Accessibility has a reputation problem on small sites: it sounds like a compliance project for enterprises with audit budgets, so personal sites and small businesses quietly skip it. The reality is friendlier. A small number of inexpensive habits eliminates most of the barriers most visitors actually hit... and nearly all of them improve the site for everyone, including search engines. Here is the short list, in rough order of impact per minute spent.
1. Contrast that survives sunlight
Low-contrast grey-on-white text is the web's most widespread accessibility failure, and it degrades the experience for every reader on a phone outdoors, not only those with low vision. The fix costs one colour decision: body text at a ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background. Check the handful of text/background pairs your site actually uses once, fix the failures, and the problem stays fixed.
2. Real text structure, not visual structure
Screen readers navigate by headings the way sighted users navigate by skimming. A page whose "headings" are just bold paragraphs is, to assistive technology, one undifferentiated wall. Use one h1 per page, h2 for sections, h3 beneath them, and never pick a heading level because of its font size... that is what CSS is for. The same logic applies to lists: three items separated by line breaks are not a list; a ul is.
3. Alt text with a purpose test
Every meaningful image needs an alt attribute describing what the image communicates... not what it depicts. A photo on a bakery's homepage is not alt="photo"; it is alt="Display counter with fresh sourdough loaves". Decorative flourishes get an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them silently. The test for writing good alt text: if the image vanished, what sentence would preserve the page's meaning?
4. The keyboard test
Put the mouse away and traverse your site with Tab, Shift+Tab and Enter. Can you reach every link, button and form field? Can you see where you are at every step (the focus outline that some stylesheets delete for cosmetic reasons)? Can you operate the menu? Five minutes of this test finds the traps... unreachable buttons, invisible focus, keyboard-hostile dropdowns... that lock out users with motor impairments and power users alike. If something fails, the cause is usually a div pretending to be a button; a real button element is keyboard-accessible for free.
5. Labels that touch their fields
Placeholder text is not a label: it vanishes on focus, fails contrast almost everywhere, and screen readers treat it inconsistently. Every input needs a visible label element associated with it. As a bonus, properly labelled fields enlarge the click target... tapping the label focuses the field... which every mobile user benefits from.
6. Link text that survives out of context
Screen reader users routinely pull up a list of all links on a page. A list reading "click here, click here, read more, here" is unusable. Write links whose text says where they go ("see the contact page", "download the June menu"). This habit also happens to be exactly what search engines reward.
7. Motion and zoom respect
Two settings users set for a reason: reduced motion and text zoom. Honour the first by gating animations behind the prefers-reduced-motion media query. Honour the second by testing your layout at 200% browser zoom... if content overlaps or disappears, the usual culprits are fixed pixel heights and viewport-unit text sizing.
Where to go from here
These seven habits will not make a site formally WCAG-certified, and complex applications need real expertise. But the gap between "never thought about it" and "did the basics" is where most of the human impact lives... an estimated one in six people has some form of disability, before counting temporary situations like a broken wrist or a bright afternoon. Run the keyboard test and a contrast check on your site this week. The fixes are almost always smaller than the embarrassment of needing them.