ADA & WCAG accessibility is
risk you can measure.

What is the ADA?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a U.S. civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. Most people know it for ramps, doorways and parking. For decades the Justice Department has said it also covers the digital front door: the websites and apps businesses use to serve the public. The idea underneath is plain. If the public can use your site, people with disabilities should be able to use it too.

For private businesses, no ADA regulation sets technical rules for websites. The Justice Department's guidance points to existing standards instead, and settlements and court cases keep landing on the same one: WCAG.

What is WCAG 2.2 AA?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international technical standard for accessible web content, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG 2.2 is the current version. It keeps the criteria of the earlier 2.1 (minus one obsolete one) and adds new ones, which matters because most laws still name 2.1. The U.S. Justice Department's 2024 rule for state and local government websites, for example, adopts WCAG 2.1 at level AA, the level rules usually require. There are three levels: A is the minimum, AA the usual requirement, AAA the strictest. We test against 2.2 AA, which covers the 2.1 AA ground and then some.

Everything in WCAG hangs off four principles, remembered as POUR: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. Those four words are the backbone of any accessibility audit, and we take them one at a time below.

Who has to comply?

This question has the most nuance, and the answer is that it depends on your organization and where you operate. As a general guide, and not legal advice, coverage has historically reached:

• Businesses open to the public in the United States (retail, hospitality, healthcare, professional services), under the ADA. The Justice Department applies it to their websites. Courts still disagree on some edges, such as businesses that exist only online.
• U.S. government websites: federal agencies under Section 508, which references WCAG, and state and local governments under the Justice Department's 2024 ADA rule, which adopts WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Many businesses selling to consumers in the EU, under the European Accessibility Act, whose technical benchmark is the EN 301 549 standard, itself built on WCAG.

If your website helps customers find you, learn about you, buy from you or contact you, accessibility very likely matters to your business. Whether it's legally required is a question for a qualified attorney. Where it creates risk and lost customers is what the checker is built to measure.

Websites now account for a large share of the ADA lawsuits filed in U.S. federal court, and demand letters and state-court cases come on top of that. Businesses of every size, from large brands to small companies, have received demand letters and complaints alleging that their websites can't be used by people who rely on screen readers, keyboard navigation or sufficient color contrast. Many of these matters end in settlements and remediation agreements rather than trials.

The barriers are familiar ones. The Justice Department's web guidance lists poor contrast, missing alt text, inaccessible forms and mouse-only navigation among the common problems, and the first three are also the failures automated tools detect most often on home pages. That is where an automated audit earns its keep. Keyboard problems usually need a person with a keyboard to confirm. Many of the fixes make the site easier for every visitor, with or without a disability.

Each card below matches a barrier the Justice Department's web guidance calls out: missing alt text, low contrast, keyboard traps and unlabeled forms. Automated testing catches three of them well, so our checker looks for those first. A keyboard trap usually takes a person pressing Tab to confirm.

Accessibility work pays off fastest when the common, high-risk issues go before the edge cases. That's how we order a remediation plan: most exposure and most affected users first, with the low-effort wins flagged early.

1. Add meaningful alt text to images. Describe what each informative image conveys, and mark purely decorative images so screen readers skip them. It takes little effort and closes one of the most common gaps on the web.
2. Fix color contrast. Bring body text and interactive elements up to the WCAG 2.2 AA contrast ratios so low-vision users can read them. It's often a small change to your palette.
3. Label every form field. Give each input a programmatic label and clear, specific error messages. Every contact, checkout or sign-up flow depends on this.
4. Make everything keyboard-operable. Every control should be reachable and usable by keyboard, in a logical focus order, with a visible focus indicator and nothing that traps focus.
5. Clean up structure and ARIA. Use correct headings and landmarks, and valid, minimal ARIA, so assistive technology can read your pages consistently.
6. Test with real assistive technology. Automated checks catch a lot, and miss the rest. Manual review, and testing alongside people who use screen readers and keyboards, is the part no tool replaces.

Each finding in a report is mapped to its WCAG 2.2 success criterion and labeled by confidence, so your developer knows what to change and you know what it buys you. Run the checker on your own site (it runs in sample mode while live scanning rolls out), or browse a sample report first.