ADA compliant web design, built into the code instead of bolted on.
Someone who navigates by keyboard lands on your contact form. The fields have no labels, so their screen reader announces “edit text, edit text, edit text.” They cannot tell which box wants the phone number. That is a qualified customer with money in hand, and the site just quietly showed them the door.
I design and hand-code websites to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard accessibility work in the United States is generally measured against: real color contrast, a page you can operate without a mouse, alt text written by a person, forms that explain themselves, and headings that map the page for anyone reading it with something other than their eyes. I build to the standard. I am not an attorney and I do not certify legal compliance, and any page claiming it can is selling something. The studio is in Aurora, IL, and this work is not geography-locked.
The ADA never named a web standard. Everyone keeps landing on the same one anyway.
Here is what confuses almost every owner who starts reading about this. The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990, and it was written about physical places: doorways, ramps, counters, parking spaces. It contains no technical specification for websites. There is no line in the statute setting your contrast ratio, or saying your menu has to open with the Enter key. So when a vendor sells you an “ADA compliant website,” they are describing something the law itself never spelled out.
What filled that gap was the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. WCAG is not a law. It is a technical standard, and it is the one that keeps getting referenced wherever the question comes up: settlement agreements, consent decrees, procurement requirements, federal rulemaking. Section 508, covering federal agencies and much of what federal contractors deliver, points at WCAG. In 2024 the Department of Justice issued a rule for state and local government entities under Title II naming WCAG 2.1 Level AA specifically. That is why AA is the number this field builds to.
Courts have generally treated the websites of businesses that serve the public as connected to the ADA’s requirements, though how directly varies by jurisdiction and the legal picture is still moving. Exposure is not spread evenly either. The organizations that draw attention first tend to be the ones serving the general public (retail, medical and dental practices, law firms, hotels), anyone taking government money or bidding on government contracts, and e-commerce, where a checkout that cannot be completed without a mouse is a door that does not open.
I am a web designer, not a lawyer. I can tell you exactly what your site does and does not do against WCAG 2.1 AA, and I can fix it. Your attorney is the right person to tell you where your particular business sits.
- ALevel AThe floor. Fail these and whole sections of the site are unusable for some visitors.
- AALevel AAThe working benchmark, referenced by settlements and federal rules, and the level I build to.
- 3Level AAAAspirational. Worth borrowing from, not something the W3C expects a whole site to meet.
- !Most ExposedPublic-facing businesses, anyone taking government money, and e-commerce.
Not sure where your site stands? Send me the URL and I will check it for real.
Get in Touch →The job sheet for a site that everybody can use.
Accessibility is not one setting. It is a stack of small, specific decisions in the markup, nearly all invisible to a sighted visitor using a mouse. This is the spec I work through on every build and every remediation, and what breaks when it is skipped.
Color Contrast You Can Actually Read
Light gray text on white is the most common failure on the web, and usually a design choice nobody questioned. AA asks for 4.5:1 on body text and 3:1 on large text and meaningful interface elements. That is not only about blindness: it affects low vision, most people over fifty, and anyone reading on a phone in sunlight. Every color pair gets measured, not eyeballed.
Full Keyboard Navigation and Visible Focus
Plenty of people never touch a mouse: screen reader users, people with tremors or limited fine motor control, people using switch devices. Every menu, button, slider, and modal has to open, operate, and close from the keyboard, in an order matching the visual layout. The focus outline has to stay visible, and a designer deleted it on roughly half the sites I audit.
Alt Text That Describes Function, Not Decoration
Alt text is not a caption and not a keyword dumping ground. It tells someone who cannot see the image what that image is doing on the page. A team photo announced as “IMG_4471” is noise, and a button built from an image and announced as “image” is a dead end. Decorative graphics get an empty alt attribute so a screen reader skips them.
Form Labels and Error Messages That Say Something
This is where the money leaks. A field whose only label is placeholder text disappears the moment somebody types, and is often never announced at all. An error shown as a red border alone tells a screen reader user nothing, and a colorblind user nothing either. Every field gets a real label tied to its input, and errors say what went wrong and how to fix it.
A Heading Structure That Maps the Page
Screen reader users very often navigate by jumping between headings, the way a sighted visitor scans a page in a second and a half. That works only if the headings are real headings in order: one H1, H2s for sections, H3s underneath, nothing skipped. Page builders routinely ship four H1s and body text marked up as a heading because the font looked right.
Link Text That Makes Sense Out of Context
Assistive technology can pull every link on a page into one list, stripped of the sentences around them. Nine links that all say “click here” become nine identical items with no way to choose between them. Links get written to describe their destination on their own, and search engines read that same list.
Captions and Transcripts for Video and Audio
If your homepage leads with a video, everything in it is unavailable to anyone deaf or hard of hearing, and to the much larger group watching with the sound off in a waiting room. Captions cover the audio track. A transcript covers everything and is readable and searchable besides. Auto-generated captions are a starting point, not a finished job.
