A 10 minute accessibility checkup means walking through your own site the way a real visitor with a disability would, checking a short list of the things that go wrong most often. Look at your image descriptions, your text contrast, your headings, your links, and whether you can use the whole page with only a keyboard. You do not need a developer or expensive software to start, and most of the fixes are small. If you want the checks done for you in seconds, the free report at healthypage.help/check flags the biggest accessibility problems automatically.
Accessibility sounds like a big, technical project, and that reputation keeps a lot of site owners from ever starting. The truth is smaller and friendlier than that. Most websites fail on the same handful of basics, and you can find those basics yourself in about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. You do not need to read the full standards. You do not need a compliance consultant on day one. You just need to look at your own pages with fresh eyes and a short checklist.
Why bother? Because roughly one in four adults lives with some kind of disability, and every one of them is a potential customer you may be turning away without knowing it. There is a business reason too. The same things that make a page easy for a blind visitor or a keyboard user also make it easier for Google to rank and for AI assistants to read and recommend. Good accessibility is not charity. It is a cleaner, more findable website. Here is the 10 minute checkup, one honest pass at a time.
Start with your pictures. Every meaningful image on your site needs a short written description, called alt text, so that people who cannot see the image still get its point. Screen readers read this text aloud. Search engines and AI tools read it to understand what the image shows. When it is missing, a blind visitor hears nothing useful, and a bot sees a blank.
To check quickly, right click an image and choose inspect, or use a free browser extension that flags missing alt text for you. What you want to catch are two things. First, photos and product shots with no description at all. Second, lazy descriptions like image or the raw file name, which help no one. A good description is plain and specific. Instead of nothing, write what a friend would say if they were describing the picture over the phone. Decorative images that carry no information, like a background swirl, should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them politely.
Now look at how readable your words are. Light gray text on a white background looks elegant in a design mockup and becomes a wall for anyone with low vision or anyone reading on a phone in bright sun. The fix is contrast. Your text and its background need enough difference in brightness that the words stand out clearly. A free contrast checker lets you paste in your two colors and tells you in a second whether they pass. If they do not, nudge the text darker or the background lighter until they do.
While you are here, check your headings. Headings are not just big bold text for looks. They are the outline of your page, and screen reader users jump through a page heading by heading the way a sighted reader skims. You want one main heading at the top, then section headings under it in a sensible order, without skipping levels just to get a certain size. Clean headings help humans, help search engines, and help AI assistants pull the right answer off your page.
Put your mouse aside for the last stretch. Press the Tab key and walk through your page using only the keyboard. You should be able to reach every link, button, and form field in a logical order, and you should always be able to see where you are, usually as a visible outline around the focused item. If the outline vanishes, or if you get stuck somewhere you cannot escape, that is a real barrier for people who cannot use a mouse at all.
Then read your links out of context. Text like click here or read more tells a screen reader user nothing, because they often pull up a list of just the links on a page. Link text should describe where it goes on its own. Finally, glance at any forms. Every field needs a visible label that stays put, not just faint placeholder text that disappears the moment someone starts typing. If a field has an error, the message should say what went wrong in words, not just turn the box red. Run those three checks and your 10 minutes are up.
Run a free website health check and see your Performance, SEO, Best Practices, Accessibility, and Agentic Browsing scores in seconds. Find out exactly where your site stands and what to fix first.
Run Your Free Health Check Free · Instant · PDF included · healthypage.helpAnswers to the exact questions people ask AI assistants about this subject.
Ten honest minutes today beats a perfect plan you never start. See where your site stands with your free website health check at healthypage.help/check