Is My Website ADA Compliant? How to Check in 60 Seconds

By Dr. John Liddy, D.C. · March 31, 2026

Most business owners have no idea whether their website is ADA compliant. They built it, published it, and moved on. And that is completely understandable — you had a business to run. But if your website has accessibility barriers, you are potentially excluding customers with disabilities and exposing yourself to legal risk under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The good news: you can get a solid answer in about 60 seconds. You do not need to hire an expert, buy any software, or understand a single line of code. This guide walks you through two simple steps — a quick manual check and a free automated scan — that will tell you exactly where your website stands.

Step 1: Five Things You Can Check Right Now

Before you run any tool, you can spot the most common accessibility problems yourself. Open your website in a browser and try these five tests. Each one takes about 10 seconds.

Tab through your site with keyboard only. Put your mouse aside. Press the Tab key repeatedly and try to navigate your website using only your keyboard. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you see where the focus is on the page as you tab? If your navigation menu, contact form, or call-to-action buttons are unreachable by keyboard, that is a WCAG 2.1 failure — and it is one of the most common issues cited in ADA lawsuits. Many people with motor disabilities rely entirely on keyboards or keyboard-like devices to browse the web.
Right-click an image and check if it has alt text. Right-click any image on your site and select "Inspect" (or "Inspect Element"). In the HTML that appears, look for the alt attribute on the <img> tag. If it says alt="" or the alt attribute is missing entirely, screen reader users will have no idea what that image shows. Every meaningful image on your site needs a brief, descriptive alt text — something like alt="Team photo of our staff in the office lobby" rather than alt="IMG_4832.jpg".
Check if your text has enough contrast. Look at your website and ask: is any text hard to read because it is too light against its background? Light gray text on a white background is one of the most common accessibility failures on the web. WCAG requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. If you have to squint, your contrast probably fails. This affects everyone — not just users with low vision — but it is especially critical for the roughly 1 in 12 men who are color blind.
Zoom your browser to 200% and check if everything still works. Press Ctrl + (or Cmd + on Mac) a few times until your browser is at 200% zoom. Does the layout break? Does text overlap? Do buttons or menus disappear off-screen? WCAG requires that content remains functional and readable at 200% zoom. Many users with low vision rely on zoom to read web content, and a layout that falls apart at higher magnification is a real barrier.
Check if your form fields have visible labels. Go to any form on your site — your contact form, newsletter signup, or search bar. Does each field have a visible label that clearly says what it is for? Placeholder text that disappears when you start typing does not count as a label under WCAG. Screen readers need a proper <label> element associated with each input field to announce what information is expected. If your fields only have placeholders, that is a violation.

If you found even one issue in these five checks, your site almost certainly has more. These are surface-level tests. They catch the most visible problems, but there are 50 WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria in total. The manual checks above cover maybe five or six of them. That is why Step 2 matters.

Step 2: Run a Free Automated Scan

A manual spot-check tells you whether obvious problems exist. An automated scan tells you exactly how many violations your site has, what they are, and how severe they are.

Tools like ADA Audit Report scan your homepage against the full set of WCAG 2.1 success criteria in seconds. You enter your URL, the scanner runs axe-core (the same accessibility engine used by Microsoft, Google, and U.S. government agencies) against your page, and you get back three things:

A compliance score — a number from 0 to 100 that tells you roughly where you stand. Above 90 is solid. Below 70 means you likely have serious barriers.
A violation count by severity — how many critical, serious, moderate, and minor issues were found.
The top issues found — the specific WCAG criteria your page fails, like missing alt text, insufficient color contrast, or unlabeled form fields.

The whole process takes less than 60 seconds. No signup, no credit card, no sales call. You just get data.

What the Results Mean

When you get your scan results, the severity levels tell you how urgently each issue needs attention. Here is what each level means in practical terms:

Critical Screen readers cannot use your site at all. A blind user hits a dead end. These are the violations most likely to trigger legal action.

Serious Major barriers that prevent some users from completing tasks — like a form they cannot submit or a menu they cannot navigate.

Moderate Usability issues that make things harder than they should be. Users can work around them, but they should not have to.

Minor Best practice gaps. Not likely to block anyone, but fixing them improves the experience for all users and shows good faith effort.

