Website accessibility lawsuits have become common enough that most businesses now hear about compliance from their lawyer rather than their designer. That is the wrong order, but it is where a lot of organisations start.

What the standard actually is

The Americans with Disabilities Act does not publish a technical checklist for websites. In practice, courts and settlements have converged on WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, at level AA. That is the standard to build against.

The issues we find most often

Across the sites we audit, the same handful of problems account for the majority of failures.

• Images without alt text. Every meaningful image needs a description. Decorative images need an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them.
• Insufficient colour contrast. Light grey text on white fails, and it is everywhere. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1.
• Keyboard traps. Every interactive element must be reachable and operable with a keyboard alone, and the focus outline has to be visible. Removing focus styles because they look untidy is a compliance failure.
• Unlabelled form fields. A placeholder is not a label. Each input needs a real, associated label element.
• Video without captions. Pre-recorded video needs captions, and audio content needs a transcript.
• Headings used for styling. Heading levels describe document structure. Choosing an h4 because it happens to be the right size breaks navigation for screen reader users.

Automated tools find about a third of it

Scanners are useful and they are not sufficient. They will catch missing alt attributes and contrast failures. They will not tell you whether your alt text is meaningful or whether your site is genuinely usable with a keyboard. That part requires a person.

Overlay widgets are not a fix

The one-line script that promises instant compliance does not deliver it, and their presence has featured in litigation rather than preventing it. Fix the underlying markup.

Accessibility done properly makes a site better for everyone. Clearer structure, better contrast and sane keyboard behaviour are just good design that happens to also be a legal requirement.