What website accessibility actually means (no scare tactics)

You may have heard that businesses are getting sued over their websites. Maybe a fellow business owner got a scary letter. Maybe a salesperson called, warning that your site could be next, and by the way they sell the solution.

I want to talk about this plainly, because the topic attracts more fear than facts. Website accessibility matters, the lawsuits are real, and most of what protects you is basic good work you can understand. I will stick to the facts and the fix list.

What the numbers actually say

Let me give you the honest picture first.

A law firm called Seyfarth Shaw tracks these lawsuits every year. In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court. That was up 27% from the year before, and website cases now make up more than a third of all ADA lawsuits filed federally. A separate tracker, UsableNet, which also counts state court filings, projects roughly 6,176 cases for 2026, about 20% higher than 2025.

A few things worth knowing about those numbers. Most of the targets sell things online. UsableNet’s data shows roughly four out of five sued businesses are e-commerce, which makes sense: online stores have the most pages and the most complicated checkouts. And the lawsuits you hear about are only the visible part. For every case filed, many more businesses get a private demand letter first.

I am not telling you this to scare you. I am telling you because the pattern is clear and boring: the businesses that get targeted tend to have the same basic, fixable problems.

One Connecticut note, since you are probably wondering: most of these cases get filed in a handful of states, and Connecticut courts have set a higher bar for who can sue here. But that is not a shield. If you sell online to customers in other states, you can be pulled into their courts. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. It is just the practical reality.

What accessibility actually means

When a demand letter arrives, it almost always claims the site fails something called WCAG. That stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In 2024, the Department of Justice made WCAG 2.1 Level AA the required standard for state and local government websites. There is no federal technical standard written specifically for private businesses, but WCAG 2.1 AA is the benchmark that courts, demand letters, and settlements all point to. So that is the target.

Here is what it means in plain language, for a normal five-page business site:

Alternative text. Blind visitors use screen reader software that reads a page aloud. If a photo has no hidden text description attached to it, the screen reader has nothing to say. More than half of all homepages are missing these descriptions. This is the single easiest thing to fix, and I will show you how below.

Keyboard navigation. Some people cannot use a mouse, so the whole site has to work with a keyboard alone: Tab to move forward, Shift plus Tab to go back, Enter to click. There should always be a visible outline showing where you are on the page. Try it on your own site sometime. You might be surprised.

Headings that make sense. Sighted visitors scan big bold headlines to understand a page. Screen reader users do the same thing through the page’s code. If headings skip levels, say jumping from a Heading 1 straight to a Heading 4 because someone liked the font size, the outline breaks for them.

Color contrast. Text needs to stand out sharply from its background. The standard calls for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Low contrast is the single most common failure on the internet, showing up on more than eight out of ten homepages.

Form labels. Every box on a contact or checkout form needs a real, permanent label. The gray placeholder text inside the box that vanishes when you start typing does not count. Screen readers need the actual label.

That is most of it. Nothing exotic. Just a site that can be read, navigated, and used by everyone.

The quick wins

Researchers at WebAIM analyze a million homepages every year, and their 2026 report found that just six error types account for 96% of all automatically detected accessibility failures. Six. Fix those and you have handled the vast majority of what the scanners, and the plaintiff firms’ scanners, look for.

For a WordPress site, here is the list:

1. Fix your color contrast. This is the most common failure on the internet. It takes minutes with a free online contrast checker. Darken the text color or lighten the background in your theme settings until you hit that 4.5 to 1 ratio. Done.

2. Add alt text in your Media Library. In WordPress, click any image in the Media Library and you will see an Alternative Text box. Describe the image plainly: what it shows, in a few words. If the image is purely decorative, leave the box empty on purpose, which tells screen readers to skip it. This one fix clears the second most common failure.

3. Label your forms properly. If you use WPForms, Gravity Forms, or anything similar, make sure every field has its own visible label turned on. Do not rely on placeholder text inside the field alone.

4. Give your icon buttons names. That magnifying glass for search, the hamburger menu on mobile, the shopping cart icon: if there is no text, a screen reader just announces “button.” Adding a text label, even a hidden one, tells the user what it does.

5. Set your page language. Screen readers need to know which pronunciation rules to use. Making sure your site declares its language is a one-minute, one-time fix. Most WordPress sites already do this, but it is worth checking.

