Is Your Website ADA Compliant? How to Meet ADA Title II Compliance and WCAG Standards

Last year, the Department of Justice issued an update to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act ( ADA With the advent of digital transformation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has taken on new significance in the realm of websites and IT. Title III of the ADA requires that places of public accommodation, including websites, be accessible to individuals with disabilities. This has profound implications for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, all of which must ensure their online presence is accessible to all users, including those with visual, auditory, and motor impairments. Compliance with ADA standards involves implementing various web accessibility guidelines, such as providing text alternatives for non-text content, ensuring that all functionalities are accessible via keyboard, and offering captions for multimedia content. By adhering to ADA requirements for websites and IT, organizations not only fulfill their legal obligations but also enhance user experience and inclusively serve a diverse audience. https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/ ), extending its protections to web and mobile content. Title II of the ADA With the advent of digital transformation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has taken on new significance in the realm of websites and IT. Title III of the ADA requires that places of public accommodation, including websites, be accessible to individuals with disabilities. This has profound implications for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, all of which must ensure their online presence is accessible to all users, including those with visual, auditory, and motor impairments. Compliance with ADA standards involves implementing various web accessibility guidelines, such as providing text alternatives for non-text content, ensuring that all functionalities are accessible via keyboard, and offering captions for multimedia content. By adhering to ADA requirements for websites and IT, organizations not only fulfill their legal obligations but also enhance user experience and inclusively serve a diverse audience. https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/ states that people with disabilities cannot be excluded from or denied access to the services, programs, or activities of a public entity because of their disability. This article explores these new regulations and how your website may be affected.

What Are the Regulations?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization responsible for developing and maintaining standards for website design, tracks three different standards regarding accessibility under their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), ranging from Level A to Level AAA. Level A covers basic accessibility features, Level AA requires full compatibility with all commonly used forms of assistive technology, and Level AAA essentially means that everything that can be done to improve accessibility has been done. Each successive level requires compliance with the below level and several additional new criteria.

Consider a video embedded into a website. To achieve Level A compliance, this video must have closed captioning available. For Level AA compliance, a written transcription of the video and an alternate version of the video with descriptive audio narration must also be provided. For Level AAA compliance, alternate versions of the video with sign language interpretation and extended descriptive audio narration must be made available alongside the original.

The Department of Justice ruled that websites belonging to organizations covered under ADA With the advent of digital transformation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has taken on new significance in the realm of websites and IT. Title III of the ADA requires that places of public accommodation, including websites, be accessible to individuals with disabilities. This has profound implications for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, all of which must ensure their online presence is accessible to all users, including those with visual, auditory, and motor impairments. Compliance with ADA standards involves implementing various web accessibility guidelines, such as providing text alternatives for non-text content, ensuring that all functionalities are accessible via keyboard, and offering captions for multimedia content. By adhering to ADA requirements for websites and IT, organizations not only fulfill their legal obligations but also enhance user experience and inclusively serve a diverse audience. https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/ Title II must conform to the WCAG version 2.1 Level AA standard to maintain ADA With the advent of digital transformation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has taken on new significance in the realm of websites and IT. Title III of the ADA requires that places of public accommodation, including websites, be accessible to individuals with disabilities. This has profound implications for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, all of which must ensure their online presence is accessible to all users, including those with visual, auditory, and motor impairments. Compliance with ADA standards involves implementing various web accessibility guidelines, such as providing text alternatives for non-text content, ensuring that all functionalities are accessible via keyboard, and offering captions for multimedia content. By adhering to ADA requirements for websites and IT, organizations not only fulfill their legal obligations but also enhance user experience and inclusively serve a diverse audience. https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/ compliance. Failure to comply with this standard can result in the same penalties as any other ADA With the advent of digital transformation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has taken on new significance in the realm of websites and IT. Title III of the ADA requires that places of public accommodation, including websites, be accessible to individuals with disabilities. This has profound implications for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies, all of which must ensure their online presence is accessible to all users, including those with visual, auditory, and motor impairments. Compliance with ADA standards involves implementing various web accessibility guidelines, such as providing text alternatives for non-text content, ensuring that all functionalities are accessible via keyboard, and offering captions for multimedia content. By adhering to ADA requirements for websites and IT, organizations not only fulfill their legal obligations but also enhance user experience and inclusively serve a diverse audience. https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/ Title II violation.

Who Does This Apply To?

All websites owned by a state or local government or any organization that has a contract with or receives funding from a state or local government to provide public services must comply with this standard. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Public schools, community colleges, and public universities
• State and local police departments
• State and local courts
• State and local election offices
• Public hospitals and clinics
• Public parks and recreation programs
• Public libraries
• Public transit agencies

When Is the Deadline for Compliance?

Organizations serving a population of 50,000 or more must be compliant by April 24, 2026, and special district governments and other organizations serving a population of less than 50,000 must be compliant by April 26, 2027.

What Does Compliance Entail?

Many assistive technologies like keyboard-based navigation and screenreaders expect the contents of a web page to be presented in a very specific format and structure. Suppose your website does not follow this format. In that case, people using these technologies may find themselves unable to click on some or all of your site’s links, trapped in a specific area of your site with no way to navigate elsewhere, locked out of content that relies on visuals such as images or graphs to display information or even denied access to your website entirely. People who rely on assistive technologies can encounter these issues even when everything on your website appears to be working perfectly while browsing unassisted. Your website cannot achieve Level AA compliance if any of these issues are present.

Other requirements for compliance may have an impact on your website’s visuals and design. Contrast ratio, for example, is a method of mathematically calculating the difference in color between an element on your website and the background behind it. The contrast ratio ranges from 1:1 when the background and foreground are the same color to 21:1 when using black text on a white background or vice versa. In order to achieve Level AA compliance, the contrast ratio between regular-sized text and the background must be at least 4.5:1, and large-scale text (defined as 18-point or larger font, or bold and 14-point or larger) must have at least 3:1 contrast. Level AAA requirements are stricter, requiring 7:1 contrast for regular text and 4.5:1 for large-scale text. 

Automated compliance checkers such as Wave by WebAIM and Axe by Deque can help detect potential accessibility issues, but the developers of these programs caution that they cannot guarantee their software will detect every error present on any given website. Ultimately, the only way to be one hundred percent certain of compliance is to navigate the entire website using assistive technologies and make sure that none of the issues described above are present.

WebAIM runs an annual audit called The WebAIM Million, which automatically evaluates the accessibility of the home page of the top one million most visited sites on the internet. According to their February 2025 report, the average home page has 51 accessibility errors with “notable end-user impact” and a “very high likelihood of being WCAG Level A/AA conformance failures.” 94.8% of all home pages scanned in the audit have at least one accessibility error, and 66.4% have ten or more errors.

HOW CAN INTRADA HELP?

If you need assistance in determining whether your website is compliant, contact us today.

REFERENCES

• Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1

• The WebAim Million