Accessibility Basics for Guide Sites

The most useful sentence the Justice Department has published on this subject is a warning about tools. A clean report from an automated accessibility checker does not mean everything is accessible, and a report containing a few errors does not necessarily mean there are barriers. It compares those checkers to a spelling checker and says pairing a manual check with an automated one gives you a better sense of where you stand. That is unusually candid for a regulator, and it decides the shape of this article: five things you can check yourself, by hand, in about twenty minutes, none of which needs software. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice.

Does any of this apply to a guide business?

The Justice Department's stated position is that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to businesses open to the public, and that its requirements reach the goods and services those businesses offer online. It has held that view since 1996.

Its guidance lists examples of covered businesses including retail establishments, banks, hotels, food and drink establishments and medical offices. It does not enumerate every category, and a fishing guide is not among the named examples.

What it does say about method is the part worth knowing. The Department states it does not have a regulation setting out detailed technical standards, and that businesses can currently choose how they ensure what they offer online is accessible, with existing standards offered as helpful guidance rather than as a mandate.

Two caveats belong here rather than at the end. That guidance is dated March 2022, its own text notes it does not reflect requirements published later for state and local governments, and the Department states its guidance documents have no legally binding effect. Rules in this area move, so confirm the current position before relying on any of it, and ask an attorney about your own obligations.

Great Day Guiding, WI

Why bother if the standards are not mandated?

Because the barriers described are the same things that lose you ordinary bookings. Every item on the Department's list of accessibility failures is also a usability failure, and a guide site fixing them will convert better for everybody.

Consider the named examples. Poor contrast between text and background. Information carried by colour alone. Images with no text alternative. Videos without captions. Forms without labels or error messages. Navigation that requires a mouse.

Now think about somebody standing at a boat ramp in bright sun on a phone. Low-contrast text is unreadable, a colour-coded cue is invisible, and a form that fails without saying why is abandoned. Those are the same defects.

So treat this as overlapping with the conversion work rather than competing with it. The sequence a visitor moves through, and what each step needs, is in the anatomy piece.

Check one: can you book without a mouse?

Put the mouse down and press Tab repeatedly from the top of your booking page. You should be able to reach every field, type in it, and submit, seeing clearly where you are at each step.

The Department names mouse-only navigation explicitly as a barrier, noting that people who cannot use a mouse or trackpad cannot access content they cannot reach by keystroke. It is the single most revealing check on this list.

Two failures are common. Focus is invisible, so you cannot tell which element you are on. Or a custom control, usually a date picker, simply cannot be reached or operated at all.

If the date picker is the problem, there is a cheap fix that helps everybody: accept a preferred date as plain text and confirm by phone. That also shortens the form, which is argued for in the booking page piece.

Check two: does it survive being enlarged?

Zoom your browser to 200 percent and read the page. The Department lists text size and zoom capability among the features to consider, noting that people with vision disabilities may need to enlarge text to see it clearly.

What breaks is usually layout rather than text. Columns overlap, a menu vanishes, a button slides off the edge, or text ends up underneath an image.

Do this on a phone too, using the device's own text-size setting rather than browser zoom. Plenty of people run their phone at a larger default size permanently, and it is a setting your site never sees you use.

The fix is almost always in how the page was built rather than in the content, which puts it in a different category from most website complaints, as sorted in the rebuild piece.

Check three: is anything told by colour alone?

Look for information carried only by a colour, and the classic example is red text marking required form fields. The Department calls this out directly, noting that screen readers do not announce the colour of text, so somebody who is blind has no way to know that colour was meant to convey something.

Its recommended fix is to add a text cue alongside the colour. If red marks a required field, include the word required as well.

The same principle covers availability calendars, which is where guide sites usually hit it. A calendar showing green for open and red for booked is unreadable to a portion of your visitors unless the state is also written or labelled.

Contrast belongs in this check too. The Department names poor contrast first among its barrier examples, describing light grey text on a light background as the kind of thing people with limited vision or colour blindness cannot read.

Check four: what do your images actually say?

Read the alt text you wrote, or discover that you did not write any. The Department's description of what makes it useful is two words long: short and descriptive, conveying the purpose of the image.

Purpose is the operative word and it is what most guides get wrong in both directions. A photograph that is decoration needs almost nothing. A photograph carrying information, such as a map of the water or a diagram of what to bring, needs that information available as text.

The common failure on a guide site is a filename dropped in as alt text, or the same phrase repeated on forty images, neither of which tells anybody anything.

Write it as though describing the photograph to somebody on the phone. That takes ten seconds per image and it is genuinely the whole technique. It also forces the question of whether the image is carrying anything at all, which is the same question asked of every element in the page list. Ownership and permission questions around those images are in the photos piece.

Check five: does the form tell you when it fails?

Submit your booking form wrong on purpose. Leave a required field empty, put a bad address in the email field, and see what happens.

The Department is specific about what good looks like: people using screen readers should be automatically informed when they enter a field incorrectly, with the error clearly identified and the way to resolve it explained, such as an alert saying a date was in the wrong format.

The standards guidance covers the same ground from the technical side, treating labelling, grouping, instructions, validation with a way to undo, and notification as separate requirements rather than as one idea.

The failure worth hunting for is silent. A form that appears to submit and reports nothing is failing every visitor equally, which makes it both an accessibility problem and the most expensive defect on any guide site.

What about videos?

Captions, and the Department asks for them to be synchronized, accurate and to identify who is speaking. That last part is the one people skip.

