You have probably typed some version of “is my website ADA compliant” into a search box and landed on a site that offers a free score in ten seconds. Those scores are not useless, but they are not an answer either. A better first step costs nothing and takes about half an hour: try your own site the way some of your visitors have to.
This post is that half hour, broken into short tests anyone can run without technical skills. At the end you will know whether you have obvious barriers, roughly where they are, and what questions to ask next. You will not have a legal answer, and we will be clear about why.
Is my website ADA compliant? What a self check can tell you
Nobody can check if a website is ADA compliant from a quick look, and a free tool cannot either. Under Title III there is no official technical checklist for business websites; the benchmark people use is Level AA of WCAG 2.1 or 2.2, which runs to a long list of success criteria, and plenty of those need a trained person with a screen reader to judge. Whether a business met its legal duty is a legal question for a lawyer.
What a self check does well is find the loud problems. If you cannot use your own contact form without a mouse, you do not need an audit to know something is wrong. If the self check finds little, that is encouraging, but it is not a clean bill of health. Keep both of those in mind as you go.
For the wider picture of what the law expects, read our guide to ADA compliance for business websites. This post stays with the hands-on part.
Before you start: pick three pages and a notepad
Do not try to test the whole site. Pick:
- Your homepage.
- The page that earns you money: a main service page, a product page or a menu.
- The page where people act: the contact form, booking form, or checkout.
Open a plain document or a sheet of paper. For each problem, write the page, what you did, and what happened. “Contact page: pressed Tab from the top, focus disappeared after the phone number, could not reach the Send button.” That one line is worth more to a developer than a screenshot of a score.
Use a desktop or laptop browser for most of this. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all work.
Minutes 1 to 5: run one free scanner
Go to WAVE from WebAIM, paste in your homepage address, and run it. Then do the same for your other two pages.
WAVE puts icons on your page. Red icons are errors, yellow ones are alerts that need a human to decide. Do not try to understand every icon. Write down the counts and the kinds of red errors you see most. Common ones on small business sites are missing alternative text on images, empty links (often social icons with no text), form fields with no label, and low contrast text.
Two cautions. First, a scanner catches only part of the problems; plenty of serious barriers never show up in one. Second, WAVE can report no errors on a page that is still hard or impossible to use. Treat the scan as a quick look, not a verdict.
Minutes 6 to 13: put the mouse away
This is the test that surprises owners most. Many people cannot use a mouse, including people with motor disabilities and most screen reader users. Click into the address bar one time, then tap Tab again and again while you watch the page.
- Can you see where you are? Whatever has focus (a link, a button, a field) needs a visible ring or highlight. If focus vanishes, or you cannot tell which item is active, write it down.
- Is the order logical? The highlight ought to travel roughly in reading order: header, menu, main content, footer. If it jumps around, note where.
- Does the menu open? Move to a menu entry with a submenu arrow and try Enter, then Space. If the submenu only ever opens on mouse hover, keyboard users cannot reach those pages.
- Can you get out? If a popup, chat window or video player grabs focus and Tab just cycles inside it with no way to close it (Escape should usually work), that is a keyboard trap.
- Is focus hidden? Watch for focus disappearing behind a sticky header or cookie banner at the bottom of the screen.
Shift+Tab moves backward. Enter follows links and presses buttons; Space presses buttons and ticks checkboxes. That is all you need for now.
Minutes 14 to 18: zoom in
People with low vision often zoom their browser. Press Ctrl and the plus key (Command and plus on a Mac) until text is about twice its normal size. Then keep going a few more steps, until the layout switches to the narrow, phone-style version.
What you are looking for:
- Text that overlaps other text or gets cut off inside a box.
- Having to scroll sideways to read a line of body text.
- A sticky header or banner that grows until it covers half the screen.
- A menu or form that disappears or cannot be opened at this size.
Press Ctrl and zero (Command and zero) to reset when you are done.
Minutes 19 to 22: check contrast where it counts
The usual offenders are light gray text on white, white text on a pale brand color, and words laid over photos. WCAG sets the minimum at 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text.
