Building a care home site that actually needs to be accessible

A care home’s website has a different audience than most brochure sites: often it’s an anxious family member searching on a phone, sometimes late at night, sometimes with eyesight that isn’t what it used to be. That reframes “accessibility” from a compliance checkbox into the actual job the site has to do.

A few things I made non-negotiable on this build that I’ll happily argue for on every site from now on:

• Body text at a minimum of 18px, not 16px. It sounds like a small thing until you watch someone squint at 16px on a phone in daylight.
• Colour contrast checked against WCAG AA everywhere, including on top of background images — not just the “brand colours look fine on white” spot check.
• Every interactive element reachable and clearly focus-visible by keyboard alone. No mouse, no trackpad, just Tab and Enter.
• The phone number in the header as an actual tel: link, always, because on mobile that’s the entire point of the page for a lot of visitors.

None of this is exotic. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to skip when a deadline is close and nobody’s explicitly asked for it. But “nobody asked for it” is exactly the trap — the people who need it most are rarely the ones filing the ticket.