Your Site Is Leaking Sales: A Plain-Language Guide to Accessibility and Revenue
In 2018, I was trying to buy a course.
Not sell one. Buy one. Someone I admired had put together a program I wanted, and I sat down one night to go through it. The videos had no captions. I'm Deaf. So I sat there watching a person's mouth move, paying for content I couldn't actually use, feeling dumb because I didn’t think to check whether captions were available.
I kept thinking: someone will make a tool for this. Someone will fix the gap between what these platforms can do and what the people running them actually know how to do. The accessibility industry was busy writing forty-page PDFs for developers. The solopreneur tools were busy designing for some mythical average user who has perfect vision, perfect hearing, and reads everything on a brand-new Retina screen in good lighting.
I wasn't a developer. I wasn't the average user. I was just trying to be somebody's customer.
Nobody made the tool. So I built it.
I'm telling you this because it's the whole point of what follows. The people who can't use your website are not abstractions. They are not a diversity statistic or a compliance checkbox. They are customers. They were already on your list, already in your audience, already interested enough to click. And when your site doesn't work for them, here's what happens:
They don't email you. They don't reply. They just go.
That's the leak. Let's talk about it.
This is a revenue problem wearing a compliance costume
Here's the truth most people get backwards. When accessibility comes up in a Slack group or a Facebook community, the conversation almost always goes legal. "Could I get sued?" "Does the ADA even apply to me?" "I heard about the EAA, do I need a lawyer?"
I understand why. Fear is loud. But filing accessibility under "legal" is the single most expensive mistake you can make, because it lets you treat it as a someday problem. A problem for big companies with compliance officers. A problem you'll deal with if a letter ever shows up.
Meanwhile the actual cost is happening right now, quietly, on every page you publish.
Disabled Americans control about $490 billion in annual spending power. That's not a guilt number. That's a market. And roughly 1 in 4 American adults has a disability, which means in any audience you've built, a quarter of the people you worked so hard to attract may be running into walls you can't see.
Some of those walls are obvious. Most are not. The reader with low vision who can't make out your butter-yellow body copy. The customer with ADHD who bounces off a wall of dense gray text. The person with a migraine who needs higher contrast to get through your sales page without their head splitting. The 52-year-old whose eyes just aren't what they were, squinting at a 14px caption on your pricing table.
None of them write you an angry email. They close the tab. Your Stripe dashboard registers it as a conversion rate that's a little lower than it should be, and you never find out why.
A launch that converts at 1.8% instead of 2.5% isn't a rounding error. On a five-figure launch, that gap is real money walking out a door you didn't know was open.
So yes, the EAA is here, and yes, it's enforceable, and we'll get to that. But lead with this: accessibility is how you stop leaking sales to people who already wanted to buy. The legal stuff is a footnote on a much bigger number.
The five things you believe that aren't true
Most people who care about this stay stuck for years. Not because they're lazy or don't care. Because they're carrying around five beliefs that feel completely reasonable and are completely wrong. Let's take them one at a time.
1. "I'm too small for this to matter"
The belief: accessibility is a big-company thing. You're one person with a Showit site and a course. Nobody's coming for you, so why worry about it.
Why it feels true: every accessibility headline you've seen involves a lawsuit against a brand with a legal department. The whole topic got coded as "enterprise."
Here's the turn. Size determines your legal exposure. It does not determine your leak. A business doing $200K a year with a 3% accessibility-related bounce is losing the same proportion of revenue as a business doing $2M. The customer who couldn't read your checkout page doesn't care how big you are. She just couldn't check out.
The first concrete thing to do: stop thinking "am I big enough to get sued" and start thinking "how many sales am I losing." That second question has an answer, and the answer is almost never zero.
2. "Fixing this means hiring a developer and rebuilding my site"
The belief: accessibility lives in code. To do anything about it you'd need to hire someone, pay thousands, and probably tear down the site you spent months building.
Why it feels true: the entire industry is built for developers. The free tools (WAVE, Lighthouse) spit out technical reports written in a language you were never meant to read. The paid option is a consultant quoting you $5,000 to $10,000. Both of those say the same thing to a solopreneur: this is not for you.
Here's the turn. Roughly 80% of the most common accessibility issues on small business sites are things you can fix yourself, inside the platform you already use, without writing a single line of code. We're talking about changing a button color. Adding a sentence of alt text. Bumping a font size. Fixing a heading so it's actually a heading.