You already have contrast results from WAVE. Look at them again and focus on the places that matter: body text, button labels, form placeholder text, prices, and the footer. If you squint at your screen and something fades into the background, it probably fails. Write down the color combinations that keep appearing, because fixing one brand color in the theme often fixes dozens of spots at once.
Minutes 23 to 27: fill in your own form
Forms are where barriers cost you real customers. Go to your contact, booking or checkout form and try three things.
- Click each label. Clicking the visible word “Email” should put the cursor in the email field. If nothing happens, the label may not be connected to the field, and a screen reader may announce just “edit text” with no name.
- Look for labels that vanish. If the only hint is gray placeholder text inside the box, it disappears as soon as someone types. That is hard for many people, not only screen reader users.
- Submit it wrong on purpose. Leave a required field empty and enter a bad email address. Does the form tell you, in words, which field is wrong and how to fix it? Or does a field just turn red? Color alone is not enough. Can you reach the error message with Tab?
Then try the form once from the keyboard only, start to finish. If a CAPTCHA appears that asks you to pick images or solve a puzzle, note it; those block many people.
Minutes 28 to 30: video, documents and images
Finish with a quick sweep of everything that is not plain text:
- Video. Play any video with speech. Are there captions, and are they accurate, or are they auto-generated with mistakes nobody fixed?
- PDFs. Open a menu, price sheet or intake form PDF. Try to select a line of text with the mouse. If you cannot, the PDF is probably a scanned image, and a screen reader will find nothing in it.
- Images. On the pages you scanned, look at the images WAVE flagged. A photo of your team does not need a long description, but an image that contains text, such as a flyer or an offer banner, needs that text available in words. Our WordPress alt text how-to shows the field to use.
Reading your notes
Your notes will not settle “is my website ADA compliant” as a legal matter, but they do show where to start. Sort what you wrote into three piles.
- Blockers: something you could not do at all. Menu items you could not reach, a form you could not submit, a trap you could not escape. These go first.
- Hard but possible: you got there with effort. Invisible focus, confusing order, faint text.
- Content items: missing alt text, uncaptioned video, scanned PDFs. Your own staff can often fix many of these once someone shows them how.
If you have a few items in the third pile and almost nothing in the first, you are in a reasonable place to keep improving on your own. Our small business accessibility checklist will help with the everyday upkeep.
If you found blockers, or more than you expected, that is the signal for proper testing. A full method adds a screen reader pass, checks every page template, and maps each issue to a specific WCAG criterion; our walkthrough on how to test website accessibility thoroughly explains what that involves. For a second pair of eyes on your notes first, request our free website accessibility check, and our ADA website accessibility help page explains the wider audit and fix process.
Frequently asked questions
Can a free online checker tell me if my site is ADA compliant?
No. A free scanner flags issues a machine can detect, such as missing alt text or low contrast, but it catches only part of the problems and cannot judge things like keyboard use, focus order or whether alt text makes sense. It also cannot answer the legal question, which depends on your situation.
Do I need special software to test with a keyboard?
No. Every computer can do it. Click in the browser address bar, then use Tab to move forward, Shift and Tab to move back, Enter to follow links, Space to press buttons and tick boxes, and Escape to close popups. Watch for a visible outline on each item as you go.
Should I test on my phone too?
It helps, but start on a computer, where keyboard and zoom tests are easiest. Once those are done, open the same pages on your phone, check that the menu opens and closes, that buttons are easy to tap, and that you never have to scroll sideways to read text.
What should I do if the self check finds nothing?
Treat it as good news with limits. A half-hour check cannot cover screen reader behavior, every page template, or every criterion. Keep an eye on new content and plugin updates, and consider a fuller test of your most important pages if your business serves the public online.
When you want the technical side looked at properly, our page on how we approach ADA website compliance explains how we test against WCAG 2.2 AA, correct what fails, and record what changed.
Next in this series: ADA Website Lawsuits Explained for Business Owners
