The accessibility failures that quietly cost you sign-ups

Accessibility gets filed under 'compliance' and ignored until a lawyer or a launch checklist forces it. That framing misses the point. The failures that block a screen reader are usually the same ones making your page harder to use for everyone, including the visitor with a working browser and full attention who still bounces because your text is hard to read.

Run an automated check like axe-core on a typical landing page and you'll see the same short list almost every time. Automated tools catch maybe a third of all accessibility issues, but the ones they catch are real and common.

1. Contrast failures

This is the most frequent one by far. Light gray text on a white background, or a slightly-lighter gray on a dark background, that doesn't meet the 4.5:1 contrast ratio. Designers love it because it looks calm. Visitors squint, skim, and miss your value proposition. Fix it by lifting the muted text color until it passes, and your bounce rate usually thanks you.

2. Missing alt text

Every image that carries meaning needs alt text. Screen readers announce it, search engines read it, and when an image fails to load, it's the fallback. A product screenshot with no alt text is a blank gap to a chunk of your visitors. This one is cheap to fix and almost always neglected.

3. Form inputs with no label

An email field with placeholder text but no real label is a classic. The placeholder disappears the moment someone types, screen readers may skip it, and on a signup form that's the exact field you cannot afford to confuse. Use a proper label, even a visually compact one, on every input.

How to find yours

You can't eyeball these reliably, contrast especially. Run the page through an automated checker against the rendered DOM, not the raw HTML, so it sees what visitors actually get. BrutalRoast runs axe-core on your live page and reports the exact failures: how many contrast issues, which inputs lack labels, how many images have no alt text, with the real counts, not a vague grade.