ADA Compliance: What to Know and Why You Should Care

by Katie Hemmeter and Justin Difazzio

If you’re in the US, legislation has set deadlines in place for certain sites to be ADA accessible. Now we’re not legal counsel, and we can’t dispense legal advice about ADA compliance (or anything else for that matter), but we can tell you how to make your website more ADA compliant.

Why Should You Care?

You might be asking why you should even care about this sort of thing. Well, the most simple reason is that there could be legal penalties for noncompliance. Title II of the ADA Act means you might be required to have an accessible website, and the deadline might be coming very soon. The first deadline for compliance is ~~April 24, 2026~~ April 24, 2027*.

You should prepare yourself by checking out this resource: Requirements for Web and Mobile Accessibility

The deadlines for compliance are clearly laid out here: Figure Out When You Need to Fully Comply with the Rule.

Legal penalties are a pretty good motivator for making your site ADA accessible, but the most important reason is that making your site accessible to all users means you’re not missing out on people who need those accessible features to access your site. You’ll have an advantage over other sites who aren’t accessible, too.

Want to see more? Here’s a great video to check out:

What Can You Do?

Caring about ADA compliance won’t automatically get your site in order. Here are 3 things we recommend doing to get started.

1. Get Going With a WAVE Scan

A fast way to see where your ADA compliance stands is with a simple review scan of your site using the free WAVE tool.

screencap of WAVE tool results from occreates.com

This will highlight many of the more obvious corrections needed such as insufficient color contrast, missing alt text, and incorrect headline tags, but it’s not able to give you a complete list of everything needed for your site. More information can be found on the WebAIM: Introduction to Web Accessibility page.

2. Get Your Images Compliant

Stop using images with text to convey important information—like…yesterday. This is something we see all the time on event pages. Many places use event posters with all the important details on the image and do not provide that important information in the actual text of the website. That important info gets misses by SEO crawlers and by those who can’t see images. Don’t do that! Use a decorative image instead, and add the important details in the text.

Pro tip: Using a generic event image that doesn’t have any specific details on it means you can reuse that image for the next occurrence of the event. No more making a new image every time. It makes your site more accessible and means less work for you. We’d say that’s a win-win sitch.

3. Get Some Help!

Overwhelmed? Call OC. We’ll help you get your website accessibility sorted out. Don’t worry—this sort of hit us out of nowhere, too. But we’re quickly becoming experts in making the sorts of design and coding changes needed to get with the times, and we’ll be happy to help you!

Links & Resources

Here’s a bunch more places to look into, if you’re still thirsty for more info.

*This changed after the publication of this blog. The government pushed compliance dates back a full year.