Make Your Site Accessible
Barring a time machine, there’s never been a better time than right now to make your website accessible. The case for accessibility has always been straightforward: A site that works for everyone reaches everyone. But the landscape around accessibility has recently changed. The practical, legal, and human reasons to act have never been stronger or more aligned.
Accessibility Makes the Web Better for Everyone
Features designed for people with disabilities tend to become features everyone depends on.
Audiobooks started as a library service for low-vision readers. Today they’re a multi-billion dollar industry that commuters, parents, and students rely on every day. Captions were developed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing—now they’re the default expectation for social video, and most people watching in a quiet office or a loud gym are glad they exist. Curb cuts were built for wheelchair users and became indispensable for anyone pushing a stroller, moving a dolly, or rolling luggage through a parking lot.
Designing for the edges of human experience tends to produce things that work better at the center of it.
The same pattern holds on the web. Proper heading structure—one of the most common failures we find in audits—makes content easier to scan and easier for search engines to index. Sufficient color contrast helps low-vision users and anyone trying to read a phone screen in bright sunlight. Logical page structure helps screen reader users navigate and helps every other visitor understand what they’re looking at.
When you fix accessibility issues you’re improving the experience for everyone who visits your site.
Compliance Rules Have Changed
State and local governments are now required to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA under a 2024 DOJ rule—with deadlines of April 2027 for larger entities (populations of 50,000 or more) and April 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. The 2024 rule governs Title II of the ADA—state and local government entities only.
Nonprofits and private organizations fall under Title III, which carries no hard federal deadline but a different kind of pressure: Title III litigation around inaccessible websites has been rising steadily for years, and courts consistently apply WCAG 2.1 AA as the benchmark when cases come up.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA covers a wide range of criteria: how images are described, how pages are structured, how color contrast works, how a site behaves when someone navigates without a mouse and so on. It’s a good standard, and meeting it requires a deliberate review of how your site is built—not just how it looks.
While the rules are changing, accessibility requirements don’t need a mandate to be worthwhile goals. If your site isn’t accessible, some of your visitors can’t use it. Isn’t that worth addressing regardless of where the regulatory lines fall?
Many nonprofits serve populations with higher rates of disability—including older adults, veterans, and people with chronic health conditions. If your site isn’t accessible, some of the people you want to reach won’t be able to.
What Most Sites Look Like
We audit across nonprofit, government-funded, and commercial websites. The consistent finding isn’t that some sites have problems—it’s that most sites have problems, and most organizations don’t know those problems exist.
Government-adjacent organizations—consultants, contractors, vendors, and service providers—increasingly find that accessibility compliance is a requirement baked into procurement and partnership agreements. If you work with government entities, it’s worth knowing where your site stands before a contract requires you to.
That’s not a criticism. Accessibility issues aren’t visible the way a broken layout or a missing image is. Most of them are structural: Things your visitors experience—or fail to experience—that don’t show up when you look at the screen. A missing image description. A form field that’s unlabeled. A heading hierarchy that makes sense visually but not to assistive technology. These aren’t things that surface in a routine review. They require someone looking for these kinds of problems.
What we find, again and again, is that once organizations understand what’s there, they want to fix it.
What An Audit Provides
An audit is not a commitment to a remediation project. It’s a picture of where your site stands.
Our accessibility audits include automated scanning across a strong sample of pages, manual review of key page types and user flows, a findings report with every issue identified and categorized by severity, and a plain-language summary written for non-technical stakeholders. We map findings to the specific WCAG criterion each one fails, and we produce an Accessibility Impact score for the site overall.
You get a checklist of what you can act on—not a raw data export.
Audits start at $750. If you want help understanding what the findings mean in practice, or want to talk through remediation priorities, we’re glad to do that as a next step. The audit stands on its own, and a lot of clients find that having a clear picture of where they stand is enough to get internal momentum moving.
Why Now?
April 2027 feels like a long time away. It isn’t, particularly if remediation is involved. Accessibility issues at scale take time to address, and identifying them now—before a deadline creates pressure—means you get to be deliberate about how you respond.
But set the deadline aside for a moment. If your site isn’t accessible, some of your visitors can’t use it. Some of the people you’re trying to reach can’t reach you back. That’s worth addressing regardless of any regulation.
We can show you where you stand. Learn more about our Web Accessibility Audit service.
