Standards ยท 2026-02-20
ADA Compliance Is a Technical Problem, Not a Legal One
Most clients come to ADA/WCAG compliance work because of a legal concern: a demand letter, a lawsuit, a vendor requirement, or an internal risk review. That framing is understandable, but it changes the work in ways that often produce weaker outcomes. When compliance is treated as a legal problem, the goal becomes passing an audit. When it is treated as a technical problem, the goal becomes building a site that actually works for people using screen readers, keyboards, captions, zoom, high contrast settings, or other assistive tools.
Those are different targets.
The WCAG guidelines are organized around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. In practical site work, that turns into concrete checks: meaningful alt text, sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation, proper heading structure, programmatic labels on forms, visible focus states, and markup that assistive technology can interpret consistently. None of that is abstract. It lives in templates, page-builder output, theme settings, plugin behavior, and the way new content gets added.
The most common failures I find in audits are ordinary production problems. Images are uploaded without useful alt text, or the alt text describes what a sighted person can already see instead of explaining the image's function. Form labels look connected visually but are not programmatically associated with the input. A menu, modal, or form control can be entered by keyboard but not exited cleanly. Body text uses light gray on white because it looked subtle in the design mockup but fails contrast in actual use.
Most of these issues are not difficult to fix. They are easy to introduce accidentally and easy to prevent with a consistent review process.
WordPress-specific accessibility work has its own patterns. Themes may add decorative icons without marking them as decorative. Page builders may generate heading structures that look fine visually but jump from H2 to H5 in the markup. Plugins may insert sliders, popups, maps, or custom controls without keyboard support. The fix is usually not a legal memo. It is theme configuration, template cleanup, CSS adjustment, plugin replacement, or a small amount of custom JavaScript.
The remediation audit is also not the end of the work. A site that passes today can drift out of compliance as staff add landing pages, swap colors, upload images, embed third-party tools, or update plugins. Sustainable compliance means building accessibility into the content workflow: writing alt text when images are uploaded, preserving heading order, testing forms after changes, and avoiding color-only instructions such as 'click the green button.'
That is why I prefer the technical framing. It gives the client something practical to maintain. The legal framing makes people ask, 'What is the minimum we need to pass?' The technical framing makes the minimum much clearer: build the site so people can use it.