Is my website ADA compliant?

Short answer: the Americans with Disabilities Act does not contain a technical standard for websites, but the courts and the Department of Justice measure against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and thousands of website suits a year are settled on that basis. So the practical question is whether your site meets WCAG 2.1 AA, and that is something you can start checking today.

What "compliant" means in practice

Title III of the ADA covers businesses open to the public. Most federal circuits treat a website as covered, either as a place of public accommodation in itself or because it is tied to a physical one. There is no certification, no registry and no regulator that audits sites in advance. Enforcement is by complaint and lawsuit, and the pattern is consistent: a demand letter arrives, usually triggered by an automated scan of your site, citing specific WCAG failures.

Which failures? The same handful, again and again:

• Images with no alt text, or alt text that is a file name
• Form fields with no label
• Links and buttons with no accessible name (an icon and nothing else)
• Text with insufficient colour contrast
• No visible keyboard focus
• Pages that cannot be operated without a mouse

Every one of those can be found automatically, which is why the letters are so cheap to send.

Check your site for free

Run your address through the scan box on this page. It crawls your site and checks 93 rules across accessibility, SEO, security and performance, and shows every failure with the exact element and the WCAG criterion. No account is needed.

The free scan reads the HTML your server sends. Colour contrast, keyboard focus and whether the page reflows on a phone can only be measured by rendering the page in a browser, which is what the paid pack does.

What automated checks cannot tell you

This matters, and most vendors skip it. Automated testing reaches a minority of the WCAG success criteria. It cannot tell you whether alt text is accurate, whether a video's captions are correct, whether the focus order makes sense, or whether a screen reader user can complete a purchase. A site that passes every automated check is in much better shape and still is not, by that fact alone, compliant.

Any tool that says otherwise is selling you something. Curbcut's packs ship a check-by-hand list scoped to what was found on your site, and the attestation we issue when a re-scan comes back clean says exactly what it proves: that the automated checks passed on that date.

If you are also selling to Europe

The European Accessibility Act has applied to businesses selling to EU consumers since 28 June 2025. It uses the same WCAG 2.1 AA standard. Fixing your site once covers both.

What to do first

Fix the things that clear the most. On most sites, three template-level changes clear over half the findings: one line in a header template, one in a footer, one colour in a stylesheet. The Curbcut pack ranks every change by what it clears per minute of work, and writes the alt text, link wording and headings for you.

This is our understanding of the legal position, written to point you at the right obligation. It is not legal advice.