Motion, Animation, and Autoplay Under the Visitor’s Control
Parallax scrolling, auto-advancing carousels, and looping background video can cause real physical symptoms for people with vestibular disorders: dizziness, nausea, migraine. Anything moving for more than five seconds needs a way to pause it, and the site respects the reduced-motion setting people already have switched on. Nothing flashes rapidly, which is a seizure-safety line.
The overlay widget is the popular answer. It is not the same as fixing the site.
You have almost certainly been pitched one: a line of JavaScript you paste in, an accessibility icon in the corner, a monthly fee, and language suggesting the problem is now handled. These products are sold hard, and plenty of careful owners have bought one in good faith. So here is the honest version of what an overlay can and cannot do.
An accessibility overlay widget
- A script loaded on top of the page that tries to patch problems while the visitor is standing there
- It cannot invent a label for a field that has none, or a meaning for an image nobody described
- It cannot repair heading order, a broken tab sequence, or a control that was never a real button
- Many blind and low-vision users object to these toolbars, and some run extensions to block them
- It can conflict with the screen reader, magnifier, or browser settings a visitor already relies on
- Adopting one has not reliably kept businesses out of accessibility claims
- Monthly fee forever, and the page underneath is exactly as broken the day you cancel
Fixing it in the code
- The page itself is correct, so it works with whatever assistive technology the visitor trusts
- Labels, alt text, headings, and focus order live in the markup, where every browser and tool reads them
- Tested the way people actually browse: keyboard only, screen reader on, zoomed to 200 percent
- Nothing extra to load, so the page stays fast (see the care plan for keeping it that way)
- One flat price, agreed in writing, on the published rate card
- Stop paying me tomorrow and the accessibility work stays exactly where it is, because it is your code
// FAIR NOTE: an overlay is not nothing. Some visitors do use the toggles, and on a site nobody will rebuild this year, a widget plus a real remediation plan beats doing neither. What it is not is a substitute for the underlying work, and it should never be bought on the belief that it settles the question. The standard is measured against your page, not the widget on top of it. If somebody sold you one, keep it or drop it as you like, but let us look at what is underneath.
Paying monthly for a widget on a broken page? Let’s find out what is actually under it.
Start a Quote →Accessibility work and SEO work are mostly the same work.
This is the part that surprises owners, and the part that makes the budget make sense. A screen reader and a search engine crawler do remarkably similar jobs: both arrive without eyes, both read your markup rather than your layout, and both are working out what the page is about and what a visitor can do on it. Build the page so the first one succeeds and you have handed the second one everything it wanted.
I wrote about the performance half of this in web accessibility and performance, why they go hand in hand. The short version: the same lean, semantic markup that makes a page usable also makes it light, and page speed has been a ranking factor for years.
Semantic Headings
A screen reader user jumps between headings to find a section. A crawler reads the same outline to work out the page’s topic and hierarchy. One correct structure serves both.
Alt Text
Written for a person who cannot see the image, it doubles as the only description a search engine has of it. Honest alt text ranks in image search. Stuffing helps neither audience.
Descriptive Link Text
Assistive tech lists links out of context, and search engines read link text as a signal about the destination. “Click here” nine times wastes both.
Captions & Transcripts
A transcript makes your video usable without sound and adds several hundred words of indexable text to a page that had almost none. It is the rare fix that is unambiguously good for both.
// THE POINT: nobody has to choose between building for people and building for search. Most accessibility work is the same technical hygiene you would want anyway, done deliberately and documented.
Accessibility is not a one-time fix. It is a maintenance habit.
A site can launch clean and drift within a month. Somebody adds a PDF with no text layer. A staff member uploads a promo graphic with the offer baked into the image and nothing in the alt attribute. A new form goes up through a plugin shipping placeholder text instead of labels. None of it is anybody’s fault, and all of it puts barriers back. The sites that stay usable are the ones somebody checks on a schedule.
So the handoff includes that: a short written standard for your team covering alt text, headings, link text, and documents, plus a keyboard and screen reader pass at launch so you know the baseline is real. If you would rather it stay on my desk, a website care plan from $85 a month includes periodic accessibility checks alongside updates, backups, and performance monitoring. Every build also includes 90 days of post-launch edits, usually enough to catch the first round of drift. For the full picture of what a build covers, start with web design services.
The accessibility questions I get every week.
Ready for a site everybody can use?
Send me the URL and tell me what prompted the question: a complaint, a client requirement, a contract you are bidding, or a nagging sense the site is leaving people out. I will come back with a straight assessment against WCAG 2.1 AA and a flat quote in writing, usually inside a day. Prefer to talk it through? Call (331) 269-6120. If the honest answer is three fixes and not a rebuild, I will tell you that instead.