ADA website compliance

What the law asks, and what nobody hands you

The Americans with Disabilities Act is a civil rights law about access to businesses. It was written before most companies had a website, and it does not contain a technical specification for one. What filled that gap is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, usually cited at level AA. Attorneys, auditors, and settlement agreements point at WCAG because there is nothing more specific to point at.

Here is what a failure looks like in practice. A customer with low vision opens your quote form on her phone with the screen reader turned on. The phone number field has a gray placeholder that reads Phone, but no label attached to it in the code. The placeholder vanishes the second she starts typing, and with no label behind it there is nothing left telling her which box she is in. She loses her place, so she backs out and calls somebody else. Nothing on your end looks broken. The form works fine when you test it yourself.

Most accessibility problems are that ordinary. Light gray text on a white background. Photos with no alt text. A menu that only opens on hover, so a keyboard can never reach it. Video with no captions. A contact form whose fields are identified only by where they sit on the screen. None of it announces itself, which is exactly why it survives redesign after redesign.

We are not attorneys and this is not legal advice. It is also worth being skeptical of a script you paste in that promises instant compliance. Assistive software reads the underlying markup of the page, so the markup is where the work is.

Why this lands on a local service business

Two reasons, and the first one is not the lawsuit. Accessibility work is mostly plain usability work: real contrast, tap targets big enough for a thumb, form fields with labels actually attached to them, headings in an order that makes sense read aloud. Every one of those also helps a customer standing in a driveway in bright sun with one hand free and a dying battery.

The second reason is that demand letters about inaccessible websites do reach small companies, and being small is not a defense. Nobody can promise you will never receive one, and a vendor who promises that is selling something. What you can do is make the site usable, then keep your own record of what changed and when.

There is a side benefit worth knowing about. The same markup that helps a screen reader, meaning real headings, labeled controls, alt text, and a sensible reading order, is the markup that search crawlers and AI answer engines read too. An accessible page tends to be an easier page to parse.

If you are scoping a new site, put accessibility in the brief before design starts instead of retrofitting it after launch, which is how we handle it on a custom web design project.

How it relates to WCAG and the rest

WCAG is the standard. ADA website compliance is the legal conversation that borrows it. Alt text is one of the specific criteria named inside that standard, responsive design is how a page satisfies the part about staying usable when text is enlarged or the screen is small, and user experience is the wider bucket both of them sit in. If you read only one neighboring term, read WCAG, because that is where the actual success criteria are spelled out.