The legal standard you may be overlooking: how to meet ADA compliance with your website

Could your firm’s website land you a lawsuit?

That reads a little alarmist for an opening line. We know. It also happens to be true.

We are talking about ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance for your website. It is easy to picture ADA in terms of parking spaces and ramps, but the goods and services your firm offers online fall under the same umbrella. As the U.S. Department of Justice states:

“… the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.“

What does accessibility for a website actually look like?

Accessibility is a broad discipline, but the common building blocks are concrete:

• Proper color contrast. Low contrast makes text hard to read for people with low vision or color blindness.
• Captions on video. Without them, anyone with a hearing impairment loses whatever the audio was carrying.
• Alt text on images. Screen readers rely on it to describe what is on the page.
• Screen reader compatibility. Poorly structured markup can break the assistive technology people depend on to navigate.
• Restraint with automatic motion. Auto-playing carousels, slide-in modals, and pop-ups can disorient users with cognitive or vestibular conditions. Avoid them, or give visitors a clear way to stop the motion.

Those are the basics. The formal benchmark behind them is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C and broken into three levels: A, AA, and AAA.

A quick note on versions, because it matters here. WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C Recommendation, published in October 2023. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is still the version most legal and regulatory frameworks reference as the baseline. The DOJ’s 2024 ADA Title II rule for state and local government websites, for example, points to WCAG 2.1 AA. So 2.1 AA is the number to know, with 2.2 as the direction the standard is moving.

WCAG A: must have

Every website should clear Level A. These are the criteria that, left unaddressed, make a site impossible to use for people with disabilities: keyboard navigation through the whole page, content available as text, alt attributes on images.

WCAG AA: should have

Level AA includes everything in A and adds to it: stricter contrast ratios for low vision, sensible line heights, resizable text, and clear hover and focus states. In many industries and jurisdictions, AA is the legal bar, not the stretch goal.

WCAG AAA: nice to have

The strictest level. Very few sites meet all of it, and those that do usually offer AAA contrast as an optional high-contrast theme rather than the default.

Which level should your firm’s website meet?

Every website should clear Level A, though plenty of off-the-shelf themes and site builders fall short even there. Aim for AA. It is the right target whether or not a regulator is requiring it of you, and it is what lets clients of every ability move through your site without friction.

There is a second payoff. Much of what earns you AA overlaps with the fundamentals of good search performance: clean structure, descriptive text, and a page machines can parse. That same discipline is what helps you show up in traditional search and get surfaced by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. Accessible pages and findable pages are built from the same raw material. It is worth reading more about how we approach SEO and AI search with that in mind.

AAA is worth pursuing only when you know a high share of your audience relies on assistive technology day to day.

What happens if your website is not compliant?

You could face litigation. Web and mobile accessibility claims have made up a meaningful slice of ADA Title III filings in federal court for years, and the volume runs into the thousands annually and keeps climbing. The opening line was not alarmist after all.

How Starling handles this

We do not treat accessibility as a bolt-on or an upsell. Every website we build is built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start: contrast, keyboard navigation, focus states, semantic structure, and alt text handled as part of the work, not patched in after a complaint arrives.

And even if you never work with Starling, find a partner who understands accessibility and can get you to compliance. It protects you from a lawsuit, and it is simply the right way to run a site: an online space that clients of any ability can actually use.

If you would rather not guess where your current site stands, start a conversation with us and we will point you in the right direction.