ADA Website Compliance: The Practical Guide
There's no official government ADA website checklist to check off — which is exactly why so many businesses either do nothing, or buy a widget that claims to solve it in one line of code. Here's what actually gets treated as the standard.
Where the risk actually sits
Overview
The ADA itself predates the modern web and never named a specific technical web standard. In practice, courts and DOJ guidance have converged on WCAG 2.1 (and increasingly 2.2) at the AA conformance level as the de facto benchmark for what "accessible" means for a website under Title III, even though no regulation formally mandates that exact version. That gap between "no official checklist" and "a de facto standard everyone is actually measured against" is where a lot of confusion — and a lot of ineffective quick fixes — comes from. Title III applies to private businesses open to the public with no fixed compliance deadline, which means the exposure is ongoing rather than tied to a single date, unlike Title II's government-entity deadlines.
Source-level fixes, not a workaround.
We benchmark your site against WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA — the standard actually referenced in DOJ settlements and case law — with a manual review of your real user journeys, not just an automated scan of the homepage. You get a dated findings report, source-level fixes (not a widget), a re-test confirming what's actually resolved, and an accessibility statement and evidence trail you can point to if a demand letter ever arrives.
Read the full explainer on what ADA compliance means