Is your booking page usable by everyone?

Accessibility gets treated as an obligation for large organisations with a compliance department. For a local service business it is simpler than that and more directly commercial. Around one in five people in the UK has a disability, and a booking page they cannot use is a customer who goes elsewhere without ever telling you why.

The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. That applies to how you provide a service, and taking bookings is providing a service. This is a summary rather than legal advice.

The things that go wrong most often

Contrast. Pale grey text on white looks tasteful on a designer's screen and is unreadable to a large number of people, including anybody outdoors on a phone. This is the most common failure by a distance and the easiest to fix.

Tap targets that are too small. A time slot rendered as a tiny box is difficult for anybody with a tremor, arthritis or large hands. Bigger buttons help everyone and cost nothing.

Colour as the only signal. If available and unavailable slots differ only by being green or grey, then for a colour blind user they do not differ at all. Add a label, a border or a strike through.

Form fields with no proper labels. A placeholder that vanishes when you start typing is not a label, and a screen reader announces an unlabelled field as nothing useful at all.

No keyboard route. Plenty of people never use a mouse or a touchscreen. If you cannot reach every part of your booking flow with the tab key alone, some people cannot complete it.

Time limits. A booking session that expires while somebody is still deciding punishes anybody who needs longer, which includes people using assistive technology and people who were interrupted by their own life.

The information that is part of accessibility

Half the problem is not the page at all, it is what the page fails to say. Publish it plainly.

• Whether there are steps, and how many.
• Whether there is a ground floor option.
• Where the nearest accessible parking is.
• Whether the space is quiet or loud, which matters enormously to autistic clients and to many others.
• Whether a companion, a carer or an assistance dog is welcome.
• Whether you can offer a longer appointment or a quieter time on request.

Publishing that costs nothing and it converts, because somebody who currently has to ring and ask an awkward question will simply book instead.

A five minute test anyone can run

1. 1Load your booking page on a phone in bright daylight. If you are squinting, so is everybody else.
2. 2Complete a booking using only the tab and enter keys. Note anything you cannot reach.
3. 3Turn your phone's text size up to a large setting and see whether the layout still works or the buttons overlap.
4. 4Turn on the screen reader built into your phone and try to get through the first two steps. It is an uncomfortable five minutes and it is the most informative test on this list.
5. 5Ask somebody over seventy to book an appointment while you watch and say nothing.

The standard to aim at

WCAG 2.2 at level AA is the recognised benchmark and the reference point most organisations use. You do not need to become an expert in it. Getting contrast, labels, keyboard access, tap target size and text resizing right covers the large majority of real world problems.

If your booking page comes from a platform, that work is largely somebody else's job, and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask a provider about before you commit to them. If your booking page is your own, the five minute test above will find more issues than an afternoon of reading.

The commercial point

An accessible booking page is not a favour to a minority. Larger text, better contrast, bigger buttons and clearer labels make the page easier for everybody, particularly on a phone, outdoors, in a hurry, which is how most bookings are actually made.