What makes a website ADA compliant?

If your business is open to the public, the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to what you offer online too. This page sets out what the U.S. Department of Justice says about websites, the standard most people measure against, and what you can check on your own site this week. It is information, not legal advice: for your own situation, ask a lawyer.

What the law says, in the Department of Justice's words

The DOJ's guidance on web accessibility (https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/) says the ADA applies to state and local governments (Title II) and to businesses open to the public (Title III), and that businesses open to the public must provide "full and equal enjoyment" of their goods and services to people with disabilities, including what they provide online.

Two points in that guidance matter most to a small business:

• There is no single technical rule for private businesses. The guidance says businesses have flexibility in how they comply, and points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Section 508 Standards as existing technical standards that can help.
• Flexibility is not an exemption. The same page says businesses still must make sure the goods and services they provide to the public, including online, are accessible.

The specific rule you may have read about, with WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard, is for state and local governments, not private businesses. Its compliance dates were moved by an interim final rule published on 20 April 2026: 26 April 2027 for governments serving 50,000 people or more, 26 April 2028 for smaller ones (https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/). Many private sites use the same WCAG level as their yardstick because it is the one the government picked for itself.

What WCAG asks for, in plain words

WCAG (https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) is long, but most of what goes wrong on small business sites is a short list:

• Text you can read: enough contrast between text and background, and text that can be enlarged without the page breaking.
• Everything works with a keyboard alone: menus, buttons and forms, with a visible outline on whatever has focus.
• Pictures described: every meaningful image has alternative text a screen reader can read out.
• Forms that say what they want: each field has a label, and errors say what to fix.
• Nothing that moves or flashes if the visitor's device asks for reduced motion.
• A clear structure: one main heading per page, headings in order, links that say where they go.

Check your own site in ten minutes

1. Put the mouse away and press Tab from the top of your home page. Can you see where you are on every step? Can you reach the phone number, the menu and the contact form and send it?
2. Zoom your browser to 200%. Does the text still fit, or does it overlap and cut off?
3. Turn on your phone's screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and listen to your home page. Do the pictures make sense? Do the buttons say what they do?
4. Look for light gray text on white, or white text on a photo. Those are the commonest contrast failures.

Be wary of anything that promises compliance from one line of code added to your site: accessibility lives in how each page is built, so it has to be fixed in the pages themselves.

How we build for it

On the sites we build, these are part of the build, not an extra (as stated on our own accessibility page):

• Every page works with the keyboard alone, with a visible focus outline and a link to skip straight to the content.
• Colors come only from palettes measured against the WCAG contrast standard before they can be chosen.
• Text can be enlarged without the layout breaking; if a device asks for reduced motion, nothing moves.
• Pages need no JavaScript to be read or used.
• Automated checks run before every publish and stop it if one fails: alt text on every image and one main heading on every page among them.
• Every site gets an accessibility statement with a way to report a problem.

Automated checks catch a lot but not everything, which is why the statement invites people to tell you what did not work. Open a dental practice, a hair salon or an HVAC company we built as examples and try the Tab test on them.

If your current site fails the checks

Some problems are quick fixes on any platform: alt text, a contrast change, labels on a form. If the problems are in the theme or the plugins themselves, a rebuild (USD 1,800 once) moves your content to a site built this way and keeps every old address working. Starting from nothing, a new website is USD 1,500 once.

Tell us what you do and where you do it.

Written with AI help. Not legal advice. Sources: ada.gov (both pages above) and w3.org, read 2026-10-29; our own published accessibility page and prices, checked 2026-10-29.