Please note: this article is general information, not legal advice. Accessibility law in the US is complex, depends on your specific situation and continues to develop. If you have questions about your legal obligations or have received a demand letter, please speak to a qualified attorney.
If you run a business website in the United States, you have probably come across the term "ADA compliance" — often in an alarming email from a company selling a quick fix. Website accessibility is a real and important topic. It is also one surrounded by a lot of half-truths. This article explains the basics in plain English and looks at what it means in practice for a WordPress site.
What Is the ADA?
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a US civil rights law from 1990 that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. Title III of the ADA covers "places of public accommodation" — businesses open to the public, such as shops, restaurants, hotels and service providers.
The ADA was written before most businesses had websites, and its text does not spell out technical rules for them. How the law applies to websites has largely been shaped by courts, government guidance and ongoing legal debate — which is one reason the topic feels confusing.
What Standard Is Usually Referenced?
In discussions about website accessibility, one standard comes up again and again: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG describes how to make web content usable for people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive disabilities, organised into three levels: A, AA and AAA.
Level AA of a recent WCAG version is widely used as a practical benchmark. Whether and how it applies to your business specifically is a legal question — but from a technical point of view, WCAG is the clearest roadmap for building a site that more people can actually use.
Why It Matters Beyond the Law
Accessibility is not only about risk. A significant share of people live with some form of disability, and many more benefit from accessible design: older visitors, people on small screens, in bright sunlight or with a temporary injury. Accessible sites tend to be clearer, easier to navigate and often perform better in search, because the same structure that helps a screen reader also helps search engines understand your content.
Where WordPress Sites Commonly Fall Short
WordPress itself can be used to build accessible sites, but the result depends heavily on the theme, the plugins and how content is added. Issues that come up frequently include:
- Missing or meaningless alt text on images, so screen reader users do not know what an image shows.
- Low colour contrast between text and background, making content hard to read.
- Menus, sliders and pop-ups that cannot be used with a keyboard alone.
- Forms without proper labels, or with error messages that are not announced.
- Headings used for styling rather than structure, which breaks navigation for assistive technology.
- Videos without captions and PDFs that cannot be read by screen readers.
- Page builders and plugins that output inaccessible code no matter how carefully content is written.
Can a Plugin or Overlay Make My Site Compliant?
You will find tools that promise "instant ADA compliance" with one line of code. Be cautious. Many accessibility experts and disability advocates point out that automated overlays cannot fix underlying problems in a site's code, and in some cases can get in the way of the assistive technology people already use. Automated testing tools are useful for finding certain issues, but they only catch part of the picture. Real accessibility comes from the theme, the code and the content — and from testing by people.
Accessibility Is Ongoing, Not a One-Time Project
Even a site that was carefully built with accessibility in mind can drift. New pages are published without alt text, a plugin update changes how a menu behaves, a new pop-up appears that traps keyboard users. That is why accessibility fits naturally into ongoing website care: it needs regular attention, just like security and updates.
Practical First Steps
- Get an overview of where your site stands, using a combination of automated tools and manual checks.
- Fix the foundations first: theme, navigation, forms and colour contrast affect every page.
- Train whoever adds content to write alt text and use headings properly.
- Publish an accessibility statement with a way for visitors to report problems — and respond when they do.
- Talk to an attorney if you have questions about your specific legal obligations.