ADA Website Compliance Services

If you are a private business, there is no federal regulation that spells out a website standard for you, and the DOJ’s planned Title III web rule is paused indefinitely. In practice the answer is still yes: courts treat websites of businesses open to the public as covered by the ADA, plaintiffs’ firms filed more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits in 2025 according to UsableNet, and about two-thirds of the companies sued had under $25 million in revenue. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the standard those cases and settlements reference. If you are a state or local government, a healthcare organization receiving HHS funds, or you sell to customers in the EU, WCAG 2.1 AA is an explicit legal requirement with dates attached.

For state and local governments under the ADA Title II rule, the DOJ extended the deadlines on April 20, 2026: April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. For healthcare and other HHS-funded organizations under Section 504, HHS extended on May 7, 2026 to May 11, 2027 for organizations with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for smaller ones. The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 28, 2025. Private businesses have no fixed date, only ongoing litigation exposure, which is its own kind of deadline.

WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023, adds nine success criteria to 2.1, covering things like keeping focused elements visible, minimum target sizes, alternatives to dragging, consistent help placement, and not requiring users to re-enter information or solve cognitive tests to log in. Everything in 2.1 remains in 2.2, so a 2.2 AA site is also 2.1 AA compliant. The DOJ, HHS, and EU rules all cite 2.1 AA as the legal baseline. We build to 2.2 AA where it is practical and verify against 2.1 AA at minimum, so the site meets the law today and is ready if the reference is updated.

No. An overlay is a script that attempts to patch the page in the browser; it cannot fix missing form labels, broken heading structure, keyboard traps, inaccessible PDFs, or badly built components, which are the things audits and lawsuits actually turn on. UsableNet tracked 95 to 155 lawsuits every month of 2025 against sites that were running an overlay, and in January 2025 the FTC fined one overlay vendor $1 million over misleading compliance claims. Overlays can also interfere with the assistive technology people already use. We remediate the site in the code and then remove the overlay.

It depends on the size of the site, the number of templates and components, how it was built, and how many issues the audit finds. A hand-coded site with a small number of templates is a very different job from a page-builder site with hundreds of pages and a library of PDFs. We start with a WCAG audit, quoted per site, which tells you exactly what needs fixing, and then quote remediation as a fixed price from those findings. For new builds, accessibility is part of the project rather than an add-on, and it is always cheaper than retrofitting.

Mostly in the theme. WordPress core is reasonably accessible on its own; the problems come from themes, page builders, plugins, and content. We fix semantic structure and heading order in the templates, make menus, modals, sliders, and forms work from the keyboard with visible focus, correct color contrast in the design system, add proper labels and error messages to forms, handle images and media alternatives, replace inaccessible plugins or page-builder components with accessible theme code, and set up editors so that alt text, headings, and link text are done right by default. Then we test with screen readers and keyboard alone, and verify with independent tooling.

Yes. After remediation we verify conformance with third-party audit tooling and manual assistive-technology testing, and deliver a written report mapped to WCAG success criteria along with an accessibility statement for the site. That is the kind of evidence a compliance officer, general counsel, or federal funder expects under the HHS and DOJ rules. The Trust Company of North Carolina’s WCAG AA conformance was verified this way rather than self-assessed.