You don't need a developer to change orange to a darker orange. (I'd know. I use orange in my own branding, and my favorite shade of it fails contrast. I love it anyway, and I know exactly where I'm allowed to use it and where I'm not.)
The first concrete thing to do: pick one page. Just one. Look at your smallest, palest text and your lowest-contrast button. Those two things are probably fixable in under ten minutes, today, with no help.
3. "Disabled people aren't really my audience"
The belief: your customers are moms, or creatives, or coaches, or whatever your niche is. They're not disabled. So this doesn't apply to your specific people.
Why it feels true: when you picture "disabled," you picture a wheelchair or a white cane. Visible things. You scan your audience, don't see those, and conclude you're fine.
Here's the turn. Most disabilities are invisible. Dyslexia. ADHD. Low vision that doesn't rise to legal blindness. Color blindness, which affects roughly 1 in 12 men. Migraine. Light sensitivity. Chronic pain that makes a fiddly mobile checkout genuinely hard. Hearing loss, which I promise is on your list whether you've noticed it or not. And then there's age: your audience is getting older every year, and so are their eyes. The "45 and up" segment of your list is the one most likely to bounce off thin gray text, and it's often the segment with the most money to spend.
You would never see any of it by looking. It doesn't announce itself. It just shows up as people who clicked, couldn't quite use the thing, and left.
The first concrete thing to do: stop auditing your audience for visible disability. Assume a quarter of them have a reason your site might be harder for them than you think, and build like that's true. Because it is.
4. "My platform already handles this for me"
The belief: you pay good money for Squarespace, or Kajabi, or Flodesk. Surely a company that size has accessibility figured out. The template looks clean and professional, so it's probably accessible.
Why it feels true: the templates are beautiful. They look intentional. It's reasonable to assume the people who made them thought of everything, including making sure they’re accessible.
Here's the turn. Your platform is neutral. It hands you a set of tools that can be used accessibly or not, and then it gets out of the way. A "clean modern" template often means thin typography, a low-contrast palette, tiny tap targets, and a cookie banner you can't dismiss with a keyboard. The template gives you the canvas. Everything you put on it (your colors, your text sizes, your images, your buttons) is where the leaks actually live. Your content inherits nothing automatically.
A professional-looking site and an accessible site are two different things. I've seen gorgeous sites fail basic contrast in the headline. The polish is real. It just isn't the same as accessible.
The first concrete thing to do: go look at your platform's accessibility settings. Most have more than you realized, buried a few menus deep. Then accept that the settings only go so far, and the rest is the content choices sitting in your own hands.
5. "If I can't do it all, there's no point starting"
The belief: accessibility is all or nothing. If you can't make your site perfectly, certifiably compliant, then doing a few things is pointless, maybe even dishonest.
Why it feels true: the standards documents are enormous. The word "compliance" sounds binary. And starting means admitting you weren't doing this before, which feels like admitting you got it wrong.
Here's the turn, and it's the most important one in this whole guide. Accessibility is not a pass/fail exam. It's a dial. Every single fix you make helps a real person who couldn't use your site five minutes ago. Run a scan and you might see 47 issues. That number can knock the wind out of you. But then you fix 6 of them in one afternoon (the contrast on your sales page, the alt text on your three best images, the unreadable button) and you realize the other 41 are also just tasks. Boring, doable, one-at-a-time tasks.
You didn't fail because you started late. Neither did I. The point was never perfection. The point is closing the gap between what you say you believe and what your website actually does, one fix at a time.
Progress, not perfection. That's not a slogan I print on things. It's the only way this actually gets done.
What a fix actually looks like
Let me make one of these real, because "you can fix it yourself" is easy to say and hard to believe until you've watched it happen.
Say your sales page has a "Buy Now" button. The button is a soft gray, #B0B0B0, with white text on top. It looks tasteful. It also scores about 1.9:1 for contrast, and the readability standard most of the web agrees on is 4.5:1. So a chunk of your readers (the ones over 45, the ones reading on a phone in bright sun, anyone with even mild low vision) can tell something is there but can't comfortably read the word "Buy."
The fix: open your editor, click the button, change the background from #B0B0B0 to something like #C2410C, a deep warm orange. White text on that scores well above 4.5:1. It passes. Total time, about thirty seconds. You didn't touch code. You changed a color.
Now a second one. You uploaded twelve photos to your About page and skipped the alt text box on every one, because you weren't sure what to write. (Hi, same. I did this for years.) Alt text, short for "alternative text," is the sentence a screen reader reads aloud to someone who can't see the image. Leave it empty and that customer hears "image, image, image" twelve times and learns nothing about you.
