Web accessibility, explained properly

What each guide answers, and who it is for

The cards above are the short version. This is the longer one — what question each guide exists to settle, who should read it, and what you will be able to do when you finish.

ADA website compliance

Answers the legal question: am I actually required to make my website accessible, and to what standard, given that no federal web regulation for private businesses exists? Written for owners and managers rather than developers. It separates what is law (Section 508, the DOJ’s Title II rule for government sites) from what is convention (WCAG as the settlement standard), explains who is being sued and what the complaints plead, and ends with a five-step order of work. Read it first if a demand letter, an insurer or a procurement form is the reason you are here.

WCAG 2.2 Level AA in plain English

Answers the requirements question: what exactly do the rules ask me to change? All 55 Level A and AA success criteria, translated out of specification language and grouped by the work — media, structure, contrast, keyboard, navigation, forms — rather than by criterion number. Written for whoever will actually edit the site. Use it as the reference you come back to, not a single sitting.

Why accessibility overlays do not work

Answers the purchasing question: can I solve this with a subscription widget?For anyone currently being pitched one. It walks through the FTC’s order against the largest vendor, the lawsuit counts for sites running overlays, and the technical reasons a script injected at page load cannot fix markup it cannot understand — then lists what to do instead at four budget levels, starting at free.

How to write image alt text

Answers the writing question: what do I actually type into the alt attribute? For content editors and anyone who uploads images. One decision question, the same photograph alt-texted four different ways depending on where it appears, the phrases to delete on sight, and the hard cases — icons, charts, logos, linked thumbnails — settled one by one.

Keyboard accessibility testing

Answers the testing question: does my site work without a mouse? No tool can tell you; this shows you how to find out yourself in ten minutes, with no software and no expertise. Includes a table of the eight failures you are most likely to hit, the criterion each one breaks, and the fix. If you only ever do one thing from this whole section, do this pass on your checkout or contact form.

If you only have an hour

Most people arrive here in one of three situations, and the right first move is different for each.

The short version of all of it

If you read nothing else on this site, this is the part that matters. Web accessibility litigation is a volume practice: federal filings reached 3,117 in 2025, up 27% year on year, and over 5,000 counting state courts. The defendants are mostly small businesses, and the allegations are almost always the same short list — images with no text alternative, form fields with no label, controls with no readable name, text below 4.5:1 contrast, video with no captions, and content that cannot be operated with a keyboard.

That list is the whole game. It is a few hours of work on most sites, it is what the complaints are built from, and it is what actually stops disabled people using your site — which is the reason it is worth doing regardless of the legal weather. What it is not is a product you can buy: in January 2025 the FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1,000,000 for claiming otherwise.

The vocabulary, in one pass

Ten terms cover almost every conversation on this subject. The guides use all of them, so here they are once, in plain words.

• ADA — the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It bans disability discrimination by businesses open to the public but never mentions websites; courts and settlements filled that gap.
• Title III / Title II — the parts of the ADA covering private businesses and government bodies respectively. Only Title II has an actual web regulation, adopting WCAG 2.1 AA for state and local government sites.
• WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C, a standards body, not a government. The document everyone borrows when the law is silent.
• Level A / AA / AAA — WCAG’s tiers. A failures tend to block people entirely; AA failures make things much harder; AAA is aspirational. “WCAG AA” is the phrase that appears in settlements and contracts.
• Success criterion — one individual testable requirement inside WCAG, identified by a number like 1.1.1. Level A and AA of WCAG 2.2 contain 55 of them.
• Screen reader — software that reads the page aloud or to a braille display. It navigates by the page’s real structure — headings, landmarks, labels — not by what the page looks like.
• Alt text — the text a screen reader announces in place of an image. The most cited failure in ADA complaints and the cheapest to fix.
• Focus indicator — the visible outline showing which element keyboard input will act on. Deleting it in CSS is common and is a WCAG failure.
• Overlay — a third-party script promising automated accessibility. See the guide above for why the promise does not hold.
• Accessibility statement — a published page saying what has been fixed, what remains, and how a person who hits a barrier can reach a human. Not a legal shield; still worth having.

Free tools that go with these

• Accessibility checker — scan a page for the machine-detectable failures, ranked by how often each gets cited in ADA complaints.
• Color contrast checker — check any two colors against AA and AAA and get the nearest color that passes.

And when the findings point at the way the site was built rather than at content you can edit — custom controls with no keyboard support, templates with no structure — that is development work. It is what we do the rest of the week: web development, UI and UX design, and dedicated teams for California businesses — one of the three states where most of this litigation is filed.