What "ADA Compliant" Can Honestly Be Sold to You
There is no certification. No government body inspects private business websites and issues a seal, so "ADA compliant" is not a status anyone can grant you. What exists is a measurable standard — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at Level AA — that courts, settlements, and the Department of Justice keep pointing to, and a site can be measured against it.
That distinction matters commercially, because a large industry sells the other thing. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalized a $1 million order against accessiBe, the largest accessibility-widget vendor, over claims that its automated product could make any website WCAG compliant. The order bars the company from repeating that claim without evidence. Plenty of agencies are still repeating it.
So here is what we will actually say: we build and remediate sites to be measurably accessible against WCAG 2.2 AA, we show you the measurements, and we do not promise you will never receive a demand letter. Nobody can. This page is also not legal advice — the plain-English guide to ADA website compliance we published free covers where the law currently stands, and your attorney covers your situation.
The Overlay Widget Is the Thing to Avoid
Most small businesses meet accessibility through a sales call selling a script tag. Paste one line, get a floating toolbar with contrast and font-size buttons, pay monthly, feel covered.
The problem is mechanical, not ideological. An overlay sits on top of the page. It does not go back and label your form fields, name your icon-only buttons, fix a heading structure that jumps from H2 to H5, or give your images alt text. A screen reader still encounters exactly what it encountered before. Worse, overlays frequently interfere with the assistive technology a visitor already has configured, which is why they are unpopular with the people they are sold as helping.
The litigation data says the same thing. UsableNet's tracking of 2025 accessibility lawsuit filings — more than 5,000 digital accessibility cases across federal and state courts — found roughly a quarter of them targeted companies that already had a widget installed, with no meaningful reduction in filings against widget users over the year.
It is also a subscription that never finishes. You pay every month, forever, for something that leaves the underlying code exactly as it was. Fixing the source code is a one-time cost that stays fixed.
Six Failures Are 96% of the Problem
Accessibility sounds unbounded until you look at what actually gets flagged. WebAIM scans the top million home pages every year. The 2026 WebAIM Million report found detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of home pages, averaging 56.1 errors per page — both worse than the year before. And six failure types account for 96% of all detected errors:
| Failure | Share of home pages |
|---|---|
| Low contrast text | 83.9% |
| Missing alternative text for images | 53.1% |
| Missing form input labels | 51.0% |
| Empty links | 46.3% |
| Empty buttons | 30.6% |
| Missing document language | 13.5% |
Every one of those is a decision made when the markup is written. A contrast ratio is a color choice. A form label is one attribute. A document language is one line in the page head. None of them are hard problems — they are problems that were never anyone's job on the way to launch, repeated across thousands of pages by themes and builders that shipped the wrong default.
Automated scanning catches roughly a third of real accessibility issues, so clearing these six is not the finish line. It is, however, the majority of what a demand-letter scan will find, and it is the cheapest work available.
Built Accessible Costs Nothing Extra. Retrofitted Costs Real Money.
On a new build, accessibility is not a line item and we do not price it as one. Semantic HTML, real labels tied to their inputs, headings used for structure instead of styling, contrast checked against the brand palette before it is signed off, visible focus indicators left in place, and navigation that works with the Tab key alone are all things we do while writing the page, at no additional cost, on every SEO website design project.
Remediating an existing site is different work with a different shape:
- Scan and manual pass. Automated tooling for the six failures above, then the manual work it cannot do — keyboard-only navigation of every template, focus order, form error handling, zoom to 200%, and a screen reader pass over the pages that matter.
- Source-level fixes. Contrast corrections in the stylesheet, alt text on every meaningful image, accessible names on icon-only controls, heading structure rebuilt, keyboard traps removed.
- The template problem. Fixes applied to the page template rather than page by page, so new content inherits them instead of reintroducing the same error.
- A written record. What was found, what was fixed, what remains, and why. If a demand letter ever arrives, documented remediation effort is a materially better position than a widget subscription.
