Your Store Locator Map Might Be Locking Out Disabled Customers. Here's How to Fix It.

Almost every local business website has one: a “Find Us,” “Locations,” or “Contact” page with an embedded map. You dropped in a Google Map, maybe added a “Get Directions” button, and called it done. It looks clean. It works on your phone. Customers can see exactly where you are.

Except some of them can’t. And on a surprising number of small business sites, the map is the single biggest accessibility barrier on the page — worse than the contrast, worse than the menu, worse than the contact form. It is also one of the easiest things to get badly wrong, because the embed code Google hands you was never designed with screen reader users in mind.

If a blind customer, a keyboard-only user, or someone using voice control lands on your locations page and cannot find your address, your hours, or how to get to you, you have not just created a frustrating experience. For a business that depends on foot traffic, you have effectively closed the door on them. This guide explains what goes wrong, why it matters legally and practically, and how to fix it — without touching anything more complicated than copy and paste.

Why maps are uniquely hard for accessibility

A map is, fundamentally, a picture. An interactive, zoomable, draggable picture — but a picture all the same. The information it conveys is visual: this pin is here, the road bends there, you turn left at the second intersection.

Screen readers — the software blind and low-vision people use to read websites aloud — work with text, not pictures. When a screen reader reaches a typical embedded map, one of a few things happens, none of them good:

  • It announces something useless like “Google Maps, frame” and nothing else.
  • It dumps a flood of confusing controls — “zoom in button, zoom out button, map data, terms, keyboard shortcuts” — with no actual location information.
  • It traps keyboard users inside the map. Someone navigating with the Tab key gets stuck cycling through map controls and cannot get back out to the rest of the page.

That last one is the most damaging. A keyboard-only user — which includes many people with motor disabilities, as well as anyone who simply cannot use a mouse — can get pulled into the map and find themselves unable to escape without closing the whole tab. Imagine your front door swinging shut behind a customer and locking. That is what a poorly embedded map does on the web.

The crucial insight, and the thing most business owners miss, is this: the map itself almost never needs to be accessible. What needs to be accessible is the information the map is trying to convey — your address, your hours, and clear directions. The map can stay as a nice visual extra for people who can use it. You just cannot let it be the only way to get that information.

The fix in one sentence

Put your full address, hours, and a plain-text “Get Directions” link in real text right next to the map — and make sure the map can be skipped over with the keyboard.

That is genuinely most of the work. Let’s break it into concrete steps you can do today.

Step 1: Write your address as real text

Not inside the map. Not baked into an image. Real, selectable, copy-and-pasteable text on the page:

Riverside Bakery 142 Mill Street Greenwood, OR 97001 United States

This single change solves the biggest problem. A screen reader reads it aloud. A voice-control user can select it. Someone can copy it into their own maps app. Search engines can read it, which helps your local SEO too. If your map vanished entirely tomorrow, a customer should still be able to find you from the text alone. That is the test.

If you have multiple locations, list each one as a clearly labeled block of text — a heading with the location name, then the address and hours beneath it. Do not rely on map pins as the only way to tell them apart.

Step 2: Add your hours as text, not a graphic

Business hours are frequently saved as an image — a nicely designed graphic the owner made in Canva. To a screen reader, an image of your hours is invisible unless it has alternative text, and even then, a long table of hours crammed into “alt text” reads terribly.

Write your hours out as actual text on the page. A simple list works perfectly:

Hours Monday to Friday: 7:00 AM – 6:00 PM Saturday: 8:00 AM – 4:00 PM Sunday: Closed

Plain text hours are readable by everyone, easy to update, and — again — good for search. If you love your designed hours graphic, keep it, but make sure the same information also appears as text nearby.

The directions button inside the map is part of the trap problem. Instead, add your own plain link that opens directions in the visitor’s own maps app:

Get directions to Riverside Bakery

A few important details for whoever maintains your site:

  • Make the link text descriptive. “Get directions to Riverside Bakery” tells a screen reader user exactly what the link does. A bare “Click here” or a lone map-pin icon tells them nothing.
  • If the link opens in a new tab, say so in the link text, e.g. “Get directions (opens in Google Maps).” People who cannot see the new tab open get disoriented otherwise.
  • Make sure it is a real text link, not an icon with no label. An icon-only button needs a hidden text label so assistive technology can announce its purpose.

Step 4: Let keyboard users skip the map

This is the one genuinely technical step, but it is small, and you can hand the exact instruction to whoever manages your site.

The embedded map almost certainly arrives as an <iframe> — a little window showing another page inside yours. Two things make it far more accessible:

  1. Give the iframe a title. A title attribute tells a screen reader what the frame is, so instead of “frame,” the user hears “Map showing the location of Riverside Bakery.” Your developer adds title="Map showing the location of Riverside Bakery" to the iframe tag.

  2. Make sure focus can move past it. The goal is that a keyboard user pressing Tab reaches the map, and one more Tab moves them out and on to the rest of the page — they are never trapped. Because the address and directions are already available as text above the map (Steps 1–3), it is also completely legitimate to remove the map’s interactive controls from the keyboard’s tab order entirely, so the map becomes a purely visual element that keyboard and screen reader users simply skip. Either approach is fine; being trapped is the only outcome that is not.

If that paragraph means nothing to you, that is okay — copy it into an email to whoever built your site. The phrase to use is: “Please make sure the embedded map has a descriptive title and that keyboard users can tab past it without getting stuck.”

A 60-second test you can run right now

You do not need any tools to check the most important things. You need your keyboard.

  1. Open your locations page.
  2. Click once at the very top of the page, then put your mouse down and only use the Tab key to move through the page.
  3. Watch the highlight box (the “focus indicator”) move from link to link.
  4. When it reaches the map, keep pressing Tab. Can you get past the map and continue down the page? Or are you stuck cycling through zoom and map controls forever?

If you get stuck, you have found a real barrier that affects every keyboard and screen reader user who visits. That is your priority fix.

For a second check, try this: imagine the map is just a gray box. Read only the text on the page. Can you find the address, the hours, and how to get there? If yes, you have built a page that works for everyone. If the only place your address appears is inside the map, you have work to do.

Why this matters beyond being kind

There is a real legal dimension here. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States and the European Accessibility Act in the EU, businesses are increasingly expected to make their websites usable by people with disabilities. “I couldn’t find the store’s address or hours because the only copy was locked inside an inaccessible map” is exactly the kind of concrete barrier that shows up in accessibility complaints and demand letters. Location and contact information is considered essential — if disabled customers cannot get it, that is a meaningful problem, not a nitpick. (This is general information, not legal advice; if you have received a complaint, talk to a qualified attorney.)

But honestly, the legal angle is the smaller reason. The bigger one is that roughly one in four adults has some form of disability, and local businesses live and die on local customers. A blind regular who can no longer figure out whether you are open, or a customer with a motor disability who gives up before finding your address, is a customer you lost for an entirely fixable reason. Making your locations page work in plain text is one of the highest-return accessibility fixes a small business can make: it is quick, it requires no design overhaul, and it helps your search ranking at the same time.

The short version

  • The map can stay. It just cannot be the only way to get your information.
  • Put your address and hours on the page as real, selectable text.
  • Add a descriptive “Get Directions” link instead of relying on the map’s built-in button.
  • Make sure keyboard users can tab past the map without getting trapped, and give the map a descriptive title.
  • Test it in 60 seconds with your Tab key and the “imagine the map is a gray box” check.

Do those five things and your locations page will work for the customers who are most likely to be quietly turned away today.

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