Your website's visitors are not all reading it the way the designer imagined. Someone is zoomed to 200% on a phone. Someone is tabbing through with a keyboard because a mouse is painful. Someone is listening to the page through a screen reader. Someone is dyslexic, or reading in their third language, or checking your opening hours from a hospital car park with a cracked screen.
A website assistant can be a real help to these visitors, because asking a question is often easier than hunting through menus. It can also become one more barrier if the replies are dense, the widget is hard to reach, or chat is the only way in.
An accessible chatbot is mostly the result of ordinary care in four places: the wording of replies, the widget itself, its colours and greetings, and the routes that sit beside chat.
Readable replies are the biggest win
The part of accessibility you control most directly is what the assistant says. You set its instructions, persona and Q&A pairs, so you decide whether replies are easy to follow.
Long, hedged paragraphs are hard for almost everyone. They are especially hard for people using screen readers, who hear every word in sequence, and for people with cognitive or learning difficulties. A few rules make a large difference:
- One idea per message. If the answer has two parts, send the first and offer the second.
- Short sentences. Aim for most under twenty words.
- Common words. "Book" not "schedule an appointment", "cost" not "pricing structure".
- No reliance on layout. Avoid "see the table below" or "click the green button", which mean nothing to someone who cannot see them.
- Descriptive links. "Our returns page" rather than "click here".
- Numbers written clearly. "£45" and "Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm" rather than ranges that depend on symbols.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Our comprehensive range of services encompasses residential and commercial electrical installations, periodic inspection reports and emergency call-outs across the wider metropolitan area. | We do electrical work for homes and businesses. That includes new installations, safety inspections and emergency call-outs across Greater Manchester. |
| Please refer to the information presented in the section above for further details on eligibility. | You can apply if you live in the borough and are over 18. |
| Appointments are available subject to practitioner availability; kindly utilise the booking request facility. | Tell me which days suit you and I'll pass your request to the team. They will confirm a time. |
| Click the button on the right to continue! | Would you like me to take your details? |
Put a line in the assistant's instructions asking for short, plain replies, then check a week of transcripts to see if it listened. If you want help rewriting your FAQ content in plainer language first, the FAQ generator is a quick starting point.
Keyboard and screen reader checks
You do not need specialist knowledge to catch the biggest problems. You need twenty minutes and a willingness to put the mouse in a drawer.
- Load a page with the assistant on it. Press Tab repeatedly and confirm you can reach the chat button and see where focus is.
- Open the chat with Enter or Space. Type a question and send it without touching the mouse.
- Close the chat with the keyboard and confirm focus returns somewhere sensible on the page.
- Turn on the screen reader built into your device (VoiceOver on Apple devices, Narrator on Windows, TalkBack on Android).
- Open the chat, ask a question and listen. Can you tell when a reply has arrived? Is it read out in full?
- Zoom the browser to 200% and check the widget is still usable and does not cover the content visitors need.
- Try it on your own phone, one-handed.
Write down anything that fails. Some issues will be in how your own site is built, such as focus traps from other pop-ups. Others will be in the widget, and those are worth raising with your vendor. Ask what they support rather than assuming.
Colour, size and the proactive greeting
Customisation options such as brand colour, avatar and welcome message affect accessibility more than people expect.
A pale brand colour with white text looks elegant in a mock-up and becomes unreadable for anyone with low vision or glare on their screen. Check contrast with a free contrast checker rather than by eye, and if your brand colour fails, use a darker shade of it for the widget. Our guide to making the assistant look like yours covers the settings.
Proactive and exit-intent greetings are useful, but anything that pops up can interrupt a screen reader or cover content for someone zoomed in. Keep greetings short, avoid triggering them the instant a page loads and make sure they are easy to dismiss.
Language is accessibility too
A visitor who is more comfortable in Polish, Urdu or Portuguese may struggle with a dense English page and do perfectly well in chat. The assistant replies in the language the visitor writes in, which quietly widens who can get help from you.
The plain-language rules still apply. Simple source content translates more reliably than idiom and jargon. There is more on this in our post on multilingual website assistants.
Chat should never be the only door
Some people cannot use chat comfortably. Some simply do not want to. Some are on assistive technology that handles live-updating content poorly. Inclusive customer service means they still get served.
Keep your phone number, email address and a simple contact form easy to find, and not buried behind the widget. Tell the assistant to mention them when a visitor seems to be struggling, or asks for another way to get in touch. A reply like "You can also call us on 0161 000 0000 or email hello@example.com, whichever is easier" costs nothing and matters a lot to the person who needed it.
Where to begin
Start with the cheapest fix: add plain-language instructions to your assistant and rewrite your five most-used Q&A pairs using the before-and-after approach above. Then do the keyboard and screen reader walk-through on your busiest page, and list what failed.
Fix the colour contrast if it needs it, check that your alternative contact routes are visible, and repeat the walk-through after any redesign. If most of your visitors are on phones, also read mobile visitors and enquiries, since small screens expose the same problems faster.