ADA compliance and web accessibility for WordPress

If you serve the public in the US, very likely. Courts have repeatedly treated websites as places of public accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and e-commerce sites and businesses with a physical location are the most frequently targeted. Several other countries, including the UK, Canada and Australia, require WCAG compliance outright. We are not lawyers, so for a definitive answer on your situation speak to one.

The ADA is the federal law prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities. WCAG is the technical standard, published by the W3C, that defines what an accessible website actually looks like. The ADA does not name WCAG, but courts and regulators use it as the benchmark, so WCAG 2.1 AA is what we work to.

The IRS Section 44 credit covers 50% of eligible accessibility expenses in a tax year, up to $5,000, for small businesses that qualify. It can offset a significant part of the work. Check eligibility with your accountant, and we will provide whatever documentation they need.

No. An overlay tool helps, and we include one, but it cannot fix underlying code. Contrast, heading structure, form labels and keyboard navigation have to be corrected in the site itself. Widget-only solutions have been named in lawsuits precisely because they leave the real problems in place.

They overlap more than most people expect. Alt text, captions, transcripts, clean heading structure, sitemaps and readable contrast are all accessibility requirements and ranking factors. Screen readers and search engine crawlers read a page in much the same way, so fixing one usually improves the other.

An audit takes about a week. Remediation depends on the size of the site and what the audit finds: a small brochure site is usually days, a large e-commerce store can take several weeks. You get the timeline with the quote.

Usually a letter from a law firm stating that a person with a disability could not use your website, citing the ADA and asking for a settlement. Amounts commonly run into several thousand dollars before legal fees, and they often arrive with a short deadline. Many are sent in volume to businesses that share the same obvious failures, which is why fixing those failures is the cheapest insurance available.

The most common failures we find are: images with no alt text, colour contrast too low to read, headings used for styling rather than structure, form fields with no labels, buttons and menus that cannot be reached with a keyboard, video with no captions, and PDFs that screen readers cannot open. The audit tells you which of these apply to you and how serious each one is.

Barely. Most fixes are invisible: code structure, labels, alt text. Where contrast is too low we may need to adjust a colour, and we will show you options before changing anything. The accessibility interface itself sits behind a small icon and is styled to match your branding.

New content is where compliance quietly slips. That is what the monthly monitoring is for: new pages and posts are scanned, problems are flagged, and small fixes are handled as part of the plan. You get a short report each month showing what changed.