Harrogate has plenty of older residents, and if you run a small business here, a good number of your customers fall into that group. Website accessibility for older users in Harrogate isn’t some extra feature bolted on at the end. It’s part of making sure the people who’d actually buy from you can use what you’ve built.
I want to make the business case for this in plain terms. Too much writing on accessibility reads like it was written for other designers, not for the person running the shop, the salon or the family firm.
Who your older customers actually are
Forget the idea that older people don’t use the internet. Most do, and more than you’d think. They check your opening hours before they visit. They read reviews before they book. They compare prices on their phone while deciding whether to bother driving into town. Some do this on a tablet from the sofa, others on a phone with their reading glasses pushed up on their head.
Every small business website has older customers looking at it, whether the owner realises it or not. What they’re not doing is fighting your site to find a phone number, or squinting at pale grey text to work out what you actually sell. If your site makes that hard, you lose the sale before you even know they were there.
What actually makes a website difficult
A few things come up again and again when a site is hard going for older users.
- Small text, with low contrast between the text and the background
- Tiny buttons and links, packed close together, hard to tap accurately on a phone
- Menus that need a precise hover or a fiddly tap to open
- Video or audio that starts playing on its own, which is confusing and sometimes alarming
- Contact forms with unclear labels, or no phone number anywhere in sight
None of this is about older people being less capable. It’s about a website built for someone with perfect eyesight, a steady hand and endless patience. Not many of your customers, of any age, actually fit that description.
Simple changes that make a real difference
The fixes here are not complicated or expensive. Accessible web design in Yorkshire, or anywhere else, mostly comes down to getting the basics right.
- Make buttons and links bigger, so they’re easy to tap without a second try
- Use plain labels that say what will happen, “Call us” rather than “Click here”
- Keep text a decent size, with strong contrast against the background
- Turn off autoplay on video and audio, and let people choose to press play
- Put your phone number and address somewhere obvious, on every page if you can
I build this into every site I make. It’s part of doing the job properly, not an add-on you pay extra for.
Why this helps everyone, not just older users
This is what makes it good business sense, not just good manners. Bigger buttons help anyone using their phone with one hand, perhaps while carrying shopping. Clear labels help anyone in a hurry. No autoplay helps anyone sitting in a quiet office who doesn’t want a video blaring out. Good contrast helps anyone reading their phone in bright sunlight.
Accessible design isn’t a separate category of design. It’s just good design, and it tends to make a website work better for every single person who visits it, whatever their age.
Where to start
You don’t need to rebuild your whole site to make progress here. Look at your homepage. Check the text size, check the buttons, check whether a video starts playing the second the page loads. Small changes add up.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on it, I’m happy to take a look and tell you honestly what I’d change.
