Free Tool
Accessibility Checker
Enter any website's URL and this tool checks it against common, automatically detectable WCAG accessibility issues: missing alt text, poor color contrast, unlabeled form fields, broken keyboard navigation, and more. Results come back in 10 to 20 seconds, no signup, no email required.
Accessibility isn't just a legal question. Roughly one in four adults in the US lives with a disability, and a site that's hard to navigate with a screen reader or a keyboard is a site turning away real customers before they ever reach you. This tool gives you a fast, honest first look at where yours stands.
Disclaimer: This checks for common WCAG issues an automated scan can detect. It's a useful starting point, not a full audit, and passing every check here isn't a legal certification of ADA compliance. Some things, like whether alt text describes an image correctly, still need a human to check.
Scanning the page, this usually takes 10 to 20 seconds.
What this checks: common, automatically detectable WCAG issues, alt text, labels, contrast, keyboard access, and more. This surfaces real, catchable problems, it does not replace a full manual audit, and passing every check here is not a certification of legal ADA compliance.
Found issues worth fixing?
Mindstate Strategy builds sites the accessible way from the start, not bolted on with a plugin. See how web development here works, or get in touch to talk through what fixing these would take.
Fixing what this tool finds is real web development work, not something a plugin patches on afterward. Mindstate Strategy's web development service builds these standards into the site itself, for businesses across San Diego County and remotely nationwide. Get in touch to talk through what your specific results would take to fix.
FAQ
The ADA itself doesn't spell out a specific website standard, and enforcement has developed through court rulings and DOJ guidance rather than one explicit rule for private businesses. In practice, if your business serves the public and operates a website, courts have generally treated that website as a place of public accommodation, the same way a physical storefront is, and WCAG 2.1 AA has become the standard most commonly used to judge compliance.
Yes, and small businesses are targeted specifically, not despite their size. Industry data on 2025 filings found most defendants had annual revenue under $25 million, and plaintiff firms often prefer smaller businesses because they're more likely to settle quickly and less likely to already have a documented accessibility program in place.
Demand letter settlements are commonly cited in the $5,000 to $25,000 range, before any actual remediation work. If a case moves into litigation, legal defense costs alone can run considerably higher, with several industry reports citing figures from the tens of thousands up to well over $100,000 once defense fees and mandated fixes are included.
No, and this is one of the most common and costly misunderstandings in this space. Overlay widgets sit on top of existing code without fixing the underlying structure, and they've become a specific target for plaintiff attorneys rather than a protection against them. In 2025, the FTC fined a major overlay vendor a million dollars for falsely claiming its widget guaranteed compliance, and industry reports found more than one in five ADA website lawsuits that year targeted sites that already had one of these overlays installed.
WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the technical standard defining what an accessible website looks like: proper alt text, sufficient color contrast, full keyboard navigation, and more. The ADA itself doesn't name a specific technical standard for private businesses, but WCAG 2.1 AA is the version courts and the Department of Justice reference most often, including in the DOJ's own rule for government websites.
No. An automated scan, including this one, checks for common, technically detectable WCAG issues, but full legal compliance and a complete accessibility audit go further than any automated tool can confirm on its own. Passing every automated check is a strong sign, not a legal guarantee.
Most cases start with a demand letter, not a lawsuit, typically asking for a settlement before anything gets filed in court. Ignoring it tends to escalate the situation, and repeat targeting is common: a meaningful share of 2025 federal ADA website cases involved a business that had already been sued once before, part of why fixing the underlying issues matters more than settling and moving on.
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