Six Free Checks That Show Whether Your Website Works Without a Mouse
Nobody sets out to build a website that shuts people out. It just sort of happens. A designer picks a pale grey for the body text because it looks lovely on a MacBook screen. Someone else drops in an image carousel that slides every three seconds. A contact form gets built with placeholder text instead of labels, because that's the default. Individually, none of these feel like decisions about accessibility. Together, they can make a site genuinely unusable for a decent chunk of your customers.
Here's the thing though: you don't need a formal audit to spot the worst of it. You need a keyboard, a browser, a free tool or two and about three hours. Below are six checks, in the order I'd do them. Fix what you find where you can, and note the rest for whoever maintains your site.
1. Put the mouse away and tab through the whole page
Open your homepage, click once in the address bar, then press Tab repeatedly and watch where the little outline goes. Can you reach the navigation? The main call to action? The footer links? The cookie banner that covers half the screen?
You're looking for two things: whether everything reachable by mouse is also reachable by keyboard, and whether the tab order follows the visual order of the page. A common failure is a menu that only opens on hover — keyboard users tab straight past it and never see the links inside. Another is a cookie or newsletter pop-up that traps focus so you can't get back to the page behind it.
If you get stuck somewhere and can't tab onwards, note the page. That's a hard blocker, not a cosmetic issue. Someone using only a keyboard, a switch device or voice control simply cannot use that page.
2. Check that you can actually see where you are
As you tab, does a visible outline appear around each link or button? Many sites strip the default focus ring with a bit of CSS because it looked untidy, and never replace it. The result is a user tabbing through what feels like a blank page, guessing which element is live.
Fixing this is usually a few lines of CSS for whoever built the site — a clear outline or underline in a colour that stands out from the background. Ask for it on buttons, links, form fields and anything clickable, not just the main menu.
3. Squint at your text and your buttons
Poor contrast is the most common problem I see, and it's the one that affects the widest group of people: anyone over about 45, anyone on a phone in bright daylight, anyone with low vision or colour blindness.
Grab a free contrast checker, sample your body text colour against your background, and aim for a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1. Large text can get away with 3 to 1. Grey-on-white is the usual offender, and so is white text sitting on a pale brand colour.
While you're at it, stop relying on colour alone to carry meaning. If your form shows errors in red text with no icon or wording, or your links are only distinguishable by being slightly greener than the paragraph, that's a problem for a lot of people.
4. Read your images out loud
Turn on a screen reader for ten minutes — VoiceOver on a Mac, Narrator on Windows, TalkBack on Android — and listen to your homepage. Any image without alternative text gets announced as "image", which tells a blind customer nothing.
Now write alt text for the ones that carry meaning: your team photo, a product shot, a chart in a blog post, a logo that sits inside a link. Describe what the image communicates, not what it is — "Sarah fitting a boiler in a Leeds terrace" beats "team photo 3".
Decorative images should have empty alt attributes so they're skipped entirely, and if any important text lives inside an image (a price, an offer, a phone number), move it into real text. Images of text don't scale, don't translate and don't get read.
5. Fill in your own contact form
Every field needs a proper label that stays visible once you start typing. Placeholder text vanishes the moment someone enters a character, which is exactly when a person with memory difficulties or a cognitive impairment needs the reminder. Placeholders also fail badly for anyone using voice input.
Then check the error messages. "Invalid input" helps nobody. "Enter your email address in the format [email protected]" does. And if you use a CAPTCHA, test it with a screen reader — some of them are effectively impossible to complete without sight.
6. Ask your site to calm down
If your site has a slider, animated banner, autoplaying video or a parallax scroll effect, check it against your operating system's reduced-motion setting. Turn that setting on (it's in accessibility settings on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android) and reload.
Motion is a genuine problem for people with vestibular disorders — the kind of thing that causes dizziness and nausea. If your animation ignores that preference, ask your developer to add a prefers-reduced-motion rule. If you're on a page builder, look for a motion toggle in the settings.
An afternoon that pays for itself
Work through these in order. The keyboard and focus checks first, because they're blockers. Contrast and alt text next, because they affect the largest number of people. Forms and motion after that.
You won't fix everything today, and that's fine. Note the problems, fix what's within reach, and put the rest in front of whoever built or hosts the site — most of these are small jobs, not redesigns.
There's also a legal dimension worth knowing about. Under the Equality Act 2010, service providers in the UK have a duty to make reasonable adjustments, and accessibility guidance (WCAG 2.2 at level AA) is the usual benchmark. A private members' club or a small accountancy practice is unlikely to be sued over a missing focus ring, but publicly funded organisations face much stricter expectations, and the direction of travel is one way only.
The better argument is simpler than that. Somewhere between one in six and one in five UK adults has a disability, and almost everyone will benefit from a site that's readable in sunlight and navigable without a mouse. That's not a niche. It's your customer list.
