Last updated: May 2026
If you own a website in 2026, web accessibility is no longer a nice-to-have. It's a legal expectation, a business risk, and a quality signal Google and your customers both notice. Web accessibility means building sites that work for people of all abilities, including those who navigate with screen readers, keyboards, captions, or magnification. With 95.9% of the top one million home pages failing WCAG 2 checks and federal accessibility lawsuits climbing again in 2025, the cost of getting this wrong is real. Here are the five things every website owner should know before their next build, audit, or content refresh.
The 5 things every website owner should know about web accessibility:
My dad has always reminded me that the people you don't design for are the people you end up excluding. That stuck with me. When we audit websites at Major Tom, accessibility gaps are almost always the loudest signal that a site was built for an imagined "average" user rather than the people who actually visit it. Let's walk through the five things we wish every business owner knew before the conversation gets handed to a developer.
Most teams know about the alt attribute. Describe the image, skip the decoratives, move on. That's a start, and a good one. But the WCAG 2.2 success criteria run to dozens of checkpoints across four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Colour contrast, heading hierarchy, keyboard navigation, focus indicators, error messaging, form labels, captioning, motion controls, and content clarity all live in that list.
The latest WebAIM Million 2026 analysis bears this out. Across the top million home pages, 95.9% had detectable WCAG 2 failures, averaging 56.1 errors per page. The biggest culprits weren't exotic edge cases. Low-contrast text (83.9%), missing alt text (53.1%), and missing form labels (51%) topped the list. These are foundational issues, and they're everywhere. If your site has any of these problems, you're in the overwhelming majority. That isn't comfort, it's the baseline you're starting from.
For the practitioner-level checklist of what to fix and what to avoid, our companion post covers 5 essential dos and don'ts for accessible web development.
A common pattern we see in our intake calls: the marketing lead has been told accessibility is "a dev thing." It isn't. Designers set colour contrast and focus styles. Content teams write the headings, link text, and alt descriptions. Developers translate those decisions into semantic HTML and ARIA where needed. QA closes the loop. If accessibility shows up only at the developer's desk, it's already too late, and the rework will be expensive.
At Major Tom, accessibility is built into kickoff. We define accessibility acceptance criteria in the project brief, bake them into wireframes, and audit at every milestone. We find clients see fewer bugs at launch and far fewer post-launch surprises when accessibility lives upstream. If you're scoping a new build, our guide to writing a website RFP that gets strong agency replies walks through how to make accessibility a non-negotiable from day one.
It used to be true that "there's no clear-cut way to achieve accessibility." That framing is outdated. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the global benchmark, and WCAG 2.2 extends it with a handful of new criteria around focus, dragging, and authentication. They're testable, well-documented, and referenced in legal rulings around the world.
In the United States, the legal stakes climbed sharply in 2024–2026. Under the DOJ's Title II final rule, as amended in April 2026, state and local government web content and mobile apps must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people, and by April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. Title III lawsuits against private businesses are not waiting on regulators. Plaintiffs filed 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, a 27% jump from 2024 (Seyfarth Shaw, ADA Title III News & Insights). The legal direction of travel is clear. ADA compliance is the floor, not the ceiling.
The nuance worth keeping: WCAG conformance is necessary but not sufficient for usability. A site can pass every automated check and still be frustrating for a user with low vision or a cognitive disability. The standard is the starting point; lived-experience testing is what finishes the job.
Tools like WAVE, axe DevTools, and Lighthouse have improved a lot. They'll surface contrast failures, missing labels, broken landmarks, and a fair amount of structural problems in seconds. Run them. They're a great first sweep.
But the consensus in the field, confirmed by WebAIM and W3C guidance, is that automated checks reliably cover only around 30 to 40% of WCAG criteria. The rest needs human judgment: does this alt text actually describe the image's purpose in context? Does the focus order make sense when you tab through? Does the screen reader announce form errors clearly? Can a keyboard-only user complete a checkout?
The best results come from a layered approach: automated scans for the obvious failures, manual keyboard and screen-reader testing for flow issues, and testing with users who actually rely on assistive technology. In our experience, that last step is the one most teams skip, and it's the one that catches the issues most likely to drive a complaint or a lawsuit.
