Why US businesses actually care about WCAG

Most of the world treats website accessibility as a quality issue. In the United States it is also a legal one. That is the whole reason this post exists, and it is why we treat WCAG as part of a US build rather than a polish pass at the end.

We are not lawyers. This is not legal advice, and it is not a claim that a “WCAG-compliant” sticker will keep anyone out of trouble. It is a plain account of why US buyers ask about this, what the letters actually mean, and what is reasonable to put in a brief. If you need a legal opinion, hire a lawyer who does this work. If you need a site built so a keyboard and a screen reader can use it, that is web development.

What WCAG is

WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a technical standard, published by the W3C, that describes how to make web pages usable by more people — including people who cannot see the screen, cannot use a mouse, or cannot hear a video.

It has versions and levels. The version most briefs should name in 2026 is WCAG 2.2. The level most briefs should name is AA. AAA exists; it is a higher bar and it is not what most businesses mean when they say “accessible”. If a proposal says “WCAG” with no version and no level, it has not said anything yet.

AA is a set of testable statements. Contrast ratios. Keyboard access. Form labels. Focus that you can see. Targets large enough to hit. Text that can be enlarged. None of that is taste. You can fail a page on a number.

We build to WCAG 2.2 AA on work for the US. That is already on the United States page, because it is one of the things that is genuinely different about that market. We measure contrast on what is actually rendered, not on the palette. We check that a keyboard path works. We tell you when a design choice you have asked for would fall short, rather than building it and hoping.

Why the US is different

Two facts, and neither of them needs a statistic attached.

Public-accommodation law in the US has been applied to websites. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the statute people mean. The Department of Justice has said that the websites of businesses that are public accommodations can be covered. Courts have gone both ways on the details, which is one reason this is a lawyer’s subject. The practical result for a business owner is simpler: people do file complaints and lawsuits about websites they cannot use, and those filings typically point at WCAG as the yardstick.

Government sites have a number. In 2024 the Department of Justice published a rule for state and local government websites (ADA Title II) that names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard, with dates that depend on the size of the government. That is a public rule, not a blogger’s summary. It does not automatically bind a private bakery in Ohio. It does tell you which standard US institutions now treat as the floor.

There is also Section 508, which is about federal agencies and who sells to them, and there are state laws — California’s Unruh Act is the one that comes up most often — that get used alongside the ADA. We are not going to map that for you. The point is: in the US, “we’ll do accessibility later” is not a small postponement. It is a decision about risk.

We will not invent a lawsuit count, a settlement average, or a “most sued industries” table. Those numbers go stale the month they are published, and most of the ones you will find in agency blogs are being used to scare you into a package. The risk is real without the theatre.

What this is not

It is not a plugin. “Install this accessibility overlay” is a product category, and it is one we will not sell you. An overlay that sits on top of a page and claims to fix contrast, keyboard use and screen-reader output without changing the page is making a promise the page cannot keep. The work is in the HTML, the CSS, the forms and the media. There is no badge you can buy that substitutes for that.

It is not a PDF of a report. An audit that lists two hundred failures and then stops is a document, not a fix. Useful work is “this contrast fails, here is the nearest shade of your own colour that passes, and we will change it”. We built a contrast checker that does that part because the usual ones stop at a ratio.

It is not a guarantee nobody will complain. Anyone who sells you “ADA certified” or “lawsuit-proof” is selling a phrase that does not exist as a government programme. WCAG AA is a technical target. Meeting it makes the site usable by more people and removes the obvious failures a complaint would point at. It is not a talisman.

It is not only for people with a diagnosed disability. The same work helps someone with a broken arm, someone on a phone in sunlight, someone on a bad connection, someone who cannot find the mouse cursor. Treating it as charity is how it gets cut from the budget.

What actually fails on small-business sites

You do not need a twenty-page audit to find the common ones. Open your site on a phone and try these.

Contrast. Grey text on a white card, lime text on a pale background, white text on a photograph. If you cannot read it easily, a lot of people cannot read it at all. The ratio for normal text is 4.5:1. Check it rather than squinting. The checker will also suggest the nearest passing shade of the colour you already chose.

The keyboard. Unplug the mouse, or just do not use it. Can you reach the menu, the form, the submit button, and see where you are? If the focus outline was removed because it “looked ugly”, that is a failure, and it is one of the most common.

The form. Every field needs a label that is in the page, not a placeholder that disappears when you type. Errors need text, not only a red border. If the only way to send it is a click target the size of a word, people will miss.

The menu. A hamburger that cannot be opened with a keyboard, or cannot be closed, or traps you inside it. Mobile navigation is where a lot of otherwise careful sites fall over.

The images. A photo of your shop front needs a short description. A decorative swirl does not. “IMG_4031” is not a description. Linked images need to say where they go.

The video. If you autoplay something with sound, stop. If there is speech, it needs captions. That is the item most brochure sites can skip because they have no video — and the one that becomes expensive if you add a reel later without planning for it.

None of this requires a special aesthetic. It requires that someone checked, on the built page, not on a desktop mockup.

What to put in the brief

One line is enough:

The site should meet WCAG 2.2 AA. Tell us, before you build it, if a design choice we have asked for would fail that.

That does two jobs. It puts the work in the quote instead of in a change request. And it makes “we will do accessibility later” an explicit decision rather than a quiet omission.

If you are writing a fuller brief, use the US small-business version. Accessibility is item 6 on that list, next to the systems, the accounts and the budget in dollars. What the quote should contain, and why two US quotes for the same site can be an order of magnitude apart, is in how much a website costs in the US.

What we will and will not claim

We will build the site so contrast, keyboard use, labels, focus and target size meet WCAG 2.2 AA, and we will tell you when something you want would miss. We will not certify you, represent you, or promise that nobody will file a complaint. Those are different professions.

If you want that build, tell us what the site has to do. If you are still deciding whether an overseas studio is the right shape for the rest of the work, the honest hours and the red flags are on when hiring offshore from the US makes sense and on the United States page.