The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was established in 1990 to ensure people with disabilities could not be discriminated against and had fair access to public facilities and businesses. But more recently, the ADA has evolved to keep websites and web pages as accessible and safe as public buildings.

So whether you’re building a new website or maintaining an old one, it’s crucial to know everything about ADA’s accessibility standards for online spaces. Not only will making an ADA-compliant website ensure your web presence is accessible to everyone, but it can also make your pages look better and improve traffic to your website.

And in this post, we’ll show you how to make it happen.

1. ADA Compliance Levels

A banner from the ADA website’s home page.

ADA compliance isn’t a binary system where you’re website is either accessible or not. Instead, there are three levels of ADA compliance, as listed by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The levels range from Level A to Level AAA, where A represents the minimum accessibility level and AAA represents the peak.

There are many ways to make your website more ADA-compliant, and the more you commit to adding accessibility features, the better your compliance level will be.

Level A

The baseline ADA compliance level. To reach Level A, your website must meet all the following benchmarks:

Every image on your website must have alternate text that describes what’s happening in the picture.
All links on your website need descriptive names that clearly identify their purpose.
All pages must have titles.
Users should be able to resize your website’s text up to 200% without losing any content or functionality.
Users should be able to navigate your website through a method other than a mouse.

Level AA

The majority of website builders aim for Level AA, the second tier of ADA compliance. People view Level AA as the perfect middle ground because it builds in a lot of accessibility tools without really restricting your design options. This level encompasses everything in Level A but with a bit more focus on audio and video content, as well as the following criteria:

Your audio content must have written captions, and your videos must have either captions or audio descriptions of the content.
Users should be able to access and fill out forms without a mouse.
Users should be able to resize your website’s text up to 400% without losing any content or functionality.

Level AAA

The top level of ADA compliance. Though Level AAA ensures just about everyone can use your website, it takes a lot of effort to get here and can also handcuff your design flexibility. But if you’re willing to go the extra mile, this is what you’ll need to do (in addition to meeting the Level A and AA requirements):

Users should be able to navigate every page and form of your website using just a keyboard.
All your pages should have a color contrast ratio of at least 7:1 relative to the background color.
Users with cognitive disabilities should be able to access all your website’s content.
Users should be able to resize your website’s text up to 800% without losing any content or functionality.

2. Does Accessibility Impact Your Website’s SEO?

A Google help graphic describing how the search engine determines which pages to return after a search.

Technically, no! At least not on Google. Though the company encourages website admins to make their pages as accessible as possible, they don’t use compliance levels as SEO criteria when deciding how to rank pages on relevant search inquiries.

One big reason Google doesn’t use accessibility as a ranking factor is that they don’t have a way to judge objectively how ADA-compliant your website is. Though many WCAG criteria, such as font sizes and proper page titles, are easy to check, some are too subjective for Google to grade with an automated system.

But even though Google doesn’t grade accessibility when ranking websites, making your pages ADA-compliant provides SEO benefits in a roundabout way, primarily through “bounce rate.”

Bounce Rate

“Bounce rate” is a metric that measures how many people visit a website and leave without interacting with it. For example, if you opened a website thinking it was a restaurant, only for the home page to tell you they were a hardware store, you would click off of it instantly. Or, in other words, you’re “bouncing” away from the site.

The general rule of thumb is that a bounce rate at or around 40% is good - it means only 40% of the people accessing your website leave before interacting with your pages. However, that benchmark varies depending on your industry.

Google might not measure accessibility when returning relevant search results, but they will grade your website’s bounce rate. And if people can’t use your website because it’s not ADA-compliant, they’ll leave instantly, and the bounce rate will be high even if it has the information people are looking for.

You want your bounce rate to be as low as possible since a low percentage means people are actually using your website when they open it up. Low bounce rates imply that the information on your site is valuable and relevant to what people are looking for, and Google will use that data to recommend low-bounce pages to anyone making relevant searches. But again, your website’s contents don’t matter if people can’t read or access them, so you want to emphasize ADA compliance to keep that bounce rate low!

3. Design Benefits

A banner image for a post detailing Google’s DevTools. Read it here.

A website might fail to meet ADA standards if there’s a lack of color contrast between the background and text colors. For example, people with visual impairments can struggle to read light-colored text on a light background. But while making your website more accessible is the biggest reason to fix color contrast issues, these ADA corrections will also make your pages look better since these inaccessible contrast options often aren’t visually appealing anyway.

Undersized clickable elements are another design element that might make a website impossible to use. And just like poor color contrast, these elements are often rough to look at. So making your website ADA-compliant will also make it look better, even if by accident.

Note: Google Chrome offers a feature in DevTools that suggests accessibility friendly color options if you’re struggling to find a good palette.

4. Proper Transcriptions

Though Google does automatically provide audio transcriptions, they’re often filled with errors. That means if you rely on Google’s auto-generated captions for your video and audio content, your audience might miss vital information because Google misheard and improperly transcribed a sentence.

Not only do bad transcriptions mean people won’t be able to understand your video content, but they also just come across as lazy. When you have the option to transcribe your videos and remove all Google’s errors but don’t, it sends a message that you don’t fully care about the video content or the people viewing it.

Functioning transcriptions are a benchmark for ADA compliance, so replacing Google’s auto-transcriptions with your own, functioning ones will make your site more accessible while correcting any caption issues.

5. Avoiding Legal Issues

Most people know that the ADA requires businesses to make their physical buildings accessible to everyone. However, it’s not common knowledge that websites have just as much obligation to stay accessible. This means accommodating everyone so that a person’s disability can’t prevent them from accessing your services online.

Note: Reaching Level A accessibility doesn’t make you immune to legal action. You must do your best to ensure everyone can comfortably use your website.

6. More Users

As we’ve seen, there are several technical reasons why ADA compliance is important for websites. But maybe more important than any of them is that ADA compliance means more people can use your website, and the more happy users you have, the more likely people will be to trust your business!

Big Takeaways

Now that we’ve looked at the biggest reasons why ADA compliance matters for your website, let’s recap the biggest takeaways so you can go forth and build the perfect accessible website:

Beyond improving SEO, increasing your user base, and generally being a good thing to do, making your website more accessible can also help you avoid legal issues. Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act states that websites have to accommodate people with impairments, and you’re liable for legal action if you don’t make those accommodations to your site.

There are three levels to ADA compliance, but most of the features you need to reach Level AA (such as video captions, page titles, alternate text on images, etc.) align with best design practices, so it won’t be too challenging to reach the second level.

Even though Google doesn’t account for ADA compliance when ranking websites, poor accessibility has ripple effects that will adversely affect your SEO.

Reaching Level AAA takes a lot of commitment and can limit your design options, but it's worth the effort if you can manage it. It will help lower your bounce rate and improve the perception of your brand and website.