10 Common Accessibility Mistakes on RIA Websites

Your RIA website can look polished, function exactly as expected, and still be difficult for someone with a disability to use.

Website accessibility means making sure people with disabilities can navigate, understand, and interact with your site. Yet common accessibility mistakes, from missing alt text to inaccessible forms and PDFs, are easy to overlook if you aren’t actively testing for them. They can prevent people from accessing your firm’s information and services, create potential legal risk, and quietly limit generating qualified leads from visitors who never hit a barrier.

Here are 10 common website accessibility mistakes RIAs should look for, why they matter, and how to identify them on your own site.

Why website accessibility matters for RIAs

Website accessibility helps ensure that people with disabilities can access the same information, resources, and services as other visitors. For RIAs, that includes many of the digital experiences prospective and existing clients rely on:

• Advisor information: Visitors should be able to research your firm, advisors, and services using assistive technology.
• Educational content: Articles, market commentary, videos, and downloadable resources should be accessible to people with visual, auditory, motor, or other disabilities.
• Consultation forms: Visitors should be able to navigate forms, understand what information is required, and submit them without relying on a mouse or visual cues alone.

Many of these barriers aren’t obvious during normal website use, which makes them easy for internal teams to overlook.

Accessibility is also an important legal consideration. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has shaped expectations around access to digital experiences, while the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide widely used technical guidance for improving accessibility.

10 common accessibility mistakes on websites

Many website accessibility problems come from common design, development, and content practices rather than obvious technical failures. Many of the same technical foundations that support accessibility also show up in SEO for RIAs, since search engines and screen readers often rely on the same underlying site structure.

For RIA websites, these issues can affect everything from reading educational content to navigating advisor pages and submitting a consultation form.

1. Missing or inaccurate image alt text

An advisor headshot without alt text tells a screen reader nothing about who that person is. A performance chart with alt text that just says image1.jpg tells it even less. Alt text should explain why an image matters, not confirm that one exists.

The mistakes tend to run in opposite directions. Some images get left blank, others get stuffed with keywords that read more like tags than descriptions. Decorative images, like dividers or background graphics, do not need alt text. Save the detail for headshots, charts, and educational visuals where readers need it.

2. Low color contrast

That light gray text may fit your firm’s brand palette, but can your visitors actually read it? Low contrast is especially hard on people with low vision or color-vision deficiencies, and it often turns up in subtle places like button text, disclaimers, navigation, and text over images.

Brand colors are often the culprit. A signature blue can look sharp against white in a logo, but drop it into small paragraph text and the contrast falls apart. Test buttons, links, and body copy against your actual background colors before launch, not after a complaint.

3. Forms without clear labels

A consultation form is often the only moment a prospective client interacts with your firm before picking up the phone. If a screen reader announces a field only as “edit text” because the label lives in placeholder text that disappears on click, that prospect has no idea what to enter.

Unclear error messages cause the same drop-off for every visitor, not just those using assistive technology. A red border with no explanation leaves anyone guessing what went wrong. Programmatic labels and specific error text keep the form usable, and keep prospects from giving up halfway through.

4. Website navigation that requires a mouse

Try navigating from your homepage to an advisor’s contact form using only the Tab key. If you get stuck in a dropdown, or a modal window traps you with no way out, a visitor using a keyboard or switch device hits the same wall.

Menus, dropdowns, buttons, and modal windows all need to work without a mouse. This is not a one-time check. Every new feature added to the site, from a chatbot widget to a redesigned menu, needs the same keyboard test before it goes live.

5. Missing or unclear focus indicators

Designers often strip out the default blue focus outline because it clashes with the site’s look, then never replace it with anything. Without that visible marker, a keyboard user tabbing through the page has no way to tell which link or button is currently selected.

A well-designed focus state does not have to look like the browser default. It just has to be visible against your background, on every button, link, and form field a keyboard user reaches.

6. Videos without captions or transcripts

A market update video with no captions works fine for a hearing viewer and shuts out a deaf or hard-of-hearing prospect completely. The same goes for a recorded webinar or an advisor introduction clip sitting on a bio page.

Auto-generated captions are a reasonable starting point, but they mangle financial terms, ticker symbols, and firm names often enough that someone needs to review them before publishing. A wrong word in a caption can change the meaning of what an advisor actually said.

7. Poor heading structure

Headings are not a font size choice. A screen reader user often jumps from heading to heading to scan a page, much like a sighted visitor skims bold text. Skip a level, or bold a paragraph instead of using a real H3, and that shortcut breaks.

For long RIA service pages or in-depth educational articles, a clean heading hierarchy is what lets someone jump straight to retirement planning or fee structure without reading the whole page top to bottom.

8. Links with vague anchor text

Imagine tabbing through a page and hearing “click here, click here, learn more, click here” with no other context. That is what a list of vague anchor text sounds like to someone navigating by link alone, and it gives them nothing to decide whether the link is worth following.

Descriptive anchor text solves the problem for everyone, not only screen reader users. Linking to retirement planning services instead of click here tells every visitor exactly where they are headed before they get there.

9. PDFs and downloadable resources that aren’t accessible

A firm can spend months making its website accessible and still leave a scanned market outlook PDF that a screen reader cannot read at all. The webpage passes. The document linked from it does not.

Whitepapers and financial planning guides are common offenders, especially when they started as a scanned image instead of real text. Missing headings and images without alt text carry the same problems inside a PDF as they do on a webpage. Include downloads in every accessibility audit, not just the site itself.

10. Treating accessibility as a one-time website project

Passing an audit at launch feels like the finish line, but a website is never finished. A new blog template, a third-party chat widget, or a redesigned contact form can quietly introduce a barrier that was not there the week before.

Accessibility works best as part of the same ongoing quality assurance process that already covers broken links and outdated content, checked whenever the site changes rather than reviewed once and filed away.

How to identify accessibility issues on your RIA website

Finding accessibility issues requires both automated testing and manual review. Automated tools can quickly flag technical problems, but they can’t determine whether every part of your website is actually usable by someone relying on assistive technology.

1. Run an automated accessibility scan

Start with an accessibility scanning tool to identify common technical issues across your website. Automated scans can help flag problems such as:

• Missing alt attributes
• Insufficient color contrast
• Form and markup errors
• Heading and page structure issues

An automated scan is a useful starting point, but a passing score does not mean your website is fully accessible.

2. Manually test important website experiences

Next, test how someone can navigate and interact with the website without relying on a mouse or visual cues alone. Review keyboard navigation, focus indicators, forms, links, menus, videos, and other interactive elements.

For an RIA website, prioritize high-value areas such as advisor and service pages, location pages, consultation forms, PDFs, videos, and other client-facing resources.

3. Review and prioritize accessibility issues

Compare identified issues against applicable WCAG criteria to determine what needs attention. Prioritize barriers that prevent visitors from accessing important information or completing key actions, then incorporate accessibility checks into ongoing website QA as changes are made.

WCAG can provide technical guidance for improving accessibility, but it does not replace legal advice. RIAs should work with qualified legal or compliance counsel to understand the accessibility requirements that apply to their firm.

Frequently asked questions