trying to find your opening hours before her bus arrives. She can barely read a word. Her father, who has macular degeneration, gave up last week. Her colleague, who gets motion sickness from moving screens, closed the tab after five seconds.
None of them complained. They just left.
This is why design agencies now describe accessibility as a foundation of brand systems rather than a compliance task at the end. Readable contrast, legible type and motion that doesn’t make people unwell are being built in from the start. It sounds like the worthy end of design. In practice, it may be one of the most commercially sensible decisions a business can make.
One Like insight: If customers can’t read your brand, it doesn’t matter how good it looks.
The customers you can’t see
The World Health Organization estimates that around 1.3 billion people, roughly one in six of the world’s population, live with a significant disability. Add the much larger number of people whose eyesight is declining with age, who are colour-blind, or who are temporarily injured, and the share of customers for whom a hard-to-read website is a real barrier becomes substantial.
Yet most of the web is still built as though those customers didn’t exist. Every year, the US non-profit WebAIM runs automated accessibility checks on the home pages of the top one million websites. Its 2026 report found detectable failures of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard for accessible websites, on 95.9% of home pages, up from 94.8% the year before.
The most common failure, by a wide margin, was low-contrast text: words that are too pale against their background to read comfortably. It appeared on 83.9% of home pages, with an average of 34 instances per page. Missing descriptions on images and unlabelled form fields came next, each found on around half of all pages.
These are automated checks, which can catch only some kinds of accessibility problem, so the real picture is probably worse rather than better. And notice what tops the list. Low contrast is a design choice rather than a coding error, usually made because pale grey on white looks elegant in a mock-up.
Designing for one helps many
It’s tempting to think of accessibility as a favour to a small group of customers. Microsoft’s inclusive design team offers a more useful way to see it, which it calls the Persona Spectrum. A limitation can be permanent, temporary or situational. As Microsoft puts it, a device designed for a person who has one arm could be used just as effectively by someone with a temporary wrist injury, or by a new parent holding a baby.
The same logic applies to everything from websites to shop counters. Text that’s readable for someone with low vision is also readable for someone squinting at a phone in the midday sun. Captions on a video help a customer who is deaf, and also the one watching on a crowded train without headphones. A form that works with a keyboard alone helps someone who can’t use a mouse, and someone whose trackpad has just died.
Microsoft’s team summarises the principle as solving for one and extending to many. For a small business, that changes the question. It’s no longer “How many of our customers have a disability?” but “How many of our customers are ever tired, distracted, outdoors, in a hurry, older or using a cracked phone?” The honest answer is: nearly all of them, some of the time.
[Infographic placement] Solve for one, extend to many. Three columns with simple icons. Permanent: a person with low vision. Temporary: someone with dilated pupils after an eye test. Situational: someone reading a phone in bright sunlight. Beneath all three, one shared solution: High-contrast, readable text. A second row repeats the pattern for hearing (deaf · ear infection · noisy train) with the shared solution Captions. Caption: Based on Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Persona Spectrum.
When motion makes people unwell
As we explored in A Brand System Is a Recipe, Not a Rulebook, many brands now design logos and websites to move. Used thoughtfully, motion can be delightful. But for people with vestibular conditions, which affect the inner ear and balance, large sliding, zooming or parallax effects can trigger dizziness, nausea and headaches. Others simply find constant movement distracting when they’re trying to read.
The WCAG guidelines address this directly. Moving, blinking or scrolling content that starts automatically and lasts more than five seconds should come with a way to pause, stop or hide it. Most modern devices also let people switch on a “reduce motion” setting, and well-built websites can detect that setting and calm their animations accordingly. For a small business, the practical rules are simple: avoid autoplaying carousels and background videos that can’t be stopped, keep animations short and purposeful, and ask your web designer whether your site respects reduced-motion settings.
There’s also a legal dimension, depending on where you sell. In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to a range of consumer products and services, including online shops. Microenterprises providing services, defined as those with fewer than 10 employees and turnover or a balance sheet total of no more than €2 million, are exempt from its service requirements, but larger businesses selling to EU consumers may be covered. In South Africa there is currently no equivalent website-specific law, although broader equality legislation applies. One Like isn’t offering legal advice, and businesses selling internationally should check their own obligations.
Whatever the legal position, the commercial logic is the same. A customer who can’t read your prices, use your booking form or bear to look at your homepage won’t become a customer.
What this means for a small business
The good news is that the most common accessibility problems are also among the cheapest to fix, and most of them can be built into your brand system so they don’t keep coming back. Choose brand colours that meet WCAG contrast guidelines for text, roughly a ratio of 4.5:1 for normal body text, and note those pairings in your brand toolkit so every new flyer, post and web page uses them. Add short descriptions to important images. Make sure every form field has a visible label. Keep motion calm and stoppable.
You don’t need to be an expert to start. Free tools such as WebAIM’s contrast checker and WAVE evaluation tool can flag the most obvious issues in minutes. Better still, ask a few real people to use your website: an older relative, someone with a cracked phone, someone using it outdoors at midday.
A few questions can help:
- Does our text pass a basic contrast check, especially pale grey or text over photos?
- Can someone complete our booking or contact form using only a keyboard?
- Do our videos have captions, and can our animations be paused?
- Are accessible colour pairings and type sizes written into our brand guidelines?
Which brings us back to the beautiful beige website with its pale grey text. Nobody needs to abandon elegance. A slightly darker grey, a touch more size and a pause button on the drifting animation would keep the look almost unchanged. The difference is that the woman at the bus stop, her father and her colleague could all use it. That’s three customers the business would otherwise never have known it lost.
Sources
- WebAIM, The WebAIM Million: The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages, February 2026, as reported by Priority Pixels.
- World Health Organization, Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities, 2022 (estimate of 1.3 billion people).
- Microsoft Inclusive Design, “Inclusive 101”. Source of the Persona Spectrum.
- Directive (EU) 2019/882 (European Accessibility Act), as summarised by Accessible.org. Source of the 28 June 2025 date and microenterprise definition.
- W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, success criteria 1.4.3 (contrast) and 2.2.2 (pause, stop, hide). General reference.
