Free ADA Compliance Checker

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. Courts have increasingly ruled that websites are "places of public accommodation" under ADA Title III, meaning they must be accessible to blind, deaf, and motor-impaired users.

You can be sued. In 2024, over 9,100 ADA lawsuits were filed against businesses with inaccessible websites. Settlements typically range from $25,000 to $150,000, plus legal fees. Small businesses are frequently targeted because they are less likely to have legal resources to fight back.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the technical standard that defines what makes a website accessible. While ADA does not specify a technical standard, courts and the DOJ consistently use WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the benchmark for ADA compliance.

Start by scanning your site with WCAGsafe to identify violations. Our tool provides plain-English explanations and step-by-step fix instructions for each issue. Common fixes include adding alt text to images, improving color contrast, and ensuring keyboard navigation works correctly.

If your business serves the public — even online only — you are likely required to comply. Courts have ruled that websites of businesses with physical locations must be accessible. E-commerce sites, restaurants, healthcare providers, and professional services are frequent lawsuit targets.

There is no level written into the ADA itself, but WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the standard the Department of Justice and the courts point to in practice. That is what our ADA checker tests against — every Level A and AA success criterion — so your results line up with the benchmark used in real cases.

No, and be wary of any tool that promises that. An automated scan reliably catches the most common and most-cited failures — missing alt text, contrast, unlabeled forms — but some issues need human judgment, and anyone can still file a claim. What a clean, dated scan does give you is evidence of a good-faith effort and a fixed baseline. WCAGsafe does not provide legal advice.

No. The government does not issue an official ADA "certified" seal for websites, and any vendor claiming to sell one is misleading you. What you can produce is a dated audit record showing your site was scanned against WCAG 2.1 AA and what was found — WCAGsafe generates exactly that on paid plans as an ADA Audit Certificate.

No. Overlay widgets are scripts you paste onto your site that claim to auto-fix accessibility, but they do not repair the underlying code — and they have been named as defendants in a growing number of ADA lawsuits. An ADA checker takes the opposite approach: it finds the real code problems so you or a developer can fix them properly.

Any time your site changes — a redesign, new pages, a new plugin or theme, or fresh content — can introduce new violations. Scan after every significant change and at least monthly. Paid plans include automated monitoring that re-scans your site and emails you if a new issue appears.

Yes. Many claims target small businesses precisely because they are less likely to have already fixed their sites and more likely to settle quickly rather than fight. Newness is no shield either — the obligation attaches to the site being public, not to how long it has existed. The upside is that small sites are usually fast and inexpensive to bring into line once you know what to fix.

Checking is free to start with WCAGsafe — 3 scans per day, no credit card. You will see your issue count and a preview of the violations; a free account reveals your full score. Paid plans (starting at $7/month) add per-issue fix instructions, PDF export, multi-page crawling, and automated monitoring. Fixing the issues yourself is often just a few hours of work; if you would rather not, done-for-you remediation is quote-based.

For a typical small-business site, the common fixes — contrast, alt text, form labels, link and button names — are usually a few hours to a few days of work once you have the exact list of what to change. That list is the slow part when you do it by hand, which is why a scan helps: it hands you the specifics up front. Larger sites, complex web apps, and custom interactive widgets take longer and benefit from a manual review on top of the automated scan.