Law Firm Website Accessibility: 15 Sites, Measured

Accessibility is the rare website question where a law firm owner reads ten pages and comes away less sure than before. The dates move, the standard is cited as though it were binding, and the fixes on offer are the easy ones rather than the common ones.

So here is which rule reaches your firm, and what the markup on firm sites actually gets wrong. The widget in the corner of the screen gets a section of its own.

Which rule applies to your firm

Two parts of the ADA are being mixed together in most of what is written about this, and the difference decides whether you have a deadline.

The Justice Department rule everyone is citing says plainly that it “applies to all state and local governments,” along with special purpose districts, Amtrak and other commuter authorities. It adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as “the technical standard,” and your firm is not on that list.

The dates in that rule have also changed, which is where most published advice is now out of date. On April 20, 2026 the department issued an interim final rule, effective immediately. Compliance moved to April 26, 2027 for governments serving 50,000 or more people, and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts.

What Title III actually requires

Title III “prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public.” The department’s stated position is that the ADA’s requirements “apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.”

Then comes the sentence that almost nothing written for law firms includes: “The Department of Justice does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards.” WCAG is described as helpful guidance rather than a requirement, and businesses “have flexibility in how they comply,” though “they must comply with the ADA’s requirements.”

That is an obligation with no deadline and no official yardstick. It is a weaker position than a deadline in one sense and a worse one in another, because nothing tells you when you are finished.

WCAG is still the sensible target, and it has not been withdrawn. Version 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in December 2024, and W3C states that it “does not deprecate or supersede WCAG 2.0 or WCAG 2.1.”

What is actually broken on law firm sites

Fifteen firm sites were checked page by page, a homepage and a contact page each, for failures that live in the markup and map to a named success criterion.

Every firm had at least one, and the typical firm had four of the thirteen checks that applied to it, while the worst had ten.

Two rows are worth reading as good news. Every site declares its page language, and not one interferes with keyboard focus order. These are not uniformly bad websites. A narrow, specific set of failures simply keeps recurring.

A skip link is a small, usually hidden link at the very top of a page that jumps straight to the main content. Without one, somebody using a keyboard or a screen reader walks through your entire menu on every page before reaching a word of what they came for.

The alt text number that gets inflated

One correction matters if you ever commission an audit. An empty alt attribute is not a mistake. Writing alt="" is the correct way to mark a purely decorative image, because it tells a screen reader to skip it rather than read out a file name.

Across these sites, 183 images carried a correct empty alt attribute and only 10 were missing the attribute altogether. A tool that scores empty alt as a failure would report roughly nineteen times the real number, and plenty of them do. Ask any audit you buy which of the two it counted.

What the accessibility widget does

Three of the fifteen firms run an accessibility overlay, the widget that adds a small person-shaped icon offering larger text and higher contrast. You will struggle to find the product category discussed at all in accessibility advice written for law firms, including advice published by the companies that sell it.

What an overlay does is mechanical and does not need statistics to describe. It is a script that runs on top of your page. It does not edit the markup underneath, so a missing alt attribute, an unlabeled field and an absent skip link are all still exactly where they were.

The firm with the most markup failures of any here runs one. Three firms is far too few to claim a pattern, and no such claim is made. The mechanism is the point: a widget is a layer, not a repair.

What to fix first

Ordered by how often each failure showed up across these law firm website pages. That order is close to the reverse of the usual advice, which leads on alt text — the rarest failure here — and barely mentions the commonest.

Common questions

Where these figures come from

Fifteen firm sites, a homepage and a contact page each, 29 pages in all. Exact counts, per firm: no skip link 12 of 15; untitled frame 11 of 14; vague link text 9 of 15. Empty link 8 of 15; heading level skipped 8 of 15; unlabeled field 7 of 14. Placeholder-only field 5 of 14; image with no alt 3 of 15; page language 0 of 15. Failure classes per firm ran 1 to 10, median 4. Images: 1,027 total, 10 missing the attribute, 183 correctly empty. Contact form fields: 110, of which 24 unlabeled and 18 of those placeholder-only. Eleven competing guides were measured alongside, and one was set aside as a different kind of document: a 5,099-word bar journal analysis carrying 29 case citations.