Motion and media
The cinematic autoplay video across the top
A video that plays on its own the moment the page loads. The autoplay itself is the problem — motion nobody chose to start. A pause button only helps if it genuinely stops the video the instant it's pressed; better still is to load a still frame and let the guest press play. Either way, the video still needs a text description of what it shows.
Who it shuts out: People with vestibular disorders — inner-ear conditions — get dizzy or nauseous from motion they didn't start. People with ADHD, autism, or other attention and cognitive disabilities can't pull their focus off a moving picture long enough to read a word beside it. If they can't stop it the instant they need to, they can't steady the page — so they leave.
The rotating slideshow of dishes
Slides that flip to the next one on a timer, before you've finished the one in front of you. Auto-advance is the problem — better to let the guest click through at their own pace. If it does move on its own, the pause has to be obvious and easy to reach, and every slide's image needs a text description of what it shows.
Who it shuts out: Anyone who reads slowly — older guests, people with dyslexia or a cognitive disability — never reaches the end of a slide before it's gone. A blind guest's screen reader is still reading slide one aloud when the screen has already jumped to slide three.
Text that scrolls, slides, or tickers across
Words that move instead of holding still.
Who it shuts out: You cannot read something that won't stay put. It moves faster than people with low vision, dyslexia, or a cognitive disability can track, so the message never lands.
Anything that flashes or blinks
Fast-flashing graphics or blinking elements.
Who it shuts out: Fast flashing can trigger a seizure in someone with photosensitive epilepsy. This is the one item on the list that can physically hurt a guest — not just frustrate them.
Sections that fade, slide, or drift in as you scroll
Content that animates into place as you reach it, or a background photo that drifts at a different speed than the text over it (parallax).
Who it shuts out: The drifting, mismatched motion of parallax makes people with vestibular disorders dizzy or queasy — the same inner-ear reaction as the autoplay video. And when a section only appears once you scroll to it just right, people using a screen reader or keyboard can pass straight over it and never know it was there.
Music or sound that starts on its own
Audio that begins the moment the page loads, with the controls buried or missing.
Who it shuts out: A blind guest's screen reader talks out loud — your music plays right over the one voice they're navigating by, so they can't hear it. Anyone in a quiet office or next to a sleeping baby just closes the tab. And people with attention or cognitive disabilities can't concentrate through sound they didn't ask for and can't easily stop.
The chef video or promo reel with no captions
A video of people talking with no on-screen text of what's being said.
Who it shuts out: Deaf and hard-of-hearing guests get moving pictures and no idea what's being said — the entire message lives in audio they can't hear. Captions also help everyone watching with the sound off, which, on a phone, is most people.
Reading the page
Low-contrast text — any color too close to its background
Text that's too close in tone to whatever sits behind it — pale gray on white, mid-gray on a colored panel, thin white on a light photo. It reads as tasteful and understated. The problem isn't the color itself, it's the lack of contrast between the text and its background.
Who it shuts out: People with low vision — and every older guest, because contrast sensitivity drops with age — can't separate the letters from what's behind them. And the moment anyone opens your site in sunlight or a dim room, most of your able-sighted guests can't read it either.
Text laid over a photo
An elegant caption or headline sitting on top of a hero image.
Who it shuts out: Wherever the photo is light or busy behind the words, the words disappear — completely for people with low vision, and often for everyone.
Tiny, delicate, thin fonts
The high-fashion, whisper-thin look.
Who it shuts out: Too small for people with low vision to read at all — and when they zoom the page in to cope, thin fussy letters break apart and blur instead of getting clearer.
Pinch-to-zoom switched off on phones
A setting designers often flip on by default that stops people from pinching to enlarge your page on a phone.
Who it shuts out: People with low vision zoom in to read — it's how they use every site. With zoom disabled, your menu is frozen at a size they can't read, on the exact device most guests are holding. You almost certainly never chose this on purpose, which is why it goes unnoticed for years.
The menu posted as an image or a PDF
A picture of your menu, not real text.
Who it shuts out: A screen reader reads a picture as nothing — a blind guest hits silence where your entire menu should be. Low-vision guests can't enlarge it without it turning to mush, and nobody can search it, select it, or have their phone read it aloud. The menu is the one thing every single guest came for, and a picture of it is the most common way that thing ends up unreadable.
Your hours, address, or phone number saved as an image
A JPEG or PNG with the words baked into the picture instead of typed as text — and no alt text behind it for a screen reader to read.
Who it shuts out: Same as a picture of a menu: a screen reader reads an image as nothing, so a blind guest can't get your hours, can't get your address, and can't tap a phone number to call. Nobody can copy it or search it. The details people need most to actually reach you are the ones locked inside the image.
Long stretches of ALL CAPS
Whole sentences or paragraphs shouted in capitals for emphasis.
Who it shuts out: All-caps strips away the up-and-down word shapes that people with dyslexia and reading disabilities rely on to read at a glance, slowing them to a crawl — and some screen readers give up and spell it out letter by letter.
Getting around the page
No fast way past the navigation
Every page makes you go through the whole nav menu before you reach the content.
Who it shuts out: People using a keyboard or a screen reader can't just glance down the page and click — they move through it one item at a time, in order. Without a “skip to menu” link waiting first, they have to step through your entire navigation bar again on every single page before they get to anything.
A clickable button jammed in the strip above the nav
A promo or “Book” button tucked into the thin bar at the very top.
