Put your mouse away and navigate the site using only the Tab key and Enter — through the menu, into a service page, and through your contact form. If you lose track of where you are, reach something you can't activate, or can't complete the form, you have found a real problem in under five minutes.
The symptom you cannot perceive
Every other check in this series has a signal you can eventually see. This one doesn't. A visitor who can't use your site doesn't generate an error, a bounce you can distinguish, or a complaint. They leave, and the analytics look ordinary.
Which is why the check has to be deliberate. Nothing will prompt you.
The keyboard test
Genuinely five minutes.
Put the mouse aside. Starting from your homepage, use only Tab to move forward, Shift+Tab back, Enter to activate.
Can you always see where you are? There should be a visible outline on whatever is focused. If it disappears, a keyboard user is navigating blind. Removing focus outlines for aesthetic reasons is one of the most common accessibility failures on professionally built sites.
Can you reach the navigation, including dropdowns? Menus that open on hover often can't be opened by keyboard at all.
Can you get through the contact form? Every field, the submit button, and any consent checkbox. This is where it most often breaks and where it costs most.
Does anything trap you? A pop-up or embedded widget you can enter and can't escape.
Can you skip the navigation? Many sites offer a "skip to content" link on first Tab. Without one, a screen-reader user tabs through every menu item on every page.
Then two more, quickly: zoom the browser to 200% and see whether the layout survives, and check whether your images have alternative text — particularly ones carrying information, like a headshot or an infographic.
Where the legal picture sits
Worth being careful here, and we are not lawyers.
Web accessibility obligations in the United States arise from several directions. The Americans with Disabilities Act has been applied to websites by courts, though with genuine variation between circuits on scope and on whether a connection to a physical location matters. The Department of Justice has issued rulemaking covering state and local government entities specifically. Section 508 applies to federal agencies and their contractors. Some states have their own statutes, and some are more demanding than federal law.
For private professional practices the picture is less settled than vendors selling remediation typically suggest — and also less benign than firms who've never been contacted tend to assume. Demand letters are a real and active phenomenon.
WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — is the technical standard referenced in most of this, commonly at level AA. It is a published standard rather than a law in itself.
We can tell you what your site does. We cannot tell you what you're required to do, and anyone in marketing who tells you their product makes you "ADA compliant" is making a claim they can't support. Whether you have exposure is a question for counsel who knows your jurisdiction and your situation.
On overlay widgets
A note, because they're marketed aggressively at professional firms.
Accessibility overlays — the scripts adding a floating accessibility button — are widely criticised by disability advocates and accessibility practitioners, and their use has featured in litigation rather than preventing it. Treat any claim that a single script makes a site compliant with the scepticism you'd apply to a similar claim about search rankings.
What you can and can't conclude
Verified — What you found with the keyboard test. Real, reproducible, and yours to demonstrate.
Pending — The full picture. Automated scanners typically detect around a third of issues, and the manual test above covers a different fraction. Colour contrast, screen-reader behaviour, form error handling, and document structure need proper testing — ideally including people who use assistive technology.
Unconfirmed — Whether you have legal exposure. Not a question we can answer, and not one a scanning tool can answer either. What we can tell you is what's broken.
Why this belongs in a marketing audit at all
Two reasons beyond the obvious one.
Much of what makes a site accessible also makes it legible to machines: proper heading structure, descriptive link text, alternative text, and semantic markup are the same signals search and answer engines use to understand a page. The work overlaps substantially.
And a form a keyboard user can't complete is a form losing you enquiries — from a group that includes a meaningful share of any professional practice's client base, and one that skews older in exactly the way estate, tax, and financial planning clients do.
Not knowing whether part of your audience can use the site is the eighth symptom in the full map at how do I tell if my website is losing me clients.
SEO Doctor is a marketing diagnostics firm. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Web accessibility obligations vary by jurisdiction, entity type, and circumstance, and the law in this area continues to develop. Confirm any question about your own obligations with counsel.