Your
website.

The owner sees a different site

You may be signed in, using a familiar device on a fast connection, with parts of the site already cached. You also know what every button is meant to do. A first-time visitor has none of those advantages, so their experience can be very different from yours.

This is not a subtle effect. It routinely hides a contact form that silently fails, a phone link that does nothing on a phone, and content that only logged-in visitors can see. None of it is visible from the chair the site was built in.

The checks are quick and nobody runs them

The useful response is not an audit. It is a handful of checks that take about a minute each and need no tools: look at the site signed out, on a device that has never visited it, on mobile data rather than your own connection. Then use it rather than looking at it, submit your own form, tap your own phone number, complete your own booking.

That last distinction does most of the work. A form can render exactly as designed and still refuse every click, because something invisible is sitting on top of it. Nothing about the appearance reveals that, which is why anything you have never actually used yourself should be assumed broken.

Who can use it is a legal question as well as a decent one

The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to what businesses open to the public offer, and the Department of Justice says that includes online services. Its guidance does not name a single mandatory technical standard. Instead, it points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and says businesses have flexibility in how they comply.

Flexibility is not the same as latitude about the outcome, and the practical version of this is less daunting than it sounds. Two of the most common failures cost nothing to find: can the site be operated with the keyboard alone, and is any important signal carried only by colour? Both are checkable in a few minutes by the owner.

What breaks silently

A single script error can stop other parts of a page from working while the layout and text still look normal. Forms, booking tools, and phone links can fail quietly, even though they are often the parts that bring in business.

And a change can be live and invisible for hours. After an edit, “it still looks the same” is not evidence that it did not work; it is often evidence that you are being served a cached copy. Check from another network before concluding anything.