ADA Compliance Website Audit

Most business owners assume ADA website compliance is something large corporations worry about. It isn't. Federal courts have consistently ruled that websites are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and plaintiffs' attorneys have shifted their attention to small and mid-size businesses precisely because they're less likely to have addressed it.

In 2023 alone, over 4,600 ADA website accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal court. Many targeted businesses with fewer than 50 employees. The demand letters typically arrive without warning, and the cost to settle even when you've done nothing intentionally wrong often runs into thousands of dollars before attorney fees.

An accessibility audit tells you where your site stands, what's broken, and what needs to be fixed. That's a much better position to be in than discovering the problem through a legal demand.

I offer ADA compliance website audits for small businesses in Prescott, Chino Valley, Prescott Valley, and Dewey-Humboldt — bundled into website builds and maintenance plans, or available as a standalone service.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — WCAG — are the technical standard courts and regulators use to evaluate whether a website is accessible. The current benchmark for legal compliance is WCAG 2.1/2.2 Level AA.

WCAG 2.1 AA covers four core principles. A website must be:

• Perceivable — content can be perceived by users regardless of disability, including those using screen readers or who cannot distinguish colors
• Operable — all functionality can be operated by keyboard alone, not just a mouse
• Understandable — content and navigation behave in predictable, consistent ways
• Robust — the site works with current and future assistive technologies

Most websites fail on several of these without anyone realizing it. Missing image alt text, poor color contrast, form fields without labels, and videos without captions are among the most common violations and none of them are visible to a sighted user navigating with a mouse.

Automated Testing

I run your site through industry-standard accessibility scanning tools that check hundreds of potential issues across every page; missing labels, contrast failures, improper heading structure, missing landmark roles, and more. Automated tools catch a consistent subset of WCAG violations quickly and comprehensively.

Manual Testing

Automated tools find roughly 30 to 40 percent of accessibility issues. The rest require human judgment. I manually test your site for issues that automation misses; keyboard navigation flow, focus order, screen reader behavior, meaningful link text, and form usability ; using the same methods a user with a disability would actually employ.

Written Audit Report

You receive a clear, written report documenting every issue found, organized by severity. Each item includes what the problem is, which WCAG criterion it violates, where on the site it appears, and what needs to be done to fix it. The report is written for a business owner, not a developer, plain language, no jargon.

If you want the issues fixed and not just documented, I can handle remediation on WordPress sites after the audit is complete.

Remediation covers the technical fixes — adding alt text, correcting contrast values, labeling form fields, fixing heading hierarchy, improving keyboard navigation, and more. When remediation is complete, I run a follow-up check to confirm the issues are resolved.

Some accessibility problems are straightforward code fixes. Others involve design decisions that require more discussion. I'll tell you which is which before any remediation work begins.

A few of the most common violations I will find on website:

Images Without Alt Text — Screen readers announce these as "image" with no context. A sighted user sees a photo of your team. A screen reader user hears nothing useful.

Low Color Contrast — Light gray text on a white background looks clean to most people and is essentially unreadable to someone with low vision. WCAG sets a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text.

Form Fields Without Labels — A contact form with placeholder text inside the field ("Enter your name") loses that label the moment someone starts typing. Screen readers need a permanent label attached to the field.

No Keyboard Navigation — Users who can't use a mouse whether due to motor impairment or preference to navigate entirely by keyboard. If your dropdown menus, modals, or forms can't be reached and operated by tab and enter alone, those users are locked out.

Missing Skip Navigation — Without a "skip to main content" link, keyboard and screen reader users have to tab through every navigation item on every page before reaching the content they came for.

None of these are exotic edge cases. They're routine issues on most small business websites.

An ADA compliance audit is included in my website builds and maintenance plans. If I'm building your site or maintaining it, accessibility is part of the process; not an afterthought.

If you have an existing site built by someone else and want to know where it stands, the audit is available as a standalone service. You get the written report regardless of whether you hire me to fix what's found.

No audit and no set of fixes makes a website permanently or legally bulletproof. Accessibility is an ongoing standard, not a one-time certification. Content added after remediation can introduce new violations. WCAG itself continues to evolve.

What an audit does is give you a documented, good-faith record that you assessed your site and addressed what was found. That documentation matters if a complaint is ever filed.

I won't overstate what an audit accomplishes. But doing nothing is a much worse position than having a current audit and a remediation record on file.

If you're uncertain about your site's accessibility and want a clear picture before a problem finds you, let's start there.

Call (503) 888-6844 or use the form below.