Website Accessibility for Wedding Businesses

Can I share something that genuinely changed how I think about building websites? A few years ago, a client of mine — a wedding planner in Florida — got an email from a potential client saying she had found the website but couldn’t use it. She was visually impaired and her screen reader couldn’t make sense of the navigation or the images. She ended up reaching out another way, booked the wedding, and became one of my client’s absolute favorite couples to work with.

That story stuck with me. Because someone who wanted to hire my client almost couldn’t find her because of how the website was built. And when I started looking at this more closely in my own work, I realized how many small, fixable things can make a huge difference in whether your website is usable for everyone — not just the person who sees exactly the way you do.

Today we’re talking about website accessibility for wedding businesses: what it actually means, why it matters for YOUR bottom line (not just as the right thing to do, which it also absolutely is), and what you can do about it starting today.

Why Accessibility Matters for Wedding Professionals

Here’s the thing that surprises a lot of people: accessibility isn’t just for visitors with permanent disabilities. It benefits everyone. Captions on videos help people watching without sound in a quiet waiting room. Good color contrast helps people reading in bright sunlight on their phones. Clear, simple navigation helps the person who is overwhelmed and just wants to find your pricing quickly. Accessibility is just good design for humans.

And from a purely business standpoint: the couples planning weddings represent a huge and diverse population. Some have visual impairments. Some have motor limitations that make certain navigation styles frustrating. Some are neurodivergent and benefit from clear, structured content. If your website shuts any of them out, you’re not just missing the human element — you’re potentially missing a booking.

There’s also an SEO angle, and this is the part that always gets my clients’ attention! Many accessibility best practices and SEO best practices overlap completely. Alt text on images helps visually impaired visitors AND helps Google understand your content. Clear heading structure helps screen readers AND helps search engines. Fast load times help everyone. You can peek at how accessible, well-structured web design looks in practice over in my portfolio.

The 5 Core Accessibility Principles

You don’t need to become an accessibility expert overnight. But there are five core areas that cover the vast majority of what matters for a small business website, and most of them are more straightforward than you think:

1. Perceivable. Can people perceive all the content on your site? This means alt text on every meaningful image (not just “image1234.jpg” — actually describe what’s in the photo!), captions on videos, and not conveying important information through color alone.

2. Operable. Can people actually use your website with a keyboard, not just a mouse? Tab through your site right now and see what happens. Can you reach every link and button? Is the focus indicator visible? If keyboard navigation breaks down on your site, a whole group of users can’t get around it.

3. Understandable. Is your content clear and does your site behave predictably? Plain language matters (fancy design-speak that your clients don’t understand doesn’t make you look smart, it makes them feel lost). Consistent navigation from page to page matters. Error messages on your contact form that actually tell someone what to fix matter.

4. Robust. Does your site work across different browsers, devices, and assistive technologies? This is where testing matters. Don’t just check your site on your laptop in Chrome. Check it on mobile, on Safari, on older devices. Check it with the font size cranked up. See what breaks.

5. Color contrast. This is one of the most common accessibility failures I see on wedding websites, and it is SO fixable. That beautiful light gray text on a white background? Gorgeous in your Canva mockup, almost unreadable in real life for a huge percentage of users. Run your brand colors through a free contrast checker (WebAIM has a great one) and make sure your text-to-background ratio meets the minimum standard. Your text should be readable. That’s it. That’s the whole goal.

Platform-Specific Accessibility Implementation

For Showit Websites

Showit gives you a lot of creative control, which means accessibility is also largely in your hands. A few things to check and implement: add alt text to every image through the image settings panel, make sure your color palette has sufficient contrast (this is something I build into every custom design I do — see my packages here), use heading tags in the correct hierarchy (don’t use an H3 where an H2 should go just because you like the font size), and test tab navigation on both desktop and mobile versions.

For WordPress Websites

WordPress has a solid ecosystem of accessibility tools. The UserWay or AccessiBe plugins can provide an accessibility widget that helps users customize their experience. Make sure your theme is accessibility-ready (check the theme’s documentation), use the built-in alt text fields for every image you upload to the media library, and check that your forms have proper labels on every field.

For Squarespace

Squarespace has made improvements in accessibility in recent versions. Add alt text to images in the image block settings, use their built-in heading styles consistently (don’t style regular paragraph text to look like a heading — use the actual heading styles), and check that your color contrast is sufficient. Their templates have gotten better, but it’s still worth a manual check.

Quick Accessibility Wins

Not sure where to start? Here are the fastest wins that make the biggest difference:

• Go through every image on your website and add meaningful alt text. Describe what’s in the image as if you were describing it to someone on the phone.
• Run your primary text and background colors through WebAIM’s contrast checker. Fix anything that fails.
• Tab through your entire website with just the keyboard. Can you reach everything? Is it clear where you are at all times?
• Read your page headings in order. Do they form a logical outline of the page content? H1, then H2s, then H3s — not random sizes based on how they look.
• Check your contact form — does every field have a label? Does the form tell you what went wrong if you make an error?

Testing Your Website Accessibility

There are free tools that will do a quick automated scan and give you a report. WAVE (wave.webaim.org) is one of my favorites — you just enter your URL and it highlights issues directly on your page. Google Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools) also has an accessibility audit built in. These tools won’t catch everything, but they’ll surface the most common issues fast.

After you run an automated scan, do a manual check too. Actually try to tab through your site. Actually increase your browser font size to 200% and see if anything breaks. Actually read your alt text out loud and ask yourself if it’s descriptive and useful. The combination of automated and manual testing gives you the most complete picture. Head to the blog for more practical website tips like this!

Common Accessibility Myths

“My clients aren’t disabled, so it doesn’t apply to me.” You do not know that. And even if it were true today, accessibility improvements help every visitor on your site — including the ones squinting at their phones in the sun, or reading your website while distracted, or using an older device that doesn’t render things perfectly.

“Making my site accessible will ruin the design.” I promise you it won’t. The most beautiful, elevated wedding websites I build are also accessible. Good color contrast and readable typography are signs of great design, not limitations on it. Accessibility and aesthetics are not opposites.

“It’s too technical and complicated.” Some of it requires a little learning, yes. But the quick wins — alt text, color contrast, heading structure — are things anyone can implement today without touching a line of code. And if you want a website built with accessibility baked in from the beginning, that is exactly what we do! Browse our Showit templates or check out custom design options in my portfolio.

Your Accessibility Action Plan

Run! Go do these things today:

• Run your website through WAVE (wave.webaim.org) and look at what comes up. Don’t panic — just note it.
• Check color contrast on your primary text and links using WebAIM’s contrast checker.
• Add alt text to your five most important images today. Then come back and do the rest.
• Tab through your contact form and make sure it works without a mouse.

The Bottom Line

Making your website accessible isn’t a huge, overwhelming project. It’s a series of small, intentional choices that add up to a website that works better for every single person who lands on it. It’s also the kind of thing that reflects your values as a business owner — that you care about your clients, all of them, and you’ve built something that welcomes everyone.

If you’d love a website that’s beautiful AND built the right way from the ground up, come chat with me on the contact page. It is genuinely my greatest honor to build brands and websites for the wedding pros who are ready to show up at their best. I would love for that to be you.

Cheering you on,
Sarah