For most guide operations this is a small job because there is little video. If you have one film on the homepage, captioning it once is an afternoon, and it belongs on the winter list alongside everything else that pays once, per the offseason updates piece.

There is a secondary benefit worth naming honestly, which is that a large share of video on the web is watched with the sound off. Captions serve people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they also serve everybody scrolling at night beside a sleeping partner.

If you have no captions and no time, the honest interim step is a written summary beside the video covering what it shows. That is not equivalent and it is better than nothing.

Should you install an accessibility overlay?

Read the Department's own sentence before you decide. It groups overlays with automated checkers, says they can be helpful, and warns they need to be used carefully because a clean report does not mean everything is accessible.

That is a materially different position from how these products are usually sold, which is as a one-click solution to a legal exposure. The guidance describes them as a tool alongside manual checking, not as a substitute for it.

The practical consequence for a guide is that an overlay does not remove the need for the five checks above, and the five checks cost nothing. Do those first and then decide whether you want anything else.

The same reasoning applies to a passing score from any free scanner. A tidy result tells you about the scanner, not about whether somebody can book a trip using a keyboard.

Capt. Rick's Professional, MO

What does a reasonable position look like for a one-boat operation?

Do the five checks, fix what they find, publish a way to report problems, and revisit it once a year. The Department lists that last item explicitly: sites offering a way for the public to report accessibility problems let owners fix them.

That is a line on your contact page and an email address. It costs nothing, it is on the recommended list, and it converts a silent failure into something somebody can tell you about.

Be honest about scope while you do it. This is not a compliance audit, it does not certify anything, and a real audit is a separate exercise performed by people who do it professionally.

What it is instead is the difference between a site with obvious barriers and one without them, achieved in an evening. The rest of the site-building material sits on the guide websites hub.

Does any of this affect how you are found?

Some of it overlaps, and I would rather be precise than encouraging. Alt text, headings and clear structure are things both assistive technology and search systems read, so doing them properly serves both.

Headings are the clearest example. The Department notes that building visual headings into the page layout lets people who are blind use them to navigate and understand the page, and a properly structured page is also easier for anything else parsing it.

Speed sits alongside rather than inside this. The published performance thresholds are separate from accessibility, though a page that loads quickly and does not shift under a thumb is easier for everybody, per the performance guidance.

What I will not claim is that accessibility work will improve your rankings. Nobody has demonstrated that for a business like yours, and the case for doing it does not need the help.

What should you fix first if the checks find several things?

The booking form, every time, because it is the only place on the site where a barrier costs somebody the transaction rather than the information.

Somebody who cannot read a paragraph about your water has been inconvenienced. Somebody who cannot complete your booking form has been excluded from the thing your business exists to sell, and there is no workaround available to them from their side.

Within the form, order the fixes by how many people each affects. Labels and error messages first, because they matter to anybody using a screen reader and to anybody who mistypes an address. Then keyboard reachability. Then contrast on the button itself.

After the form, work outward along the path somebody takes to reach it. The pages nobody uses to book can wait until next winter, and the ones between the front door and the button cannot.

How do you keep it from regressing?

Write alt text at upload and re-run the keyboard check whenever the form changes. Those two habits cover most of how accessibility degrades on a small site.

Regression is the normal state rather than the exception. A site is fixed once, then a season of photographs goes up without alt text, then somebody adds a field to the form, then a plugin updates and changes how errors are announced.

None of that involves anybody deciding to make the site worse, which is exactly why a habit works better than a project. The upload habit costs ten seconds and the form check costs two minutes.

Then take the twenty minutes once a year regardless, at the same time you do the rest of the annual pass. Anything that has drifted will show up in the same five checks that found it the first time.

What do experienced guides do differently?

They run the keyboard check every season alongside the form test, because both take minutes and both catch things nothing else does.

Pairing them is the efficiency. You are already submitting your own booking form to check it delivers, so doing it once with the keyboard costs an extra two minutes and covers a completely different class of failure.

The second habit is writing alt text at upload time rather than in a batch later. Ten seconds while the photograph is in front of you beats an afternoon of describing forty images you no longer remember taking.

Experienced operators also ask somebody. If a client mentions they had trouble with the site, that is the highest-quality signal available and it arrives roughly never, because people do not usually report problems, they just leave.

What are the common mistakes?

Buying a tool instead of running the checks. Treating a clean scan as proof. Writing alt text that describes nothing. And assuming a site that works for you works for everybody.

The last is the root of all the others. You know where every element is, you have a mouse, you are not zoomed in, and your eyes are the ones the design was built around, which makes you the worst available judge of whether it works.

The scan-as-proof mistake is the one the guidance itself warns against in plain language, and it is worth quoting to anybody who tries to sell you certainty. A clean report is a lead, not a verdict.

The alt-text mistake is the most common and the cheapest to fix. Repeating one phrase across a gallery is worse than nothing, because it tells a screen reader user that forty images exist and none of them matters. The mistakes piece collects that alongside everything else that quietly fails here.

What surprises people?

That the Justice Department warns about the tools sold to solve this. That there is no mandated technical standard for a business like yours. And that every barrier on the official list is also costing you bookings from people with no disability at all.

The overlap is the honest reason to act. You can hold two things at once: this is worth doing because excluding people is worth not doing, and separately, every fix on this list makes the site work better for the person standing in bright sun at a ramp.

The regulatory picture is genuinely unsettled and moving, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. What is not unsettled is that five manual checks take twenty minutes, cost nothing, and will find something on almost any guide site including, when I last looked, several I admire.