The Accessibility Deadlines Are Real Now

This Isn’t Just About Being Nice

Accessibility has a long reputation in web development as the thing you add at the end if there’s time. That mentality is outdated and increasingly expensive to maintain.

In April 2024, the Department of Justice finalized a rule under Title II of the ADA requiring state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Compliance deadlines are staggered: larger entities had to comply by April 2026, and smaller entities have until April 2027. Private sector businesses have been subject to ADA requirements for years, and federal courts have consistently ruled that websites are covered under Title III.

The WebAIM Million report, which analyzes the top one million websites annually, found that 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG failures in their most recent audit. The most common: low contrast text, missing form labels, missing alternative text, and empty buttons. These aren’t edge cases. They’re the baseline failures that accessibility scanners catch immediately.

What WCAG 2.1 AA Actually Requires

WCAG 2.1 AA is organized around four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. In practice, the most commonly failed criteria on real sites are:

Color contrast

Text must have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background for normal text, and 3:1 for large text. Light gray on white, pale yellow on white, and many branded color combinations fail this test.

Keyboard navigation

Every interactive element, links, buttons, forms, modals, must be reachable and operable using only a keyboard. This affects users who cannot use a mouse and screen reader users who navigate by Tab key.

Alternative text

Images that convey information need descriptive alt text. Decorative images should have empty alt attributes so screen readers skip them. This is one of the most commonly missing implementations on WordPress sites.

Form labels

Every form field needs a programmatic label that connects to it. A placeholder attribute is not a label. When a screen reader user focuses on an unlabeled input, they hear only ‘edit text,’ with no indication of what the field is for.

Why Lawsuits Are Increasing

Accessibility litigation has grown steadily for the past decade. Seyfarth Shaw’s ADA Title III tracking site reported over 8,800 federal ADA Title III lawsuits in 2024, a number that has climbed each year since 2013. Many of these target e-commerce sites, restaurants, and service businesses with under 50 employees.

The legal theory is straightforward: if a business is open to the public, its website is a place of public accommodation. Courts in the First, Second, and Seventh Circuits have upheld this interpretation. Businesses that have settled these cases typically pay between $25,000 and $100,000, plus legal fees and remediation costs.

Remediation after a lawsuit is significantly more expensive than building accessibility in from the start.

Where to Start

The most useful first step is a real audit, not just an automated scan. Tools like axe DevTools and WAVE catch between 30 and 40 percent of WCAG issues automatically. The rest require manual testing, including keyboard navigation testing and screen reader evaluation using NVDA or JAWS on Windows, or VoiceOver on Mac and iOS.

For WordPress sites specifically, theme choice matters enormously. Many popular themes use div-soup markup with poor semantic structure, making remediation harder than it needs to be. A clean theme with proper heading hierarchy, ARIA landmarks, and keyboard-accessible components reduces the surface area for issues significantly.

Accessibility overlays, the widgets that claim to fix accessibility with a single script, do not meet WCAG requirements and have been the subject of their own lawsuits. They are not a substitute for remediation.

Get a Real Accessibility Assessment

We audit sites for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance and prioritize fixes by impact and risk. If you’re not sure where your site stands, a structured review is the fastest way to find out.

Talk to our development team about an accessibility audit.