Most businesses that serve the public should plan their website with accessibility built in. The U.S. Department of Justice says the ADA's requirements for businesses open to the public apply to what they offer on the web, and it points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as helpful technical guidance while leaving businesses flexibility in how they comply. For a build, the practical answer is to put accessibility into the content plan from the first page brief, not to patch it after launch.
An owner may first hear about web accessibility from a demand letter, a vendor's sales email, or a plugin that promises a one-click fix. None of those is a good place to start planning. A rebuild is the easiest moment to get the structure right, because headings, form labels, link wording, image descriptions and video captions are all being written anyway.
This is a content-planning question for business owners and marketing leads, not legal advice. Whether and how a specific law applies to your business is a question for your counsel, and the details below are what to bring to that conversation.
What the federal guidance says
The Department of Justice published its Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA on March 18, 2022. It states that Title III prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public, and that the ADA's requirements apply to the goods, services, privileges and activities those businesses offer, including those offered on the web. The same page says businesses have flexibility in how they comply and names WCAG as one existing technical standard that provides helpful guidance.
The guidance lists common barriers: images without text alternatives, poor color contrast, videos without captions, inaccessible online forms, and pages that work with a mouse but not a keyboard. It also covers headings, and text size and zoom. Read that list as a planning checklist. Every item on it is decided by someone during a build, whether or not anyone notices the decision being made.
Two details are easy to misread. ADA.gov states that its guidance documents have no legally binding effect, and the guidance says it does not reflect the requirements for state and local governments set by a separate 2024 rule. That rule, under Title II, sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps. A private business reading about the 2024 rule should not assume it describes its own obligations. Ask counsel which rules apply to you, including any rules in your state.
What WCAG is and how it is organized
WCAG is developed through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) by its Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. As of October 2026, W3C's overview lists WCAG 2.2, published October 5, 2023, as the latest version, following WCAG 2.0 in 2008 and WCAG 2.1 in 2018. WCAG 3 is still an early draft. The guidelines are organized under four principles, and each success criterion is assigned one of three levels: A, AA or AAA.
You do not need to memorize the success criteria to plan a site. What helps is knowing which items depend on content decisions and which depend on code. Color contrast and keyboard behavior are mostly design and development work. Image descriptions, heading order, link wording, captions and form instructions are mostly content work, and they are the ones that slip when nobody owns them.
The content decisions that carry the most weight
Treat accessibility as part of each page brief. Every page in the plan can carry a short list of the items a designer or developer cannot supply alone.
| Content item | What the page brief needs | Who usually supplies it |
|---|---|---|
| Images | A short description of what each meaningful image shows and why it is there, plus a note when an image is only decorative | The person who knows the work in the photo |
| Headings | An outline where each heading names what its section answers, in a sensible order | The writer, checked by the page owner |
| Links and buttons | Wording that makes sense read alone ("Request a site visit" rather than "Click here") | The writer |
| Video | Captions and, where useful, a transcript | Whoever produced or approved the video |
| Forms | A visible label for each field, plain instructions, and error messages that say what to fix | The person who handles inquiries |
| Documents | A plan for PDFs: an accessible version, or the same information published as a page | The document owner |
Image descriptions are a good test of whether the brief is complete. The person writing alt text should not have to invent what a photo of your work actually shows. A stock line like "team at work" tells a screen reader user very little, while "Technician checking a rooftop unit before a spring service visit" tells them something real, and only someone who knows the job can write it accurately.
A fictional example: a clinic rebuild
Consider a fictional physical therapy clinic in Oregon planning a new site. The old site has a video tour with no captions, a booking request form whose fields are marked only by gray hint text inside each box, and a dozen photos named with camera file numbers.
In the rebuild brief, the office manager takes ownership of the form: the field labels, the instructions above it, and what the error message should say when a phone number is missing. The clinic director writes a one-line description for each photo, because only she knows which room and which piece of equipment each one shows. The video goes out for captioning before launch rather than after. The designer gets a note that body text must pass a contrast check against its background.
None of this requires the clinic to become accessibility specialists. It does require someone to ask early, "Who on our team can describe what this photo shows and why it is on the page?" Without that question, the descriptions get skipped or guessed at, and the form ships the way it always looked.
Automated checks help, and they have limits
Automated testing tools catch real problems: missing alt attributes, low-contrast color pairs, form fields without labels, empty links. They are worth running on every template and every key page. They also have limits. W3C's guidance on selecting evaluation tools says tools cannot check all accessibility aspects automatically and that human judgment is required, and the DOJ guidance warns that a clean report does not necessarily mean everything is accessible.
A tool can confirm that an image has alt text. An automated report is not an accessibility review. Whether that text is accurate, whether the heading outline makes sense, and whether the form can be completed with a keyboard alone are things a person has to check. Plan time for someone to tab through each form and template, and to read key pages with images turned off.
Be cautious with any product or vendor that describes accessibility as a single step. Ask what they test, what they change in the underlying page, and what they leave to you, and bring their answers to your counsel.
Building it into the project
Accessibility is easiest when it is part of the plan from the start. Put it in three places: the content brief (the table above, page by page), the design review (contrast, focus states, text size and zoom), and the prelaunch check (automated scans plus a manual pass on forms and key templates).
Hudson South builds websites around the same four steps as its content work. Authority Asset gathers approved business knowledge and evidence, the kind of source accurate image descriptions and form instructions depend on. Hudson Twenty-One records how the business communicates across 21 dimensions so the writing sounds like it. Market Intelligence researches the buyer questions and the market, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first content. Automated accessibility checks are part of the build practice, alongside a quality gate on copy before launch, and the manual review still belongs with people.
If the rebuild also changes how you collect contact details, read what a website needs when it collects contact information. To raise accessibility in a hiring conversation, see the questions to ask a web designer before you hire one. The website builds overview covers platforms and process.
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- Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA. U.S. Department of Justice, ADA.gov. Read 2026-10-17.
- Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments. U.S. Department of Justice, ADA.gov. Read 2026-10-17.
- WCAG 2 Overview. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Read 2026-10-17.
- Selecting Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Read 2026-10-17.