When most clients ask me about making their website ADA compliant, what they’re really asking is, can you help me not get sued (again)?

Yes, I can.

Let’s explain some of the progressions website owners should be making as they work through ADA compliance.

Technical Compliance

But what almost nobody realizes – including digital accessibility companies – is what the legal standard for compliance with Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is.

It’s meaningful access.

That’s it.

Most people just immediately jump to WCAG 2.1 AA or WCAG 2.2 AA conformance – and those standards are a best practice for compliance, but WCAG hasn’t been incorporated into the law, at least for now.

So if I were talking to a client, I might tell them:

Look, strict WCAG conformance isn’t required. The legal standard under Title III is simply that your website provides meaningful access, not that you have 100% perfect accessibility. However, what makes a website meaningful accessible is arguable and plaintiffs’ lawyers have no problem making technical argument against your website when certain issues exist – and to defend against this position will easily cost you 5-figures.
So rather than being technically right about your website providing meaningful access, let’s be practically right and avoid litigation altogether. The best practice for ADA compliance is WCAG 2.1 AA conformance – and if you want to go even further, you can even work towards 2.2 AA.

With that in mind, I want you to focus on the phrase I used at the very end, “work towards.”

The reason I say this is because WCAG conformance takes time. At lightning speed, you’re looking at 1-2 months for smaller, simpler websites.

For most website owners, the timeline is more realistically 3-8 months. This extended time period isn’t absolutely needed, but it just works out this way in real life because of the disjointed processes and workflows that prevail.

Another significant factor is the scope of the project. Because we’re not just concerned with the accessibility of your homepage, we need to keep in mind that we’re working on a significant chunk of the website; optimally, all of your primary pages, screens, user flows, important pages, and unique content will be included in this project.

Here are the steps to WCAG conformance under typical client experiences:

Audit
Remediation
Re-audit
Secondary remediation
Review
Final remediation

This back and forth exists because the service provider is auditing and the client’s team is usually remediating. And, naturally, the process can extend depending on how well remediation goes.

While WCAG conformance is effective and highly desirable, the process of being WCAG conformant isn’t speedy like a drive-through car wash; it’s involved and closer to moving out of your apartment you’ve lived in for two years.

And, in a way, full WCAG conformance works against our practical approach because, ultimately, we want to not get sued. Of course, we want to improve accessibility, but there’s no reason to remain at code red risk throughout our project.

Practical Compliance

Which leads us to making our website practically ADA compliant (fixing it so that we’re highly unlikely to get sued).

One thing that’s important to remember is that, in practice, it’s plaintiffs’ lawyers who are enforcing the ADA because they’re the ones sending demand letters and filing complaints in courts.

So, realistically, it’s not really about meaningful access.

And while WCAG conformance is highly recommended, it’s not precisely what we need.

What we need is to make sure that we reduce the chance that plaintiffs’ lawyers sue us.

How do we accomplish this?

We look at the accessibility issues they claim over and over again – and we prioritize these issues over any others.

And, importantly, some of these claimed issues aren’t required even under WCAG 2.2 AA.

Again, it’s better to be practically right than technically right. And sometimes you may want to go beyond WCAG and just cater to the whimsical nature of plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Three of the top 5 accessibility issues claimed in website accessibility lawsuits are:

Missing alternative text
Lack of keyboard navigability
Missing form field labels

But what’s also important for you to know is that the accessibility issues plaintiffs’ lawyers gravitate towards don’t map evenly to WCAG success criteria.

Some issues aren’t even required under WCAG 2.2 AA.

Also, some issues are merely techniques for conformance rather than actual non-conformance.

(This gets at plaintiffs’ lawyers not always understanding the very claims they themselves are making.)

So when clients ask me about the best approach to making their website ADA compliant, the answer depends on what the client’s objective and budget is.

My best recommendation is to prioritize the issues that are most frequently claimed by plaintiffs’ lawyers, aggressively fix those issues, and then continue working towards full WCAG 2.1 AA or WCAG 2.2 AA conformance.

You can find all of the most commonly claimed issues inside my ADA Compliance Course. The course is based on data extracted from 2023 and 2024 complaints and includes strategy, instructions on how to fix, model code examples, and more.

Summary

When most clients initially approach me, they are very much in a technical mindset:

There is no law that tells me what to do.
I don’t think this accessibility issue even exists.
If someone had just called us, we would have helped.

I let them know that they’re making valid points, but my focus is always on the practical:

How do we prevent this from happening (again)?

And both my clients and I share this thought:

Is there a path to getting this case dropped or dismissed?

Two Options

When it comes to making your website ADA compliant, there are two good options:

The formal path of full WCAG conformance
The informal path of fixing as many of the most claimed issues as fast as possible

The primary pros and cons of the formal path are 1) that it’s thorough and you can have more confidence that there will be no outstanding accessibility issues and 2) it takes much longer, leaving you exposed to risk.

The primary pros and cons of the informal path are:

That it’s aggressive and immediately and strategically reduces risk of a lawsuit while improving accessibility
That it’s imperfect and some issues will likely be missed when working so aggressively.