How to make your website ADA compliant

An ADA compliant website is one that people with disabilities can perceive, navigate, and use. The ADA itself does not list technical rules for websites, so US courts and the Department of Justice use WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the practical benchmark — covering contrast, alt text, keyboard access, labels, captions, and page structure.

If your business is open to the public in the US — retail, e-commerce, restaurants, healthcare, hotels, banking, services — courts have consistently treated your website as a place of public accommodation under ADA Title III. State and local government sites are explicitly covered by Title II, and federal contractors fall under Section 508.

The most common consequence is a demand letter or federal lawsuit from a plaintiff’s firm — thousands of web accessibility lawsuits are filed in the US every year, and e-commerce sites are the most frequent target. Beyond legal costs and settlements, an inaccessible site simply turns away the roughly 1 in 4 US adults living with a disability.

Start with an automated accessibility scan — it catches common WCAG failures like low contrast, missing alt text, and unlabeled forms in minutes. Then verify the things automation can’t judge: navigate your key pages using only a keyboard, and check that forms, menus, and checkout work with a screen reader.

It ranges from near-zero for a small site with fixable templates to significant remediation projects for large platforms. A practical path: run a free scan to size the problem, fix high-impact issues in your theme and templates, and add visitor-facing controls with a widget — Inclusense plans start at $49/month with a free 14-day trial.

Not exactly. The ADA is a US civil-rights law; WCAG is a technical standard published by the W3C. Because the ADA doesn’t define website rules, courts and the DOJ use WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the de facto measure of whether a website is accessible — so in practice, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA is how you demonstrate ADA compliance.

No single tool can guarantee legal compliance, and widgets that promise instant compliance overstate what overlays do. A widget gives visitors real controls — contrast, text size, reading support — and improves usability immediately, but structural issues like missing alt text and unlabeled forms must be fixed in your code. The strongest approach combines both.

Some themes and templates are built with accessibility in mind — look for WCAG 2.1 AA claims, keyboard-tested navigation, sufficient default contrast, and semantic HTML. But no template stays compliant by itself: the content, images, forms, and plugins you add determine whether the finished site actually meets the standard.