ADA website compliance
ADA website compliance means making your site usable by people with disabilities, in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
ADA website compliance means making your website usable by people with disabilities, so that it meets the expectations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the US civil rights law. In practice, that means people who use screen readers, keyboards instead of a mouse, captions or zoom can still read your pages, fill in your forms and buy from you.
For a marketer it matters for three reasons. It opens your site to more customers. It lowers legal risk for businesses that serve the US. And much of the work also makes your pages easier for search engines and AI bots to read.
What the standard looks like
The law itself doesn't list technical rules for websites. The US Department of Justice has published guidance on web accessibility, and most businesses work to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG, which set out testable criteria. For your own legal position, talk to a lawyer.
Typical fixes include:
- Alt text on images that carry meaning
- Headings that follow the page's structure
- Enough contrast between text and background
- Forms with labels, and errors that say what went wrong
- Captions on videos
- Every control usable with a keyboard
What accessibility has to do with AI search
A screen reader and an AI bot have something in common: neither looks at your page the way a sighted person with a mouse does. Both rely on the text and structure in your HTML.
For example, Harrow & Pine shows its delivery prices as an image of a table. A screen reader user hears nothing useful, and a bot reading the HTML finds no prices to quote. Rebuilt as a real HTML table, the same information works for both, and an answer to "how much does Harrow & Pine charge for delivery?" has something to draw on.
In AnswerOrbit
AnswerOrbit doesn't test accessibility. The Pages tab in Website does show what a bot reads next to what a person sees, and Page checks include a title and headings and text shown without scripts. See Website and AI traffic.