Is your website accessible to people who use screen readers, navigate by keyboard, or need larger text and stronger contrast? For a growing number of businesses, that question is also a legal one.
What the ADA and WCAG mean for websites
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses open to the public to be accessible to people with disabilities, and the U.S. Department of Justice has made clear this applies to websites. Website accessibility lawsuits and demand letters have become common, and they target businesses of every size.
The ADA doesn’t spell out technical rules for websites, so courts and regulators look to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at Level AA is the standard most organizations aim for.
An older website isn’t automatically compliant. Standards have evolved, and sites built years ago often fall short of today’s guidelines.
What WCAG asks for
WCAG is organized around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. In practice, common requirements include:
- Text alternatives (alt text) for meaningful images
- Enough color contrast between text and background
- Everything works with a keyboard alone, with a visible focus indicator
- Form fields have labels, and errors are explained clearly
- Headings and landmarks give the page a logical structure
- Videos have captions
- Links and buttons describe where they go or what they do
Why an accessibility widget isn’t enough
Accessibility overlays and widgets add a toolbar for adjusting text size, contrast, and similar settings, and some claim to fix accessibility problems automatically. They can be tempting, but they don’t make a website compliant on their own.
- They can’t reliably fix the underlying code, such as unlabeled forms, missing alt text, or menus that don’t work by keyboard.
- Many people who rely on assistive technology already have their own tools, and overlays can interfere with them.
- Websites using overlays continue to receive accessibility lawsuits.
Disability advocates and accessibility professionals widely recommend fixing issues in the site itself instead.
How to make your website accessible
- Scan your site. An automated accessibility scan finds common issues across your pages and ranks them by severity.
- Test by hand. Try using your site with only a keyboard. Try a screen reader such as NVDA (Windows) or VoiceOver (Mac and iPhone) on your key pages.
- Fix issues at the source in your theme, templates, and content, starting with the most serious and the most-visited pages.
- Publish an accessibility statement explaining your commitment and how people can report problems.
- Keep monitoring. New pages and content can introduce new issues, so scan regularly.
Automated scans catch many problems but not all, so treat a good score as a strong start rather than proof of compliance.
Find out where your site stands
Audsey scans your website for accessibility issues, explains each one, and tracks your progress as you fix them.
More guidance on web accessibility and the ADA is available from the Department of Justice: ada.gov/resources/web-guidance. See also why website accessibility matters more than ever.
