Is Your Website ADA Compliant? What Every Business Owner Needs to Know

Most business owners have never thought hard about website accessibility. It is not taught in business school, it is not in your operations manual, and if the site works fine for you, it is easy to assume it works fine for everyone. For a meaningful slice of your visitors, that assumption is wrong, and in the United States it carries real legal weight.

This is both a legal issue and a business one. People with disabilities make up a substantial part of any market, and a site they cannot use is a site that quietly turns them away. The good news is that the fixes are well understood, and many of them are within reach without a large budget. Note up front: this article is about US law. The Philippines has no exact equivalent statute for private websites, but accessibility remains a best practice everywhere, both for the people it serves and for the SEO and usability gains that come with it.

Does the ADA apply to business websites?

In the United States, yes. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed in 1990, and Title III prohibits discrimination in public accommodations. For decades that meant physical spaces like buildings, stores, and offices. In 2016 the Department of Justice issued guidance that Title III also applies to websites, on the reasoning that a website serving the public is itself a public accommodation. If your US business serves the public and has a website, that website is expected to be accessible to people with disabilities.

The standard courts and regulators point to is WCAG 2.1 at the AA level. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the widely accepted benchmark for accessibility, maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium. Meeting AA means your site works for people who are blind or have low vision and use screen readers or magnification, people who are deaf or hard of hearing and rely on captions and transcripts, people with motor impairments who navigate by keyboard or voice instead of a mouse, and people with cognitive differences who need clear language and logical structure.

What are the most common accessibility problems?

The most common accessibility problems are missing alt text, poor color contrast, broken keyboard navigation, missing form labels, uncaptioned video, weak heading structure, and untagged PDFs. Most sites share the same handful of issues.

• Missing alt text. Alt text is the written description a screen reader reads aloud in place of an image. Without it, the reader hits an image and the context is simply lost. "Woman smiling while using a laptop at a cafe" works; a blank or "Image" does not.
• Poor color contrast. WCAG requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18px or larger). Light gray text on white looks sleek and fails the standard. Our piece on how color choices affect visitor behavior covers the design side of this.
• Broken keyboard navigation. Some people navigate with only a keyboard. Every interactive element should be reachable by Tab, operable by Enter or Space, and show a visible focus indicator. Menus that only appear on hover, or buttons that respond only to a mouse click, exclude these users.
• Missing form labels. A field without a proper HTML label is impossible to interpret with a screen reader. Placeholder text does not count as a label.
• Uncaptioned video. Video without captions locks out deaf and hard-of-hearing users, and it also loses SEO value, since search engines cannot read video content without captions or a transcript.
• Weak heading structure and untagged PDFs. Screen reader users navigate by headings, so a logical H1, H2, H3 hierarchy matters; skipping levels for visual effect breaks it. PDFs need proper tagging and reading order to be usable too.

For the wider argument on why this matters beyond compliance, see why website accessibility is not optional.

Is there real legal risk?

Yes, in the US the legal risk is real and has been growing. Accessibility lawsuits under ADA Title III have become common, and they target small and mid-size businesses, not only large corporations. Several well-known companies have settled accessibility claims rather than litigate them. The practical takeaway is not fear; it is that fixing accessibility is far cheaper and simpler than defending a claim after the fact.

How do you check a website for accessibility?

You start with free automated tools, then test by hand, because automated checks only catch part of the picture. Run your pages through WAVE, Axe DevTools, or Lighthouse (built into Chrome). These flag obvious violations quickly and show you where to begin, though they cannot catch everything an automated scan misses.

Then test manually. Put your mouse aside and navigate a page using only the Tab key: can you reach every interactive element, see which one is focused, and activate buttons with Enter? That takes about fifteen minutes a page and surfaces issues tools miss. Check a few text-and-background color pairings with WebAIM's contrast checker; anything below 4.5:1 fails. Finally, spend a little time with a screen reader, NVDA on Windows or VoiceOver on Mac, and listen to whether your site makes sense without sight. Even ten minutes is eye-opening.

What can you fix yourself versus hand to a professional?

You can fix the simple things yourself; widespread or structural issues usually need a professional. The quick wins are adding descriptive alt text to every image, raising any low-contrast colors to meet the ratio, adding captions to video (YouTube's auto-captions are a starting point, professional captioning is better), and correcting heading order so each page follows a logical hierarchy. None of these require deep technical work, and together they clear the most common violations.

Bring in help when the problems are widespread: implementing full keyboard navigation, adding ARIA labels for dynamic content, auditing form structure, fixing PDF accessibility, and running thorough screen-reader and keyboard testing. A full audit and remediation can take a few weeks depending on the site's size, and it is worth budgeting for as a real line item rather than an afterthought. We build accessibility into projects from the start and can audit an existing site if you are not sure where you stand, book a call and we will take a look.

Accessibility is not a feature you bolt on. It is part of what a professional website is in 2026. Start with an audit, fix the biggest issues, test again, and keep it on the list rather than treating it as a one-time project. The web is for everyone, and your site should be too.