Web accessibility is the practice of designing and building websites so that everyone can use them — including people with visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, or speech disabilities. An accessible site works with screen readers, keyboard navigation, voice control, and screen magnifiers, and it stays usable in difficult conditions like bright sunlight, a slow connection, or a small phone screen.

Put simply: if someone can perceive your content, navigate your pages, and complete what they came to do — regardless of how they access the web — your site is accessible.

Why web accessibility matters

It affects a huge audience

About 1 in 4 U.S. adults lives with a disability, and that share grows as the population ages. Inaccessible sites quietly turn away customers who can’t read low-contrast text, can’t operate a menu without a mouse, or can’t complete a checkout form with a screen reader. Accessibility is reach.

It’s increasingly the law

The legal landscape has tightened sharply in the last few years:

  • ADA Title II — In 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice published a final rule requiring state and local government websites and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with compliance deadlines beginning in 2026.
  • ADA Title III — For private businesses, U.S. courts continue to treat websites as “places of public accommodation.” Thousands of web accessibility lawsuits are filed every year, and most cite the same handful of easily detectable issues.
  • Section 508 — Federal agencies and their contractors must meet accessibility standards benchmarked to WCAG 2.0 AA.
  • European Accessibility Act (EAA) — As of June 28, 2025, a wide range of digital products and services sold into the EU must be accessible, affecting many companies far outside Europe.

It’s good business

Accessibility overlaps almost entirely with quality engineering. The same work that helps disabled users also improves SEO (clean headings, alt text, semantic markup), mobile usability, page performance, and conversion rates. A site that’s easy for everyone to use is simply a better site.

The standard: WCAG

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), are the global benchmark referenced by nearly every accessibility law. The current versions are WCAG 2.1 and WCAG 2.2 (a W3C Recommendation since October 2023), with WCAG 3.0 in development.

WCAG is organized around four principles — often abbreviated POUR:

  • Perceivable — Users must be able to perceive the content. Think text alternatives for images, captions for video, and sufficient color contrast.
  • Operable — Users must be able to operate the interface, including with a keyboard alone, without time traps or seizure-inducing motion.
  • Understandable — Content and controls must be predictable and clear, with helpful labels and error messages.
  • Robust — Markup must be clean enough to work reliably with assistive technologies, now and in the future.

Conformance levels: A, AA, AAA

WCAG defines three levels. Level A is the bare minimum, Level AA is the target used by almost every law and regulation (including the ADA and Section 508), and Level AAA is the gold standard that isn’t always achievable site-wide. For nearly every organization, WCAG 2.1 AA is the goal.

The most common accessibility barriers

The good news: a small set of issues accounts for the majority of real-world failures — and most are straightforward to fix.

  • Low color contrast between text and background, the single most common issue on the web.
  • Missing alt text on images, so screen reader users get nothing.
  • Keyboard traps and unreachable controls that lock out anyone not using a mouse.
  • Unlabeled form fields and buttons, which leave assistive tech guessing.
  • Headings used out of order (or only for visual styling), which breaks navigation.
  • Videos without captions and media that plays automatically.

How to make — and keep — your site accessible

Accessibility isn’t a one-time project; it’s an ongoing practice. Content changes, new pages launch, and regressions creep in. A reliable approach has three parts:

  1. Test continuously. Automated scanning catches the bulk of issues fast — contrast, alt text, labels, broken links, heading structure — across your whole site, every page.
  2. Fix by priority. Tackle severity-ranked, high-impact issues first, with clear guidance on what to change.
  3. Prove it. Maintain an accessibility statement and, when buyers or regulators ask, a VPAT — so you can demonstrate conformance instead of just claiming it.

Where Accessible Metrics comes in

Accessible Metrics automates that entire lifecycle. We scan your full site every month against WCAG, ADA, and Section 508 standards, rank every issue by severity with plain-English fixes, monitor broken links, and generate the accessibility statement and VPAT you need to prove compliance — no consultant, no spreadsheets, no six-week wait.

The fastest way to understand where you stand is to see your own results.

Scan my site free

Note: This guide is for general information about web accessibility and is not legal advice for ADA, Section 508, or EAA compliance.