Is Your Trade Website Accessible? A Plain-English Guide to WCAG 2.2 AA for Builders, Electricians and Installers

Most tradespeople never think about website accessibility until someone asks them a question they can’t answer — usually a customer, occasionally a funder or a larger contractor doing due diligence before they hand over a job. Accessibility isn’t just a compliance checkbox for public sector sites. For an electrician, builder, plumber or installer, it’s about whether the person trying to book you in can actually use your site, no matter how they’re browsing it.

This guide explains what “accessible” means in plain terms, why it matters for a trades business specifically, and how to run a basic check on your own site today.

What WCAG 2.2 AA actually means

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the internationally recognised standard for accessible websites, maintained by the W3C. WCAG 2.2 is the current version, and “AA” is the middle of three conformance levels — the level referenced by UK public sector accessibility regulations and the one most auditors and larger clients treat as the baseline expectation.

In practice, WCAG 2.2 AA asks for a website to be:

• Perceivable — text alternatives for images, and enough colour contrast that text is readable, including on a phone screen in bright daylight on site.
• Operable — every button, link and form field can be reached and used with a keyboard alone, not just a mouse or a fingertip.
• Understandable — clear labels on forms, predictable navigation, and error messages that actually explain what went wrong.
• Robust — the site works properly with different browsers, screen sizes and assistive technology such as screen readers.

None of that requires a rebuild from scratch. Most of it comes down to sensible defaults: a proper heading structure, descriptive link text instead of “click here”, labelled contact form fields, alt text on photos of your work, and enough contrast between your brand colours and your text.

Why it matters for a trades business specifically

Your customers skew towards needing it

A meaningful share of the people booking an electrician, a boiler engineer or a builder are older homeowners, people with mobility issues, or people managing the enquiry on behalf of an elderly relative. These are exactly the groups most likely to be using larger text settings, a screen reader, or a keyboard rather than a trackpad. If your enquiry form or phone number is hard to find or hard to use, you’re losing jobs you never hear about.

You’re increasingly browsed on site, one-handed, in bad light

Trades websites get checked on mobile more than most — often by someone standing in a cold hallway with a leak, glancing at a phone between other jobs. Good contrast, large tap targets, and a form that doesn’t require pinch-zooming aren’t just accessibility wins; they’re the difference between a job booked and a job lost to whichever competitor loaded faster and was easier to read.

Bigger contracts increasingly ask about it

If you do or want to do work for housing associations, local authorities, schools or larger main contractors, digital accessibility sometimes comes up in supplier questionnaires alongside insurance and safeguarding. Having a straight answer, rather than a blank stare, can matter more than it seems.

A free 15-minute self-check

You don’t need to pay for an audit to get a useful first read on your own site. Try this:

1. Unplug your mouse and tab through the homepage. Can you reach the menu, your phone number, and the contact form using only the Tab and Enter keys? If you get stuck or lose track of where you are on the page, a visitor using a keyboard or switch device will too.
2. Zoom your browser to 200%. Does the text still make sense, or does content overlap and get cut off? This mirrors what happens for anyone using enlarged text.
3. Check your contrast. Free browser extensions and online contrast checkers will tell you instantly whether your text and background pass WCAG AA — a common failure point is light grey text on a white background, which looks stylish and reads badly.
4. Look at your images. Do photos of finished jobs have any alt text, or are they invisible to a screen reader and to search engines alike?
5. Try your contact form blind. Are the fields properly labelled, or does someone using a screen reader just hear “edit text” with no idea what to type?

There are also several free online tools, including WCAG-specific accessibility checkers, that will scan a page and flag the most common issues in seconds. None of these replace a full audit, but they’ll tell you within minutes whether your site has obvious gaps.

Fixing it doesn’t mean starting again

Almost every issue this kind of check turns up — poor contrast, missing alt text, an unlabelled form field, a menu that can’t be reached by keyboard — is fixable without rebuilding the site. It’s usually a matter of adjusting what’s already there, not starting from a blank page. The bigger risk is not knowing the issues exist, because nobody who struggled with the site told you — they just called someone else instead.

Get in touch

Livicode Tech Solutions works with tradespeople and small businesses across Bexley, Bexleyheath, Bromley, Dartford and Greenwich. If you’ve run the checks above and found a few gaps, or you’d simply rather have someone else check for you, tell us about it — no obligation, and no assumption that the answer has to be expensive.

Livicode Tech Solutions — Your Local Digital Solutions Partner
www.livicode.com · info@livicode.com · WhatsApp: +44 7708 803980