How to Make Your Website ADA Compliant

To make your website ADA compliant, conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA: audit the site against every success criterion, fix issues across all four POUR areas, document your conformance in an accessibility statement, and monitor each release for regressions. It’s involved, but it’s a finite, fixable project.

What “ADA compliant” actually means for a website

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn’t include a line-by-line technical standard for websites. Instead, ADA Title III prohibits discrimination by “places of public accommodation,” and courts and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have repeatedly treated business websites as covered. The practical benchmark everyone uses is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the W3C — specifically WCAG 2.1 at conformance Level AA.

So when someone asks how to make a website ADA compliant, the real task is: make it conform to WCAG 2.1 AA. That’s also the standard behind Section 508 for federal agencies, so meeting it covers most U.S. accessibility obligations at once. For a deeper look at how these overlap, see ADA vs Section 508 vs WCAG.

This guide is educational and not legal advice. If you have a specific legal question — especially after a demand letter — consult a qualified attorney.

The four-step process

Step 1 — Audit against WCAG 2.1 AA

You can’t fix what you haven’t found. A real audit combines two methods:

• Automated scanning catches obvious, machine-detectable failures (missing alt attributes, low color contrast, empty form labels). Useful, but limited — automated tools only flag roughly a third of WCAG issues.
• Manual testing catches the rest: navigating with keyboard navigation only, using a screen reader (NVDA or JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac), and checking that focus order, ARIA, and dynamic content actually make sense to assistive technology.

That gap is exactly why automated vs manual accessibility testing matters, and why we lean on manual accessibility testing for anything that affects legal risk. If you want the full procedure, our guide on how to do an accessibility audit walks through it.

Want a fast starting point? Run a free accessibility scan to see your most obvious issues, or check the broader question of whether your site is on track with is my website ADA compliant?

Step 2 — Fix issues by POUR area

WCAG organizes everything under four POUR principles — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. Sorting your findings this way keeps the work logical instead of overwhelming.

Perceivable — users can perceive the content with the senses available to them.

• Add meaningful alt text to informative images; use empty alt for decorative ones (see Alt Text Best Practices).
• Meet color contrast minimums — 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text (Color Contrast Requirements).
• Provide captions and transcripts for media.

Operable — users can navigate and interact, not just with a mouse.

• Everything must work with the keyboard alone, with a visible focus indicator.
• No keyboard traps; logical focus order; skip links to main content.

Understandable — content and controls behave predictably.

• Label every form field; show clear, programmatically associated error messages (Accessible Forms).
• Use a correct heading structure and page language.

Robust — the code works across browsers and assistive technology.

• Use valid, semantic HTML; apply ARIA only when native elements can’t do the job (ARIA Labels & Roles).
• Make custom widgets expose the right name, role, and state.

The conformance levels matter here: WCAG defines Levels A, AA, and AAA. Level A is the floor, AA is the legal target, and AAA is aspirational and rarely required wholesale. Aim for AA.

Step 3 — Document your conformance

Once the fixes land, write them down. Two artifacts matter:

• An accessibility statement — a public page stating your conformance target, how to report problems, and how to reach you. Grab our accessibility statement template to start.
• A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) — a formal report mapping your site to each WCAG criterion. Enterprise and government buyers often require it. We produce these as a VPAT / accessibility conformance report.

Documentation isn’t busywork — it demonstrates good-faith effort, which matters if you ever face a complaint.

Step 4 — Monitor every release

A site is never “done.” New blog posts, product photos, theme updates, and third-party scripts all reintroduce barriers. Treat accessibility like security: re-test on a schedule and after major changes. Accessibility monitoring automates the watching so regressions get caught early instead of in a lawsuit.

Why overlays and widgets aren’t a shortcut

It’s tempting to drop in an accessibility overlay — a one-line script promising instant compliance. Don’t. Overlays sit on top of your site and try to patch it in the browser; they can’t repair the underlying HTML, they frequently break the very screen-reader and keyboard behavior they claim to fix, and businesses running them are still sued regularly. The DOJ and disability advocates have been openly critical of them.

Manual remediation — fixing the actual code — is the only approach that reliably holds up. That’s the whole reason Curbcut exists, and why we explain it plainly in overlay vs manual remediation.

How hard is this, honestly?

For a small brochure site, a determined owner can work through much of this with the guides above. For anything larger — ecommerce, lots of forms, custom interactions, PDFs — the time and expertise add up fast, and a missed criterion is what serial plaintiffs look for. Thousands of ADA web lawsuits are filed each year, and most target ordinary small businesses, not big brands. Our page on ADA compliance for small business covers the realities for SMB owners.

If you’d rather not hand-test every page and rewrite ARIA yourself, that’s exactly what we do. Curbcut’s accessibility remediation service takes your site to WCAG 2.1 AA by hand — no overlays, no shortcuts — and you can start with a free scan to see where you stand today.