Who it shuts out: Keyboard users move through a page top to bottom, in the order it's actually built. A clickable thing above the nav either forces everyone through your promo before they're allowed to navigate, or the focus box suddenly leaps to the top of the page and drops them somewhere they didn't expect — and they lose their place.
Text sized up to “look like a heading” instead of being one
Making a line big and bold for looks, or jumping straight from your title to a small sub-heading.
Who it shuts out: Headings are the outline a blind guest navigates by — they jump from heading to heading to find their way around. Tag plain text as a big heading just to size it, or skip levels, and that outline collapses so they can't move through the page. Size is decoration; the heading level is the map.
No outline on the button you've landed on
Stripping off the box that shows up around a button or link when you tab to it.
Who it shuts out: People using a keyboard have nothing telling them where they are on the page. Every press is a guess — they're clicking blind.
Menus that only drop down when you hover
The dropdown that opens on mouse-hover and nothing else.
Who it shuts out: There is no hover on a touchscreen and no hover for someone using a keyboard. So phone users and keyboard users can never open the menu at all, and everything inside it is simply out of reach.
The popup that jumps up the second you arrive
A newsletter signup, promo, or cookie box that covers the page the moment it loads.
Who it shuts out: If its little “×” can't be reached or pressed with a keyboard, keyboard and screen-reader users are stuck behind it with no way through — the site is simply over for them. Even when it can be closed, people with low vision zoomed in may never find the tiny × in the corner.
A cookie banner that covers the page but sits dead-last in its order
The consent box is painted on top of everything visually, but in the page's actual order it's the very last thing — so keyboard focus won't reach it until you've tabbed through the entire page first.
Who it shuts out: A keyboard or screen-reader user sees the banner blocking the page and reaches for “Accept” — but focus won't land there. They have to tab through every link on the whole page first, sometimes twenty-plus presses, before the two buttons right in front of their face become reachable, and the page stays covered the entire time. What your eyes see and what the keyboard reaches have to be the same order.
Buttons, links, and images
Minimalist icon-only buttons
A clean hamburger, cart, or arrow with no words next to it.
Who it shuts out: A screen reader can only announce “button” — it has no idea the icon means “menu” or “cart.” A blind guest is left guessing what each one does.
“Click here” and “read more” links
Every link labeled with the same vague phrase.
Who it shuts out: Screen-reader users often pull up a list of just the links to skim a page fast. A list that reads “click here, click here, read more” tells them nothing about where any of them go.
Images with no description behind them
A photo or graphic with nothing written for a screen reader to say.
Who it shuts out: Blind guests miss whatever the image was carrying — the dish, the special, the graphic with your hours on it — with no way to know they missed anything.
Meaning shown by color alone
Green means available, red means sold out — and that's the only difference.
Who it shuts out: People with color blindness — about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women (Colour Blind Awareness) — can't tell your red from your green. Without a word or a symbol alongside the color, the two options look identical to them.
Links that look exactly like the words around them
Removing the underline and giving links only a faint color difference, for a cleaner look.
Who it shuts out: People with color blindness or low vision can't spot the slight color shift that's the only thing marking a link — so they never realize it's clickable, and miss the reservation button, the menu, the order link. Color on its own is never enough to say “this is a link.”
Booking, contact, and ordering forms
Labels that live inside the field and vanish when you type
The modern trick where the field's label sits inside it and disappears the moment you start typing.
Who it shuts out: People with cognitive disabilities and screen-reader users lose track of what a now-blank field was even asking for — so they can't be sure what they're filling in.
Forms that fail without saying why
An error that just rejects the booking or order without pointing to what's wrong.
Who it shuts out: If nothing tells people which field is wrong or how to fix it, guests with cognitive disabilities — and, honestly, most guests — hit a wall and can't finish. You lose the reservation and the order.
Tap targets that are tiny or crowded together
Small buttons packed close, so you have to aim carefully to hit the right one.
Who it shuts out: People with a motor disability, a tremor, or arthritis — and anyone tapping on a phone — can't reliably land on a small button without catching the wrong one.
A booking or ordering box pasted in from another company
The reservation or online-order widget embedded from an outside service and dropped into your page.
Who it shuts out: Whatever's inside that box is only as accessible as the other company built it — and many trap a keyboard inside (you tab in and can't get back out), skip the field labels a screen reader needs, or fail their own contrast. It sits on your page, so the barrier is yours: a guest who can't use the widget can't book or order from you.
A countdown clock on the booking or order
“Your table is held for 4:59…” — a timer that cancels everything if you're too slow.
Who it shuts out: People who use a screen reader, type slowly, have a motor disability, or simply need a moment to think get timed out mid-booking through no fault of their own — and have to start over or give up. If there's a genuine reason for a limit, guests have to be able to extend it.
The “prove you're human” image puzzle on a form
The grid of blurry photos — “select all the traffic lights” — or the squished, distorted letters guarding your contact or booking form.
Who it shuts out: A blind guest can't see the pictures or the letters, so the puzzle is a flat wall — they cannot book, order, or contact you, full stop. It's also hard for people with low vision and some cognitive disabilities. There are modern bot checks that don't put a visual test in front of a human being.
The fake fix
The “accessibility” overlay widget
The button-in-the-corner tool that promises to make your site compliant overnight.
Who it shuts out: It doesn't touch the broken site underneath — every problem above is still there. Worse, these widgets frequently fight with the screen reader a blind guest is already running, leaving them worse off than if the widget weren't there at all. It's a sticker over the crack, not a repair.