This is a practical guide, not legal advice. If you have received a demand letter, speak to an attorney — and start an audit, because knowing what actually fails is what your attorney will need.

Does the ADA really apply to my website?

In practice, yes, if your business serves the public. The Americans with Disabilities Act was written in 1990 and does not mention websites, which is the root of most of the confusion. But US courts have consistently held that Title III — covering "places of public accommodation" — extends to the websites of businesses open to the public, and thousands of web accessibility claims are filed every year.

A common and expensive misconception is that this only affects large national brands. It does not. A large share of claims target small and mid-sized businesses, for a straightforward reason: the failures are easy to find automatically, and a small business is more likely to settle quickly than litigate.

In 2024 the Department of Justice issued a rule under Title II explicitly adopting WCAG 2.1 Level AA for state and local government websites. That rule does not bind private businesses directly, but it matters: it is the federal government formally naming WCAG as the technical standard, which strengthens its role as the benchmark courts reference for everyone else.

What standard you are actually measured against

WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are published by the W3C. Version 2.2 is current; Level AA is the conformance level regulators, courts and settlement agreements consistently reference.

WCAG is organised around four principles — content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust — and defines roughly fifty testable success criteria at Level AA. It sounds daunting. In practice, a handful of failures account for the overwhelming majority of real-world problems and nearly all lawsuits.

The eight failures that cause most claims

  1. Images without alt text. Every meaningful image needs a text alternative describing what it conveys. Decorative images need an explicitly empty alt="" so screen readers skip them rather than announcing a filename.
  2. Insufficient colour contrast. Normal text needs 4.5:1 against its background; large text and interface components need 3:1. Light grey on white and white on a mid-tone brand colour are the two most common failures, and both are trivially detected by automated scanners — which is exactly why they appear in so many complaints.
  3. Form fields without labels. Every input needs a properly associated <label>. Placeholder text is not a label: it disappears when the user types, and it is not reliably announced.
  4. Keyboard traps and unreachable controls. Everything must be operable with a keyboard alone. Test it yourself: put the mouse down and Tab through your site. If you cannot open the menu, reach every link, and submit the form, neither can a substantial number of your customers.
  5. No visible focus indicator. Keyboard users must be able to see where they are. Designers frequently remove focus outlines because they consider them ugly; this is a direct AA failure and one of the easiest to fix.
  6. Videos without captions. Pre-recorded video needs synchronised captions. Auto-generated captions are a starting point, not a finish line — they need correcting, particularly for names and technical terms.
  7. Meaningless link text. Screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of links. Fifteen links all reading "click here" or "read more" is a list of nothing. Link text should make sense read in isolation.
  8. Broken heading structure. Headings are the primary navigation mechanism for screen reader users. One <h1> per page, then properly nested <h2> and <h3> — chosen for structure, never for how big the text looks.

Why accessibility overlays do not solve this

Overlay products promise compliance from a single line of JavaScript — the floating accessibility icon with contrast and font-size controls. They are heavily marketed to exactly the small businesses most worried about this, and they do not work.

The evidence is not subtle. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against websites that had an overlay installed at the time of the complaint. Hundreds of accessibility professionals, including many who are themselves screen reader users, have signed a public statement advising against them.

The reason is structural. An overlay runs in the browser after the page has loaded. It cannot know what an unlabelled image depicts, cannot infer what an unlabelled form field is for, and cannot repair a broken heading hierarchy. Worse, overlays sometimes interfere with assistive technology that was already working correctly, making a site harder to use for the people they claim to serve.

Genuine compliance means fixing the underlying code. There is no shortcut, and a subscription that promises one is buying you a false sense of security.

A realistic order to fix things in

  1. Run an automated scan. Free tools — axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse in Chrome — will find the mechanical failures in minutes. Expect them to catch roughly a third of real issues; that third is still worth clearing first.
  2. Fix contrast and alt text. The two most commonly cited failures, and usually the cheapest to resolve.
  3. Do a keyboard pass. Tab through every template. Fix anything unreachable, anything that traps focus, and restore visible focus indicators.
  4. Fix forms. Proper labels, clearly marked required fields, and error messages that are announced rather than shown only in red.
  5. Test with a screen reader. NVDA is free on Windows, VoiceOver is built into macOS and iOS. Half an hour here reveals things no scanner will.
  6. Publish an accessibility statement. Document your conformance level, known limitations and how to report a barrier. It is good practice and it is evidence of good-faith effort.

The part that is not about lawsuits

Roughly one in four US adults has some form of disability. Building a site that excludes them is a commercial decision as much as a legal exposure, and it is a bad one.

Accessibility improvements also help people nobody counts as disabled: captions get watched in noisy environments, good contrast matters in sunlight, and clear keyboard operation helps power users. And there is a direct SEO benefit — alt text, semantic headings, descriptive links and clean landmark structure are simultaneously accessibility requirements and the exact signals search engines and AI models use to understand a page. Work done for accessibility is rarely wasted.

What it costs to fix

For a small brochure site, a professional audit typically starts around $2,500, and remediation depends entirely on what the audit finds — a well-built site may need six hours, a page-builder site with deep structural problems may need sixty. Building accessibility in from the start on a new site costs close to nothing, which is the real argument for doing it at the design stage rather than after a letter arrives.

We audit against WCAG 2.2 AA with real keyboard and screen-reader testing, then fix what we find. See our ADA compliance service, or read this site's own accessibility statement.