Guide

Is my website ADA compliant?

Almost certainly not, in the strict sense, and neither is nearly any site. That is the honest starting point. What follows is what the law actually asks for, what anyone can check today, and what nobody can sell you.

The short answer

There is no such thing as an ADA certification for a website. No government body issues one. No vendor can issue one that carries legal weight. What exists is a standard, WCAG, and a body of case law and regulation that treats meeting that standard as evidence of accessibility.

So the question worth asking is not “am I compliant”. It is “how far am I from WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA, and what is the risk of the gap”. That question has a real answer, and part of it can be measured today.

What the law actually says

Titles II and III of the ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act was written in 1990 and does not mention websites. Courts have filled the gap, and they have not filled it consistently. Title III covers “places of public accommodation”. Some circuits require a connection to a physical place; others do not. A business operating nationally cannot rely on the reading of the friendliest circuit.

The 2024 Department of Justice rule

For state and local government, the ambiguity is gone. In April 2024 the DOJ issued a final rule under Title II that names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for web content and mobile apps. Compliance deadlines run by population size: larger entities have two years from publication, smaller ones three. If you run a city, county, school district, or public college site, you have a named standard and a date.

Section 508

Federal agencies, and anyone selling to them, work under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which incorporates WCAG 2.0 Level AA by reference. This is where the VPAT comes from: what a VPAT and an ACR actually are.

Outside the United States

The European Accessibility Act applies from June 2025 to a broad set of products and services sold in the EU, and the harmonised standard behind it, EN 301 549, is built on WCAG. Ontario’s AODA, the UK Equality Act, and others all point at the same standard. Building to WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the one action that helps everywhere.

Why lawsuits happen, and to whom

The volume of web accessibility lawsuits and demand letters in the US has run in the thousands per year for several years. The pattern is consistent: they cluster on retail and e-commerce, they usually cite a small set of the same barriers, and they very often name sites that had already bought something marketed as a fix.

The barriers cited are rarely exotic. Missing image alternatives, unlabelled form fields, low contrast text, keyboard traps, and inaccessible menus and modals cover most of it. Those are exactly the failures automated testing is good at finding, which is the honest case for running a scan first.

What you can find out today, for free

Automated testing reaches a definite verdict on a minority of the 55 WCAG 2.2 Level AA success criteria. That is not a small number of problems. It is a small proportion of the standard. Both things are true at once, and any tool that hides the second one is not helping you.

A scan will tell you, honestly:

• Every failure it can prove, with the code and a screenshot.
• How many criteria it actually decided, as a number.
• Which criteria it could only partly test, and why that is not a pass.
• Which criteria have no automated signal at all, and what checking them involves.

What no scan can tell you

Whether the alt text on an image says something useful. Whether a page still makes sense when a screen reader reads it in order. Whether a video’s captions are accurate. Whether an error message tells someone how to fix their mistake. Whether the tab order matches what a sighted user sees.

These are judgements, and a machine cannot make them. Every honest report says so. Ours prints the list.

What to do about it, in order

1. Scan. Free, a few minutes, and it gives you a factual list rather than a feeling.
2. Fix what the scan proved. These are certain failures. Start with the ones marked critical, and with anything that repeats across a template, since one fix clears many pages.
3. Do a keyboard pass. Unplug the mouse. Try to complete the main task on your site. This costs an hour and finds things no scan can.
4. Do a screen reader pass. NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS are free. Listening to your own checkout page is educational in a way no report is.
5. Work the human-only list. The report names each criterion and what checking it involves. This is the part that turns a scan into a defensible position.
6. Write it down. A record of what you tested, when, and what you found is the difference between “we are working on it” and a claim you can stand behind.

What not to do

Do not buy an overlay widget and call the problem solved. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission took action against accessiBe over its claims about its overlay product. Overlays can restyle a page. They do not repair the HTML underneath, and buying one has not kept sites out of court. What overlays do and do not fix.

Do not buy a compliance badge. There is no authority behind it. It advertises that you believe the problem is solved, to an audience that includes people who file claims.