Is your website accessible?

An accessible website is one people with disabilities can use too. That includes someone who is blind and uses a screen reader to hear the page, someone who can't use a mouse and gets around with a keyboard, and someone with low vision who zooms in on everything.

The standard for this is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, published by the W3C, the group that sets many of the web's standards. WCAG is built on four ideas: your site should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Each guideline has checks at three levels, A, AA and AAA. AA is the level most organizations work toward.

Every year, WebAIM, a nonprofit at Utah State University, tests the home pages of the top one million websites with an automated tool. Its 2026 report, with data from February 2026, found:

• 95.9% of those home pages had accessibility failures a tool could detect, up from 94.8% in 2025.
• The average home page had 56.1 detectable errors.
• The most common problems were low-contrast text (on 83.9% of home pages), images with no text description (53.1%), form fields with no label (51%) and empty links (46.3%).

These are the web's most popular sites, not small-business sites, and an automated tool can only catch some problems. WebAIM notes that the share of pages that fully meet WCAG is certainly lower than the 4.1% without detected failures.

We're not lawyers, and this isn't legal advice. But here's what the U.S. Department of Justice says on ADA.gov:

• Businesses open to the public are covered by Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Justice Department's guidance says those businesses need to make sure the goods and services they offer to the public, including online, are accessible to people with disabilities.
• There's no detailed technical rule for businesses yet. The guidance says businesses have some flexibility in how they get there, and it points to WCAG as helpful guidance.
• State and local governments now have a specific rule. In 2024 the Justice Department adopted WCAG 2.1 level AA for their websites and apps.

If you have questions about your own business, talk to a lawyer who knows the ADA.

The W3C publishes Easy Checks, a first look at accessibility anyone can do. Here are five of them:

1. Page titles. Look at the browser tab. Does it say what the page is, like "Services | My Business Co."? Every page should have its own title.
2. Image descriptions. Every meaningful image needs a short text description (called alt text) that a screen reader can read out. Ask whoever manages your site, or check your website builder's image settings.
3. Headings. Big headings should actually be headings in the page's code, in order, so people using screen readers can jump between sections.
4. Contrast. Light grey text on a white background is hard for many people to read. WCAG asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal-size text. Free online contrast checkers will tell you in seconds.
5. Keyboard. Put your mouse aside and press the Tab key. Can you reach every link and button? Can you always see where you are on the page?

Every site we build, on every package, is built to WCAG 2.1 AA and reviewed by our team before launch. Flagship sites also come with a written accessibility statement and an audit report showing how the site was checked. With our Maintenance plan, we check every month that your site still passes our accessibility checks.

Curious how we test our own site? It's all in our Accessibility Statement.