The fix: for each photo, write one plain sentence describing what matters about it. "Erin laughing at her desk with an orange mug." Save. Done.
That's the whole job. Not a rebuild. A color and a sentence, repeated until the list runs out.
So what about the legal part
Quick, because it does matter, just not the way fear wants it to.
The European Accessibility Act is in effect as of June 2025, and it applies to any business serving customers in the EU, which on the internet is most of us. In the US, ADA-related digital accessibility complaints have been climbing for years and they don't only target giants. This is real, it's enforceable, and ignoring it is a genuine risk.
But notice the order. If you fix your site because you're chasing the $490 billion and you want your business to actually welcome the people you claim to serve, the legal exposure mostly takes care of itself as a byproduct. If you fix it purely out of fear, you'll do the bare anxious minimum and miss the revenue entirely.
Lead with the customer. The lawyer gets handled on the way.
Find your own leaks in the next five minutes
You don't have to take my word for any of this. Go look. Here are three checks you can run right now, on your own site, with no tools and nobody's help.
The squint test. Pull up your homepage and your sales page. Lean back and squint until the screen goes soft and blurry. The text that disappears first is your lowest-contrast text, and it's the text your readers over 45 are already losing. Usually it's a gray caption, a light-on-light button, or body copy a shade too pale.
The tab test. Go to any page with a form: your contact page, your checkout, your opt-in. Don't touch the mouse. Press Tab, then Tab again, and keep going. Can you reach every field and the submit button using only the keyboard? Can you see where you are as you move? If you get stuck or lost, so does every customer who can't use a mouse.
The alt text test. Open the editor on your most-visited page and click one image. Is there a sentence in the alt text box, or is it empty? Empty means that image is invisible to anyone using a screen reader, and you almost certainly have a dozen more just like it.
None of these take more than two minutes. Every one of them will probably surface something. That isn't bad news. That's the leak becoming visible, which is the only thing that has to happen before you can close it.
How I actually do this: scan, identify, fix
Everything above is the why. Here's the how, and it's the thing I built because it didn't exist when I needed it.
It's called Successible. Think Grammarly, but for accessibility. It runs on three steps, the same three steps I'd walk you through if we were sitting together.
Scan. Successible looks at your actual site, your emails, or your course and gives you an honest accounting of where things stand right now. Not a rebuild. Not a four-hour consultation. A clear picture of what's working and what isn't, across the things that matter: contrast, alt text, headings, and missing video captions. The vague dread of "I don't even know what I don't know" turns into a specific, finite list.
Identify. This is the part the rest of the industry skips. Every issue comes back in plain language, tied to the platform you're actually on. Not "contrast ratio below 4.5:1." Instead: "Poor color contrast means low color contrast can make text difficult or impossible to read for people with low vision, color blindness, migraines, or light sensitivity."
It works within the platforms solopreneurs actually use: Flodesk, ThriveCart, Teachable, Kajabi, and Squarespace. You stop needing to translate developer-speak, because the translating is already done.
Fix. You make the changes yourself, in the visual editor you already use every day. No terminal. No developer. No rebuild. You fix what you can, rescan to watch the number drop, and get back to running your business.
If you've already been burned by one of those overlay plugins, I understand the flinch. You added accessiBe or UserWay, watched a little wheelchair icon appear in the corner of your site, and figured you were covered. You weren't. Those tools sit on top of your site and try to patch it automatically with a line of code, and the disability community has spent years documenting that they often make the experience worse, not better. Some of the biggest accessibility lawsuits have been against businesses that had an overlay installed and thought they were safe.
Successible works the opposite way. It doesn't sit on your site and it doesn't touch your code. It reports, in plain language, and you make the change. You stay in control of your own site, which is the only version of this that has ever actually worked. It doesn't certify you, it doesn't sue-proof you, and it doesn't pretend a robot can do the caring for you. It hands you the truth and trusts you to act on it.
What it does is close the gap. One fix at a time, on your own platform, in plain English.
Annual payments of $420 or monthly payments at $39/month, because the point of this work is that accessibility should be within reach. You run it as often as you want.
You've been running the math in your head this whole time, wondering how many sales you've lost. Successible runs that math on your actual site, and then it hands you the list to fix it.
Start with one page. Fix one thing. Then keep going.
Progress, not perfection. Every time.
