We are a security shop, not an accessibility auditor, but the two checklists overlap more than people expect: both start by actually looking at the markup. Here are the five issues that show up on almost every small business site we review.

1. Low contrast text

Light grey paragraph text on a white background looks clean in a design file and fails for a large share of readers in daylight or on an older screen. The WebAIM Million 2025 report, which scans the home pages of the top 1,000,000 websites every year, found low contrast text on 79.1% of home pages, more than any other single issue it tracks.

2. Images without meaningful alt text

An empty or missing alt attribute means a screen reader either skips the image or reads out the filename. The same WebAIM Million 2025 report found 55.5% of images across those home pages lacked meaningful alternative text.

3. Form fields without labels

A placeholder is not a label. Once someone starts typing, the hint disappears, and a screen reader user may never have heard it announced in the first place. Every input needs a <label> tied to it, or an aria-label at minimum.

4. Empty or vague links

A button icon with no text, or ten "click here" links on one page, forces a screen reader user to guess what each one does out of context. Link text should describe the destination on its own.

5. Missing or wrong lang attribute

Without lang="en" (or the right code) on the <html> tag, screen readers guess the pronunciation rules, and automated translation tools guess the source language. It takes one attribute to fix and almost nobody sets it.

Across the same WebAIM Million 2025 sample, 94.8% of home pages had at least one detectable WCAG 2 failure. As the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative puts it: "Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them."

A free AuditMerlin scan checks four of these five for you: missing alt text, missing page language, unlabelled form fields and links with no text, part of 11 WCAG 2.2 AA markup checks that run next to its security checks. Contrast is the one it leaves to you, because it depends on how the page renders, so pair the scan with a quick contrast checker.