Accessibility quick wins as a sales lever for a long-form heritage site

Harvested 2026-10-26. Fixing the handful of errors that block disabled readers is cheap, helps every mobile reader, and removes a reason to leave the checkout.

The numbers (primary sources)

• WebAIM Million 2026 (automated scan of the top 1,000,000 home pages): low-contrast text on 83.9% of pages, missing image alt text 53.1%, missing form labels 51%, empty links 46.3%, empty buttons 30.6%, missing document language 13.5%. 96% of all detected errors fall in these six, and the list has not changed in 7 years. 30.4% of pages had 10 or fewer errors, so a clean page is reachable.
• Click-Away Pound 2019 (UK survey of disabled online shoppers, AbilityNet write-up): 69% click away from sites that are hard to use; 83% limit their shopping to sites they know are accessible; 86% have paid more on an accessible site rather than buy the same thing cheaper on a harder one; only 8% of those who hit barriers contact the business, so the owner never hears. Lost UK spend estimated at £17.1bn (up from £11.75bn in 2016). Survey is from 2019; treat the shares as direction, not a forecast for our list.
• Conversion-lift figures quoted in vendor roundups ("+35%" etc.) do not name a site or a test; not used here.

The 30-minute fix list (in this order)

1. <html lang> right on every page: en-GB for English, cy for Welsh, es for Spanish pages; wrap Welsh or Spanish phrases inside an English page in <span lang="cy"> (WCAG 3.1.2). Screen readers switch pronunciation on it; Welsh read with English rules is unintelligible.
2. Alt text on every content image: say what the record shows ("1824 survey sheet, Tŷ Mawr parcel outlined"), alt="" on decoration only.
3. A label on every form field, especially the email signup and checkout. Placeholder text is not a label.
4. No empty links/buttons: icon-only controls get aria-label ("Open menu", "Play film").
5. Exactly one <h1>, no empty headings, no skipped levels; headline-first pages depend on headings for screen-reader navigation.
6. Contrast 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and the buy button's edge; check the e-book strip and the small-italic .unsub text, which is the most likely to fail.
7. Tap targets at least 24x24 CSS px (WCAG 2.2, 2.5.8) for "Read more", language switch and buy buttons at 390 px.
8. Focus visible (2.4.7) and <details>/<summary> for "Read more" (keyboard and screen-reader friendly without script).
9. Captions on every film (see the YouTube captions skill) and a transcript in <details>.

Measure

• python3 tools/a11y_quick.py <url> ... (free, no install) covers items 1-5. Contrast needs a browser (axe-core in the already-installed headless Chromium is the free route; not installed: disk under 2 GB).
• Before/after: buy-click rate and signup rate from the cookieless counter, per page, two weeks each side.

How we apply it to Cedwyn

Run 26 Oct 2026 on four live pages: - Home page has no <h1> in the HTML (fix: the site title or first headline as h1). - /movie/ has one empty heading and its English pages declare lang="en" while the home page declares en-GB (make them consistent). - /ebooks/ and /ebooks/dartboard/: images all have alt, signup email has a label, consent checkbox is wrapped in its label - clean on items 1-5. - Not checked yet: contrast (needs a browser), the Welsh and Spanish themes' lang values (no /cy/ or /es/ path exists; the themes need listing first), tap-target sizes. - These are markup fixes for the sole Cedwyn committer (a worker is rebuilding the headline layout now; items 5 and 8 belong in that change). Logged as PROPOSED here; nothing committed by this run. - Alt text and captions follow the editorial rules: describe the record and its date from our catalogue (1824 David Stewart survey = first record mention found); never caption a Bute document as a Tŷ Mawr record before 1824; no banned words; never name the family member who runs the archive.

Sources

• webaim.org (2026 report, six error types, 96%)
• abilitynet.org.uk (Click-Away Pound 2019 figures)
• clickawaypound.com and clickawaypound.com (survey home and report)
• w3.org (3.1.2 Language of Parts, 2.5.8 Target Size, 2.4.7 Focus Visible)
• w3.org (W3C business case)

Raw Markdown: accessibility-quick-wins-conversion-heritage.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json