Websites are like gardens, not castles. They need ongoing attention. Every new blog post, product page, video embed, or a third-party widget is a potential accessibility regression. A site that ships at WCAG 2.2 AA can drift below it within months if nobody's watching.
That's why we treat accessibility as part of ongoing website maintenance and optimization, not a one-off project. Quarterly automated scans, an annual manual audit, content guidelines for everyone who publishes to the site, and a clear remediation owner are what keep a site accessible over time. The clients we work with who treat it this way rarely face a compliance scare. The ones who don't are the ones writing emergency cheques to consultants the week after a demand letter arrives.
If you want a quick sense check, run through this list against your current site:
If any of those sound unfamiliar, that's where the next conversation starts. For organizations with complex sites and multiple stakeholders, our take on what makes a website industry-leading covers how accessibility intersects with performance, conversion, and brand.
It's easy to frame accessibility as defensive: avoid the demand letter, satisfy the regulator. That misses the point. About one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability that affects their use of the web, according to the CDC. That's a significant slice of your audience. Accessible sites are also faster, cleaner, and more SEO-friendly, because the practices that help screen readers (semantic markup, clear hierarchy, descriptive link text) also help search engines. Accessible content tends to be clearer content. Everyone benefits.
We build with accessibility from kickoff. Our wireframes flag interactive patterns that need extra care. Our design system ships with audited colour pairings and focus styles. Our developers write to WCAG 2.1 AA as the baseline, and we test with a combination of automated tooling, manual keyboard and screen-reader passes, and external auditors for complex projects. When clients come to us with an existing site, we start with a full audit, automated and manual, and prioritize remediation by user impact, not just severity score.
If your team is staring down a redesign, a compliance deadline, or just an uneasy feeling that your site might not be where it needs to be, we can help you find clarity in the chaos. Take a look at our web design and development services to see how we build, or get in touch to talk about your site specifically.
Web accessibility means designing and building websites so people of all abilities can use them, including those with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities. It covers screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, captioning, form labels, and content clarity. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the W3C are the global standard. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the baseline most regulators, including the U.S. Department of Justice, reference when defining ADA compliance for digital products.
In the U.S., yes for many organizations. The ADA has long been interpreted to cover commercial websites, and Title III lawsuits hit 3,117 federal filings in 2025. The DOJ's 2024 Title II final rule, as amended in April 2026, now formally requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA for state and local government sites by April 2027 or April 2028 depending on entity size. Other jurisdictions including Canada, the EU, and the UK have parallel laws.
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C. The current widely-adopted version is WCAG 2.1, with WCAG 2.2 adding additional criteria. Each guideline has three conformance levels: A (basic), AA (standard), and AAA (strict). WCAG 2.1 AA is the level referenced by most accessibility laws including the ADA Title II final rule. Compliance means every applicable success criterion at that level is met across your site.
Everyone who touches the website. Designers handle contrast, focus styles, and visual hierarchy. Content creators write clear headings, descriptive link text, and image alt descriptions. Developers translate those decisions into semantic, ARIA-aware HTML. QA verifies the result. Senior leadership owns the policy and budget. When accessibility is treated as a developer-only task, the upstream decisions that drive most failures never get caught in time.
Use a layered approach. Start with automated tools like WAVE, axe DevTools, or Lighthouse for a fast first sweep. They'll catch the obvious failures but only cover about 30 to 40% of WCAG criteria. Layer in manual keyboard-only navigation, screen-reader testing with NVDA or VoiceOver, and ideally usability testing with people who actually rely on assistive technology. For high-stakes sites, commission a formal third-party audit annually.
Three things tend to happen, in escalating order. First, you quietly lose customers who can't use your site and rarely tell you why. Second, you accumulate SEO and conversion debt because accessible sites are also clearer, faster, and better-structured for search engines. Third, you become a target for ADA Title III demand letters and lawsuits, which in 2025 hit a record 3,117 federal filings. The first two cost more than most teams realize.
It depends on the starting point. For a new build with accessibility baked in from kickoff, the incremental time is small — usually 10 to 15% on top of design and development effort. For a remediation project on an existing site, expect anywhere from a few weeks for a small marketing site to several months for a large eCommerce or government property. The honest answer is that accessibility work is never fully "done"; it's ongoing maintenance.