Is My Website ADA Compliant?

An accessibility ramp running alongside concrete steps at a building entrance

If you've searched this, you're probably worried. Maybe you got a demand letter. Maybe a competitor did. Maybe someone mentioned it and now it's lodged in the back of your mind.

Let's start with the answer nobody selling accessibility software wants to give you: nobody can truthfully tell you that your website is "ADA compliant." Not a scanner, not a consultant, not us. Anyone who promises it is selling you a feeling.

That's not evasion. It's the single most useful thing to understand about this whole subject, and once you get it, the rest becomes much easier to navigate.

Why "compliant" isn't really a thing you can buy

The Americans with Disabilities Act was written in 1990, before commercial websites existed. It doesn't contain a checklist for your homepage. It says places of public accommodation must be accessible - and over the past decade, courts have increasingly agreed that this includes websites.

What courts have not done is publish a definitive technical standard that, once met, makes you immune. In practice they lean on WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), usually version 2.1 at Level AA, as the working benchmark. That's the thing to aim at.

But "we meet WCAG 2.1 AA" is a technical statement about your code. "You are ADA compliant" is a legal conclusion - and only a court gets to reach it. This is why every honest practitioner in this field talks about conformance and risk rather than compliance and certainty.

What actually breaks accessibility

The good news is that the failures are boringly consistent. The same handful of problems account for the overwhelming majority of real-world barriers - and of lawsuits.

• Images with no alt text. A screen reader announces "image" and moves on. If that image was your product, your menu, or your phone number, the user just doesn't get it.
• Form fields with no labels. If a field isn't properly labelled in code, a screen reader can't say what it's for. "Edit text" is not a helpful thing to hear when you're trying to check out.
• Poor colour contrast. Light grey text on a white background. It's a design trend, and it's unreadable for a lot of people with low vision. This one is usually your brand palette, and it's usually an easy fix.
• No keyboard access. Try it right now: put your mouse down and navigate your own site using only the Tab key. Can you reach the menu? The form? Can you check out? Plenty of people browse this way, and plenty of sites simply trap them.
• Broken heading structure. Screen reader users navigate by jumping between headings, the way you'd skim a page visually. If your headings are just big text rather than real

  tags, that navigation collapses.

None of this is exotic. Most of it is the kind of thing a developer fixes in an afternoon or two.

The thing you should not do

You will encounter accessibility overlays - a one-line script you paste into your site that promises to make it accessible automatically, usually for a monthly fee.

Don't.

They're widely and loudly criticised by the disabled users they claim to serve, many of whom actively block them. They frequently interfere with the screen readers people already use. And, most importantly for you: businesses get sued while running an overlay. In 2024, roughly a quarter of all website accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that had one installed, and the FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1 million for overstating what its product could do. Installing one is not a defence, and in some circles it's read as evidence that you knew about the problem and reached for the cheapest possible cover. (More on this in website accessibility lawsuits in California.)

Accessibility lives in your code. It cannot be sprayed on afterwards.

So how do you find out where you actually stand?

Two layers, and you need both.

1. Automated testing

Free tools (Google Lighthouse is built into Chrome; WAVE is a good browser extension) will scan a page and report failures - missing alt text, contrast problems, unlabelled fields.

Run one right now. It takes two minutes and it will tell you something useful.

But know the limit: automated testing catches roughly a third of real accessibility issues. It's very good at "this image has no alt attribute." It has no idea whether your alt text is meaningful, whether your page makes sense read aloud in order, or whether a real person could complete a purchase. A clean automated score is a floor, not a finish line - and anyone implying otherwise is either mistaken or hoping you are.

2. A human

Someone who actually navigates your site with a keyboard and a screen reader. This is where the real barriers surface, and it's why the honest people in this field never claim a tool alone is enough.

What we'd actually suggest

Don't panic, and don't buy a widget. Find out where you stand, fix the things that are genuinely broken, and be able to show you took it seriously. That last part matters more than people realise - demonstrating a good-faith, ongoing effort is a meaningfully better position than having done nothing.

Start with the automated layer, because it's free and it's fast. If it comes back clean, you're in better shape than most. If it comes back with two dozen failures, at least you now know, and most of them are an afternoon's work.

One last time, because it matters: we're a web development studio, not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice. We can tell you what's broken on your site and fix it. For the legal question - especially if a demand letter has already landed - talk to an actual attorney.

If you'd like us to run that first automated layer for you and send back a plain-English read on where you stand, that's exactly what our free Accessibility Check does.

Related reading

• Website accessibility lawsuits in California - why California businesses are targeted, and what the Unruh Act changes.
• How to make your website more accessible - the practical fixes, one at a time.
• ADA website lawsuits: what business owners should know - the wider legal picture.