There are 3 levels of accessibility: A, AA, AAA. The higher the level, the better your website meets the requirements and allows greater accessibility to users.
Courts treat business websites as “places of public accommodation” under ADA Title III. There’s no single federal law that spells out a website checklist, but courts and demand letters consistently point to WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard. If a client’s site doesn’t meet it, they’re exposed to a demand letter or lawsuit, regardless of company size.
This isn’t rare. Roughly 4,000-5,000 ADA website lawsuits are filed per year in the US, and small businesses are frequent targets because they’re more likely to settle fast rather than fight. Settlements typically run $5,000-$25,000 before attorney fees.
What actually needs to happen
WCAG 2.1 AA covers four principles: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. In practice, the violations that show up most in lawsuits are:
- Missing alt text on images
- Poor color contrast (light gray text on white is a common offender)
- Keyboard navigation that traps or skips users
- Unlabeled form fields
- Missing video captions/transcripts
Where accessiBe fits in
Sebo has an accessiBe license, which we can suggest to clients as part of an accessibility plan. It’s worth being accurate with clients about what it does and doesn’t do:
- It’s an AI-powered widget that can automatically remediate a meaningful set of common issues (contrast, some ARIA labeling, keyboard navigation adjustments) and gives the client an accessibility statement.
- It is not a guarantee of compliance, and we shouldn’t market it that way.
- The honest pitch to a client: accessiBe is a strong first layer that closes a lot of common gaps quickly, but it should be paired with a real audit and code-level fixes for anything the widget can’t touch, especially on sites with forms, checkout flows, or video content.
Does this affect SEO?
No direct ranking penalty or reward from Google for ADA/WCAG compliance. That said, a lot of accessibility best practices overlap with SEO fundamentals: alt text, semantic heading structure, clean HTML, and fast load times all help both. Frame it to clients as risk reduction plus a UX/SEO side benefit, not an SEO play on its own.