What do US accessibility rules mean for your firm's website?

If your firm serves the public or makes web content for a government client, US accessibility rules can apply to your website. Most sites fail basic checks either way. Here's what the rules say, what usually fails and how to check your own site.

Most websites fail basic accessibility checks.

WebAIM tests the home pages of the top million websites every year. In February 2026 it found WCAG failures on 95.9% of them. The most common were text too faint to read (83.9% of pages), images with no description (53.1%) and form fields with no label (51%).

These failures hit real buyers. Faint grey text is hard for anyone with poor eyesight to read, and for anyone reading a phone outdoors on a job site.

A site that works for everyone also shows a buyer that the firm pays attention to detail.

What US law says about business websites.

Two US laws matter here.

Section 508 applies to federal agencies when they develop, buy, maintain or use information technology. It doesn't cover your own marketing website. It does cover what an agency buys, so documents, software or web pages you deliver to a federal agency under contract need to meet the Section 508 standards.

WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard the Department of Justice set in April 2024 for state and local government websites, including web content a contractor provides for them. After a delay published in April 2026, governments serving 50,000 people or more must comply by April 2027 and smaller ones by April 2028. For private businesses there is no set technical standard. The Department says the ADA covers the websites of businesses open to the public and points to WCAG as helpful guidance. Lawsuits are common. Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that tracks them, counted 3,117 website accessibility suits in federal court in 2025, up 27% on 2024.

A demand letter costs money to answer even when you're in the right, and fixes made under legal pressure cost more than planned ones.

If your firm bids on public work, accessibility matters even more. State and local agencies covered by ADA Title II must meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and their buyers may expect the same from the firms they hire. A site that fails basic checks can raise doubts before anyone reads your capability statement. Our page on government contractor website design covers what public buyers look for.

What WCAG 2.1 AA actually requires.

WCAG 2.1 AA is organized around four principles. Content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. In practice, for a typical industrial firm website, the most commonly failed criteria are:

• Images without alt text. Project photography, equipment shots and team headshots need descriptive alt attributes. Decorative images should use empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
• Low color contrast. Grey text on white, or white text over a mid-tone photograph, often fails the 4.5:1 contrast ratio WCAG sets for normal-size text.
• Form fields without labels. Contact forms and quote request forms where labels are only present as placeholder text fail the moment a user clicks into the field and the label disappears.
• No keyboard navigation. Every menu, button and pop-up window must work with a keyboard alone. Many custom navigation menus on technical firm sites fail this entirely.
• Missing focus indicators. Browsers provide default focus outlines. Many sites suppress them with CSS for aesthetic reasons without providing an alternative. This makes keyboard-only navigation impossible to follow visually.
• PDFs that are not tagged. Engineering firms, environmental consultancies and construction companies frequently link to capability statements, project sheets and technical brochures as PDFs. Untagged PDFs are inaccessible to screen readers.
• Video without captions. Project showcase videos and company overviews without closed captions fail users with hearing loss and fail WCAG.

How to check your own site.

You do not need to hire an accessibility specialist to find the largest problems. Run these checks first.

1. Open your website in Chrome and run Lighthouse (built into DevTools). The Accessibility score will flag the most common automated failures immediately.
2. Install the free WAVE browser extension from WebAIM. It annotates your pages with errors and warnings in plain English.
3. Manually tab through your homepage using only your keyboard. Can you reach every link and button? Can you tell where you are at all times?
4. Check your color contrast using the WebAIM Contrast Checker. Paste in your text and background colors.
5. Open a PDF from your site in Adobe Acrobat Pro and run its accessibility check. If it returns errors, the PDF needs remediation.

Automated tools miss a lot. When the UK Government Digital Service built a test page with 143 accessibility barriers, 29% of them were missed by all ten tools it tried. A person still has to check the pages by hand. If the automated scan already shows a long list of errors, that tells you what you need to know about the current state.

Common patterns on technical firm websites.

Industrial and technical firm websites tend to share a few structural patterns that create recurring accessibility problems.

Heavy use of full-screen background video or parallax photography with overlaid text almost always fails contrast requirements. The text is legible when the image behind it is dark. It fails when the image shifts to a lighter frame. There is no reliable way to pass this with dynamic content unless you add a solid semi-transparent overlay with sufficient contrast ratio.

Custom photo carousels often can't be used with a keyboard and leave out image descriptions.

Downloads such as capability statements, project sheets and certificates are rarely prepared with accessibility in mind. That matters most for firms whose PDFs do the selling.

Firms running older WordPress themes or legacy custom builds often have these problems baked in at the template level. Fixing them requires more than plugin installation.

Tools for ongoing compliance.

Accessibility is not a one-time fix. New content introduces new failures. A few tools help keep things manageable.

• axe DevTools (free browser extension, paid pro version) gives developers actionable, specific WCAG references for every flagged issue.
• Siteimprove and Monsido offer continuous monitoring for larger sites with frequent content updates.
• Adobe Acrobat Pro is the practical standard for remediating PDFs. There is no shortcut here.
• Overlay widgets are sold as one-line accessibility fixes. They don't make an inaccessible site meet WCAG. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe, one overlay maker, to pay $1 million over claims that its tool could make any website WCAG-compliant.

The firms that maintain compliance over time build it into their content workflow. Alt text is written when an image is uploaded. Captions are added when a video is made.

Where this fits in a broader web project.

If you are rebuilding your site or launching a new one, accessibility is best addressed in the design and build phase rather than added afterwards. Retrofitting contrast ratios, navigation structures and form patterns onto a completed build is more expensive and less reliable than designing to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start.

If you work for public clients, put WCAG 2.1 AA in the brief for your next website. Construction firms and engineering practices that regularly work with public-sector clients are particularly exposed.

For what a properly planned web project covers before any design begins, see how to find out what buyers need before a rebuild. If you are also thinking about where your site is hosted and how that affects performance and compliance risk, Where should your website live covers the infrastructure decision in plain terms.

If the problems sit in an old theme or page builder, fixing them one page at a time gets expensive. See how we rebuild legacy websites, or book a call and we'll look at your site with you.