ADA Website Compliance Audit

Website accessibility claims in the United States are brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and although the ADA itself does not name a technical standard for websites, courts and settlements have converged on WCAG as the yardstick. That is the standard measured here.

What matters practically is that most filings begin with automated scanning. Nobody browses the web looking for inaccessible sites; software finds the same short list of machine-detectable failures at scale, and a letter follows. Fixing that short list removes you from the easiest tier of target.

The failures that scanning finds

• Text with insufficient contrast against its background
• Images with no text alternative, and decorative images not marked as decorative
• Form fields whose only label is placeholder text that vanishes on typing
• Buttons and links with no accessible name — an icon with nothing behind it
• Headings that skip levels, so a screen reader cannot navigate the page
• Content that cannot be reached or operated with a keyboard alone

Three of those are in the free tool on this site and you can run them right now, on any public page, without paying or leaving an email.

What this audit gives you

• Every failure found, with the element and what it breaks for whom
• Ranked by how many people it affects, not by how easy it is to fix
• A keyboard-only walkthrough of your checkout, done by hand
• Fixes written specifically enough for a developer to act on
• A dated written record of what was measured
• An explicit list of what was not covered

The other US exposure: subscriptions and cancellation

There is a great deal of confident and wrong writing about the FTC's "click to cancel" rule, so here is what actually happened. The rule was finalised, and then the Eighth Circuit vacated it in 2025 on procedural grounds. The FTC has since revived the rulemaking, submitting a draft advance notice on 30 January 2026.

Neither "it is the law" nor "it was struck down so it does not matter" is true. The FTC continues to act against deceptive subscription practices under Section 5 of the FTC Act, and around 30 states have their own automatic-renewal statutes, some of them stricter than the vacated federal rule. If your business renews automatically, the requirements have not gone away; they have moved.

The design questions are the same either way: is what the customer is agreeing to clearly disclosed before they agree, and is cancelling as straightforward as subscribing was. Both are measurable, and both are behaviour questions rather than legal ones.

What I am not

Why a psychologist is doing accessibility work

Because passing a checker and being usable are different things, and only one of them is a software question. A page can technically satisfy a standard and still be impossible to complete. Judging that is a behavioural question, and it is the same discipline that decides whether anybody buys anything on the page at all.

Which is the other reason to do this work: almost every accessibility failure is also a conversion failure. Low contrast loses the customer reading outdoors. A keyboard trap loses the customer in a hurry. Fixing accessibility properly is one of the very few compliance jobs that pays for itself.