6. Do the unplugged mouse test. Unplug your mouse, or just push it aside. Navigate from your homepage through a menu and through your contact form using only the Tab key, Shift plus Tab, and Enter. If you get stuck, or you cannot tell where you are on the page, you have found a real problem a real person would hit.

What is genuinely harder

I want to be honest about the other side too. The quick wins cover what scanners can detect. The harder stuff is interactive: popup dialogs, mega-menus, image carousels, sliding filters. Making those fully keyboard accessible takes real development work, because the code has to manage exactly where the keyboard focus goes at every moment. Most cheap off-the-shelf WordPress themes do not do this well.

PDFs are their own category. If your menu or your intake forms live in PDF files, those documents need to be individually tagged and remediated, which is slow manual work. If you are due for a site refresh anyway, moving that content into regular web pages solves two problems at once.

And one caution about scanners: a free accessibility plugin that gives your site a perfect score is testing the easy stuff. It is a fine starting point, not a clean bill of health. The firms that send demand letters use tools that render the full page, run the JavaScript, and poke at the interactive parts. Think of a scanner score the way you think of a spell checker: useful, but it never read your essay.

The overlay trap

This is the part where I might save you money.

When business owners get nervous about this topic, they go looking for a fast fix, and they find companies selling “accessibility widgets.” You have seen them: the little accessibility icon, usually in the corner of a site, promising that a snippet of code will make the site compliant overnight. Companies like accessiBe and UserWay sell these as monthly subscriptions.

A blind visitor’s screen reader reads your site’s underlying code. The widget tries to paper over that code after the page loads, but the broken foundation is still what the screen reader encounters. Disabled users have been saying this for years: the National Federation of the Blind has formally opposed these widgets, and more than a thousand accessibility professionals signed a public statement saying overlays cannot bring a site into compliance.

The courts agree. Businesses get sued while running these widgets all the time. UsableNet’s 2026 data shows about one in five sued businesses had a widget installed. In April 2025, the Federal Trade Commission fined accessiBe one million dollars, finding that its claims of making any website compliant were false and unsubstantiated, and barred the company from making those promises without hard evidence.

And then there is the story I tell every client who asks about widgets. BloomsyBox, a small online flower shop, bought UserWay’s widget believing it would protect them. They were sued anyway. Then the flower shop sued UserWay, saying the marketing had misled them. In February 2026, a federal magistrate judge recommended letting the flower shop’s core claims move forward instead of throwing the case out.

So here is my plain advice: do not buy the widget. Cancel it if you have one. Spend that money on fixing your actual site instead. It is the only thing that works.

The tax credit nobody mentions.

Now the part nobody selling fear will tell you: the federal government will help pay for this.

There is a tax credit called the Disabled Access Credit, part of the tax code’s Section 44, for small businesses making their operations accessible, and website work can qualify. If your business had a million dollars or less in gross receipts last year, or thirty or fewer full-time employees, you may be eligible. The credit covers half of your eligible spending between $250 and $10,250 in a year, up to $5,000 back. You claim it on IRS Form 8826. One caveat worth knowing: it is a credit against taxes you owe, not a refund check.

To keep the math simple: spend $5,000 fixing your site, and the credit could be worth $2,375 straight off your tax bill. I am not your accountant, so run this by yours, but it turns a scary project into an affordable improvement. That is a very different conversation than the one the scare letters want you to have.

Your quick-win checklist

Most of this is an afternoon’s work.

• Add descriptive alt text to every meaningful image in your Media Library. Leave decorative images intentionally blank.
• Run your text colors through a free contrast checker and fix anything under 4.5 to 1.
• Make sure every form field has a real label, not just placeholder text.
• Give text names to icon-only buttons: search, menu, cart, and the like.
• Confirm your site declares its page language.
• Do the unplugged mouse test: Tab through your homepage, a menu, and your contact form.
• Check your headings: one Heading 1 per page, then 2s and 3s in order, no skipped levels.
• If you are paying for an accessibility overlay widget, cancel it and put that budget toward real fixes.

Where to start.

Website accessibility is not a mystery and it is not a trap. It is a set of basic, understandable practices that make your site usable by more people, and the same practices happen to be what keeps you out of trouble. Start with the checklist. Do the easy majority first. Get help for the hard parts.

And if anyone tries to sell you fear, or a magic widget, you now know more than they do.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on your site, that is exactly what I do. Get in touch through my contact page and tell me what is on your mind. No pressure, no jargon, just a plain conversation about your website.