ADA compliance means meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Much of that work is the same work you would do for search anyway.
ADA website compliance means making a site usable by people with disabilities to the standard US courts expect under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In practice that means meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The Act itself names no technical standard, which is why WCAG became the working benchmark.
Why a UK business should care
Two reasons. If you sell to US customers you are exposed to US litigation, and thousands of ADA web cases are filed there each year. Closer to home, the Equality Act 2010 puts a similar duty on UK service providers, and public sector bodies have to meet WCAG 2.2 AA under the 2018 accessibility regulations. Different law, near identical requirements. In regulated sectors this matters even more, which is why it sits at the centre of our fintech SEO work.
What compliance actually requires
- Text alternatives. Every meaningful image needs alt text. Decorative images need an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip past them.
- Keyboard access. Every menu, form and modal has to work without a mouse, with a focus state you can see.
- Colour contrast. 4.5:1 for body text against its background, 3:1 for large text and interface components.
- Labelled forms. Inputs need real labels tied to them, and errors need to say what went wrong in words rather than just turning a field red.
- Captions and transcripts. Video needs captions, audio needs a transcript.
- Sensible heading order. One h1, then h2 and h3 in sequence, used for structure rather than picked for font size.
Where accessibility and SEO overlap
A good chunk of that list is work you would do anyway. Alt text describes images to screen readers and to Google. Heading structure tells assistive technology and crawlers how a page is organised. Descriptive link text helps someone tabbing through links and tells search engines what sits at the other end, which click here never does. Captions give video pages text to index.
The overlap is not total. Colour contrast and focus states do nothing for rankings directly, though they do affect how long people stay and whether they finish a form. Treat the shared items as free and the rest as the right thing to do.
Overlay widgets do not fix it
Accessibility overlays, the floating icon that promises compliance in one line of JavaScript, now feature in a large share of US lawsuits rather than preventing them. They sit on top of broken markup instead of repairing it, and some interfere with the screen readers people already use. The fix belongs in the templates, which is why our technical SEO team handles it alongside the crawl and markup work. It is the same code either way.
Related reading: our guides to on-page SEO and SEO audits.
Common questions
Does accessibility directly improve rankings?
Not as a ranking factor. Google has no accessibility score. What helps is the overlap: alt text, heading order, link text and clean semantic markup are all things crawlers use. The indirect effect on engagement and conversion is usually the bigger prize anyway.
Which WCAG level should we aim for?
Level AA of WCAG 2.1 or 2.2. Level A is too low to count as compliant in most legal settings, and Level AAA includes criteria most sites cannot meet across every page. AA is the standard everyone means.
Can an automated tool tell me if we are compliant?
No. Automated scans catch roughly a third of issues, mainly missing alt attributes and contrast failures. They cannot judge whether alt text is useful or whether a custom dropdown works with a keyboard. Manual testing covers the rest.
Where do we start if the site is a long way off?
Fix templates before individual pages, and start with the paths that make money: homepage, search, product or service page, then the cart or enquiry form. One template fix corrects thousands of pages at once.
