Disability Compliance for Websites: Complete Guide

What is Disability Compliance for Websites?

Disability compliance means ensuring your website is usable by people with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. This includes providing text alternatives for images, captions for videos, keyboard-friendly navigation, readable content, and clear page structure.

Most accessibility laws globally, including the ADA (U.S.), AODA (Canada), and EAA (European Union), use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 or 2.2 as the technical standard for disability compliance. Failure to meet these requirements can lead to legal action, financial penalties, and damage to your brand’s reputation.

Why is Website Disability Compliance Important?

Disability compliance is essential to ensure equal access for all users, regardless of ability. Here are some key reasons why website disability compliance matters: 

• Legal risk: Non-compliance can result in lawsuits, fines, or formal complaints under laws like the ADA (U.S.), AODA (Canada), or EAA (EU). 
• Technical gaps: Issues like missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, broken keyboard navigation, poor focus handling, and incorrect ARIA use make content unusable for people with disabilities.
• SEO alignment: Proper use of semantic HTML supports both assistive technologies and search engine indexing, improving accessibility and discoverability.
• High scrutiny: Sectors like healthcare, finance, education, and government are frequently audited and legally required to meet accessibility standards.
• Better UX: Accessible websites work better for everyone and offer faster load times, device compatibility, and improved navigation.
• Discrimination impact: Denying access to people with disabilities can be legally recognized as discrimination and lead to reputational and financial harm.

Who is Responsible for Disability Compliance?

Disability compliance is a shared responsibility across multiple roles. While legal liability often falls on the organization or website owner, each team involved in creating, managing, or maintaining a website plays a part in ensuring accessibility.

• Website owners: Accountable for compliance with accessibility laws and standards.
• Designers and developers: Directly responsible for implementing accessible design and code.
• Content creators: Responsible for ensuring that all published content supports accessibility.
• QA and testers: Expected to detect and report accessibility issues during the testing process.
• Product managers: Play a key role in prioritizing accessibility across product planning and delivery.
• Vendors and third-party providers: Must provide accessible tools and integrations, and the responsibility extends to all embedded content.
• Leadership and legal teams: Ensure compliance policies are in place and handle legal exposure related to inaccessibility.

How to Achieve Disability Compliance on Your Website?

To make your website disability compliant, you need to follow specific technical standards, meet legal rules, and remove barriers that affect how people with disabilities use your site.

• Follow WCAG standards: Use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 or 2.2 as your baseline. These guidelines cover how to make text readable, content operable by keyboard, media usable with captions, and layout understandable to users with cognitive disabilities.
• Meet legal requirements: Identify which accessibility laws apply to your business, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the U.S., the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in Canada, or the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in the EU, and ensure your website meets their expectations.
• Use proper testing methods: Run both automated accessibility scans (using tools like Axe, Lighthouse, or WAVE) and manual testing with screen readers (like NVDA or VoiceOver), keyboard-only navigation, and zoom/responsive testing on real devices to catch real-world issues.
• Fix common barriers: Address high-impact failures such as missing alternative text for images, form fields without labels, poor color contrast, focus not moving properly between elements, and dynamic content that isn’t announced to screen readers.
• Maintain accessibility: Build accessibility into your ongoing workflows. Test all design updates, code deployments, and content changes before they go live to ensure they don’t introduce new barriers. Assign ownership, set up checklists, and re-audit regularly.

Why Test Accessibility on Real Devices? 

Accessibility issues don’t always show up in controlled environments. They often appear when a website is used on different devices, browsers, screen sizes, or orientations. Variations in how browsers render content, how screen readers behave, or how layouts adapt on smaller viewports can expose problems that automated tools miss.

BrowserStack makes it easy to test accessibility on real hardware without managing your own device lab. It supports accurate, reliable testing under real-world conditions.

• Access 3,500+ real devices and browsers: Check how your website performs across different screen sizes, resolutions, operating systems, and browser versions.
• Test screen reader behavior in actual environments: Validate how content is announced and navigated by screen readers on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices.
• Check layout and readability with zoom and font scaling: Identify issues with text overflow, clipping, and content reflow at various settings.
• Simulate keyboard and touch input: Ensure that navigation works for both keyboard-only users and those relying on touch interaction.
• Automate accessibility checks in CI/CD: Run integrated scans using tools like Axe and Lighthouse directly in your development workflow.
• Catch visual and interactive issues: Spot problems with contrast, focus order, hover states, and responsive layout that affect accessibility.

Conclusion

Disability compliance ensures your website can be used by people with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. To achieve it, you must follow WCAG guidelines, meet legal requirements, such as ADA, AODA, and EAA, and fix technical barriers through proper testing. Real-device testing on BrowserStack helps catch accessibility issues in different screen sizes, browsers, and input methods.