Focus on critical and serious issues first. These are the violations that actually prevent people from using your site, and they are the ones that ADA demand letters and lawsuits reference most often. Moderate and minor issues matter too, but fixing the top-severity items first gives you the biggest improvement in both accessibility and legal protection.

The 80/20 of ADA Compliance

Accessibility can feel overwhelming when you look at the full list of WCAG criteria. But in practice, a relatively small number of issues account for the vast majority of violations on most websites. If you fix these five things, you will resolve the bulk of what most automated scans flag:

1. Alt text on images

Every meaningful image needs a short text description. Decorative images get an empty alt="" attribute. This is the single most common violation on the web, and it is usually the easiest to fix. Go through your images, write a brief description for each one, and add it to the alt attribute.

2. Sufficient color contrast

Text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background (3:1 for large text). The fix is straightforward: darken your text color or lighten your background until the ratio passes. Free tools like the WebAIM Contrast Checker can tell you your current ratio and suggest compliant alternatives.

3. Labeled form fields

Every input field — name, email, phone, search — needs a <label> element that is programmatically associated with it. Placeholder text alone does not count. This is critical for screen reader users, who otherwise have no idea what information a field is asking for.

4. Keyboard-navigable menus

All interactive elements — links, buttons, dropdown menus, modal dialogs — must be reachable and operable with a keyboard alone. If your navigation menu only opens on mouse hover, keyboard users are locked out. The fix usually involves using semantic HTML (<button> instead of <div onclick>) and managing focus properly.

5. Proper heading structure

Your page should have exactly one <h1>, and headings should follow a logical order — h1, then h2, then h3, without skipping levels. Screen reader users navigate by headings the way sighted users scan a page visually. A jumbled heading structure is like a book with random chapter numbers.

These five fixes will not make your site perfectly compliant. But they address the issues that appear on nearly every website we scan, and they dramatically reduce both the number of violations and the severity of what remains.

Why a Homepage Scan Is Not Enough

A free homepage scan is a great starting point — it tells you whether your site has accessibility problems and gives you a general sense of severity. But there is an important limitation: your homepage is usually your most polished page.

The pages that tend to have the worst accessibility problems are the ones that get less attention:

Contact forms — often built with third-party plugins that do not include proper labels, error messages, or keyboard support.
Checkout and payment flows — frequently use embedded widgets from Stripe, Square, or other payment processors that may introduce their own accessibility gaps.
Blog posts and interior pages — content added over time by different people, often with inconsistent heading structures, images missing alt text, and embedded media without captions.
Modal dialogs and popups — newsletter signups, cookie banners, and chat widgets that trap keyboard focus or are completely invisible to screen readers.

Your homepage might score 85 while your contact page scores 40. A full-site audit — one that crawls multiple pages and tests each one — catches what a homepage scan misses. It gives you a complete picture of your compliance posture, not just a snapshot of your best page.

Think of it like a building inspection. Checking the front entrance for wheelchair access is important. But you also need to check the restrooms, the elevators, and the emergency exits. A homepage scan checks the front entrance. A full audit checks the whole building.

What Happens If Your Site Is Not Compliant

ADA website lawsuits have increased steadily over the past several years. In 2025, over 4,000 federal ADA web accessibility lawsuits were filed — and that does not count the thousands of demand letters sent by plaintiffs' attorneys that never make it to court. Small businesses are not exempt. In fact, small businesses with fewer resources to fight back are often the primary targets.

The typical demand letter settlement ranges from $5,000 to $25,000. But the cost of proactive compliance — fixing your site before you receive a letter — is usually a fraction of that. A few hours of developer time to address the top violations, guided by a clear audit report, can cost a few hundred dollars and save you thousands.

Beyond legal risk, there is a simpler reason to care: roughly 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. has some form of disability. An inaccessible website is a website that turns away customers. Fixing accessibility issues is not just compliance — it is good business.

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About ADA Audit Report

We built ADA Audit Report to make professional-grade accessibility auditing accessible to every business — not just enterprises with large compliance budgets. Our scans use axe-core, the same open-source accessibility testing engine trusted by Microsoft, Google, and U.S. government agencies. For $49, you get a complete audit report with every violation mapped to WCAG criteria, severity ratings, before-and-after code examples, and a prioritized remediation plan your developer can act on immediately.

We are a technology company based in Los Angeles, California — not a law firm. We believe in making compliance straightforward, affordable, and genuinely useful.