What Accessibility Work Costs
| Route | Typical cost | Honest fit |
|---|---|---|
| Do the common fixes yourself with our free guide | Your time | A site you can edit, with contrast and alt text as the main gaps |
| One-off remediation by a developer | A few hundred to a few thousand | A reasonably built site with a bounded list of issues |
| Fixed in place on a monthly plan | Included in your changes | A site we manage, or one we can safely take over |
| Rebuilt accessible by construction | $1,500 one-time | A theme or builder that fights every fix |
We do not sell a fixed-price accessibility package, because the scope is unknowable until someone measures the site. What we do is scan it free as part of a consultation and tell you which row you are in — including the row where you should spend an afternoon on alt text and keep your money.
For sites we manage, accessibility work is a change request like any other. A round of contrast, label, and alt-text fixes uses one of the changes already included in your month on any published plan: $20 Host, $99 Maintain, $249 Grow, $499 Scale.
When Remediation Costs More Than Replacement
Some sites resist fixing. A theme that hard-codes low-contrast gray into forty component styles, a page builder that strips focus outlines globally, hover-only dropdown menus a keyboard user cannot open, or plugin-generated form widgets that emit unlabeled inputs on every page — each of these can be patched, and each patch gets overwritten at the next theme or plugin update.
That is the case where remediation becomes a subscription of its own. When the fixes will not stay fixed, replacement is the cheaper answer, and the conversation becomes a website redesign instead. The sites we build are hand-written markup rather than builder output, so a contrast token or a label fix is made once, in one place, and stays made.
Staying Accessible Is Where Most Sites Fail
An accessible site drifts the same way a fast one does. Someone adds a blog post with three images and no alt text. A new booking embed arrives with unlabeled controls. A brand refresh lightens the body text by ten percent and quietly breaks contrast site-wide.
Two things prevent it, and neither is a widget. The first is that new content has to be produced with accessibility already in it — the recurring articles published through website automation get alt text, heading structure, and descriptive link text as part of the pipeline, before a human reviews the piece, rather than as a cleanup pass nobody schedules. The second is that someone has to keep checking: accessibility scanning runs alongside the Core Web Vitals audits on every deploy for sites under website maintenance, so a regression is caught at the deploy that caused it instead of by a plaintiff's firm eighteen months later.
The Part Everyone Forgets: The Software Behind the Login
Marketing pages get the accessibility attention. Client portals, booking flows, quoting tools, and intake forms rarely do — and those are the screens where someone is trying to accomplish something rather than read something. An unlabeled date picker or a modal that traps keyboard focus does not just fail a scan; it stops a customer from booking.
When we build custom business software or a custom CRM, the same standards apply behind the login as in front of it: labeled inputs, keyboard-operable controls, focus management in dialogs, and error messages that announce themselves. It is worth saying plainly that this is one of the practical arguments for owning your software instead of renting it — when a rented widget has an accessibility defect, you can file a support ticket and wait, and that is the entire extent of your control.
What We Will Not Do
- Sell you certification. It does not exist for private business websites. Any agency offering an "ADA certified" badge is selling a graphic.
- Install an overlay. Not as a product, not as a stopgap. If you already have one, we will tell you honestly what it is and is not doing before you renew.
- Promise you cannot be sued. Anyone can receive a demand letter, including sites in genuinely good shape. What remediation buys is a real defense and a site more people can use, not immunity.
- Give you legal advice. We build websites. Where you stand legally is a conversation for an attorney, and we will say so rather than guess.
- Chase AAA. Level AA is the recognized target. Pushing every criterion to AAA is expensive, sometimes conflicts with other goals, and is not what the standard expects of a small business site.
Get a Straight Read on Where You Stand
Send us the URL. We will run the scan, do a keyboard pass over your key templates, and tell you what is failing, what it would take to fix, and which of the four routes above actually fits — including the times that route costs you nothing. Book a free consultation, or read the full pricing first.