If you run a roofing, HVAC, construction, or healthcare business in North Carolina, your website is often the first place customers try to reach you. That is why questions about ADA website compliance come up so often among business owners. This guide gives you a 15-minute check you can run yourself. It is a preliminary screen that helps you spot obvious barriers — it is not a complete audit, and it does not determine whether your website is legally compliant.
What the law and the standards actually say
The U.S. Department of Justice's web accessibility guidance explains that the ADA applies to the online services that businesses open to the public offer their customers, while giving businesses flexibility in how they meet the ADA's general requirements. State and local government services are governed by their own requirements, which are separate from the obligations of private businesses.
North Carolina also has its own digital accessibility and usability standard. It applies to public-facing state agency websites and digital services, including those maintained on an agency's behalf. It does not set the same rules for every private business in the state, so do not assume that your obligations are identical to a neighboring business's — they depend on your situation.
On the technical side, the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the most widely used benchmark. WCAG 2.2 is the newer published standard, and W3C encourages using the latest version — if you are starting new accessibility work, WCAG 2.2 Level AA is a sensible target. WCAG 2.1 Level AA remains a widely used benchmark and is what the specific contrast guidance below references. Meeting a WCAG level is good practice, but it is not automatically a legal requirement for every North Carolina private business, and passing a checklist does not create a guaranteed legal safe harbor.
The litigation numbers explain why owners are paying attention. UsableNet's 2026 midyear analysis projected approximately 6,176 digital accessibility lawsuits for the year, based on filings recorded through June 14, 2026. That is an industry projection, not an actual year-end total or a government census, and it counts court filings rather than private demand letters, which are generally not recorded in a central database. This national figure also does not tell you the measured lawsuit probability for any specific group of NC businesses. The report also discusses lawsuits involving smaller businesses, particularly where customers rely on a website to request service, book an appointment, or complete a purchase.
One more caution: automated accessibility widgets and overlays can help surface some issues, but they can miss others. DOJ guidance recommends using automated checkers carefully and pairing them with manual checks. An overlay does not replace accessible underlying code, real keyboard testing, or a plan for fixing what you find.
The 15-minute website accessibility check
This checklist draws on W3C's preliminary accessibility checks. Set aside a quarter of an hour and check your homepage plus one important page, such as your contact form, appointment page, or service-area page. Try the checks on a phone and a computer when possible.
Two things to keep in mind before you start. First, this is a preliminary screen, not a complete audit or certification — it will not catch everything. Second, you do not need special software for most of it, just a keyboard, a browser, and patience.
Minutes 0–3: Check images and forms
Start with the images that communicate useful information: a crew at work, a before-and-after project, a map, or a service diagram. Ask whether someone who cannot see the image would miss important information.
One important note on alt text: you generally cannot verify it simply by looking at a picture. Alt text lives in the page's code, so check it with a browser inspection tool or ask your developer. Meaningful images need appropriate text alternatives; purely decorative images generally use empty alt text so screen readers skip them instead of announcing clutter.
Next, inspect your contact or quote form. Click or tap each field and check that it has a clear, visible label — not just placeholder text that disappears as someone types. Required fields should be identified with text or another cue, not color alone. Submit the form incorrectly, if safe to do so, and see whether the error is explained in a way users can find and understand.
For a contractor, a broken or confusing quote form can block a homeowner from requesting an inspection. For a clinic, inaccessible appointment or intake fields can make it harder for a patient to seek care.
Here is what properly labeled fields look like in practice — this is the estimate form on our own site:
Minutes 3–6: Check headings and page language
A clear heading structure helps people scan a page and lets assistive technology users move between sections. Check that the page has a clear main heading, followed by headings in a logical order. Using one H1 per page is a helpful authoring practice; don't use heading levels just to make text look bigger.
The page's language should also be identified in its code — English pages should have an appropriate lang attribute so screen readers pronounce content correctly. You may not be able to confirm the attribute just by looking at the page, so ask your developer or use a browser inspection tool.
Minutes 6–10: Navigate with a keyboard
Put your mouse aside. Press Tab to move through links, buttons, and form controls, and Shift + Tab to move backward. Check that you can reach the important parts of the page and that the current control is visibly highlighted — that highlight is the keyboard focus indicator, and it should never disappear.
While you are at it, check the basics of keyboard operation: Enter activates links, and Enter or Space activates standard buttons. Escape should close menus or dialogs where appropriate. Focus should remain visible as you move. You should always be able to leave a control or close a dialog using the keyboard. An open modal dialog normally keeps focus inside until you close it.
Try opening and closing the mobile menu, using the form, and reaching the main content. A skip-to-content link helps keyboard users bypass repeated navigation and jump straight to the page's main information — here is what one looks like when it receives focus:
Minutes 10–13: Check text contrast
Look for small or faint text on white, pale, or colored backgrounds — especially buttons, footnotes, navigation, and form hints. W3C's contrast guidance calls for a ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. "Large" here means approximately 24 CSS pixels in regular weight or 18.7 CSS pixels bold — not simply text that looks big on your screen.
Use a contrast checker to measure actual colors; visual guesses are unreliable. Also check whether meaning is conveyed by color alone: a red outline might show an error to some visitors, but the form should also provide a clear text message.
Minutes 13–15: Check zoom and moving content
Enlarge the page using your browser's zoom (try 200%) and look for clipped text, overlapping controls, or functionality that disappears. This is a quick screen, not a complete reflow test, but it catches common layout problems that affect low-vision users.
Then look for automatically moving or scrolling content — carousels, marquees, rotating banners. Automatically moving or scrolling information that lasts more than five seconds alongside other content generally needs a keyboard-accessible way to pause, stop or hide it, unless the movement is essential. Hover-only pausing is insufficient. Here is the pause control on our own client marquee:
What our own site review found
On November 3, 2026, we updated SS Design Media's website with a skip-to-content link, improved mobile-menu focus handling, visible labels on the estimate form, a keyboard-operated Pause/Resume control for the client marquee, and an accessibility statement. We manually checked specific interactions, including skip-link focus, menu closing with Escape, FAQ controls, the page-count slider, animation pausing and contact-form errors. Those checks verified particular improvements; they were not a complete accessibility audit or a certification of legal compliance.
That work is a useful reminder: accessibility checks are not just for a client project or a future redesign. A working website can still have fixable barriers.
What an accessibility statement should include
While you are reviewing your site, look in the footer for a link to an accessibility statement. If one is present, check that it gives visitors a clear way to report a barrier and request help. If there isn't one, note it as a follow-up.
Per W3C's guidance on accessibility statements, a useful statement is easy to find, written in plain language, and kept up to date. It should explain:
- Your commitment to making the website more accessible.
- The accessibility standard or guidance you use as a target, such as WCAG 2.2 AA for new work.
- Known limitations, if any, and what you're doing about them.
- How visitors can report an accessibility problem or request information in another format.
- A contact method, such as an accessible form, email address, or phone number.
- When the statement was last reviewed.
Make sure the contact route itself works with a keyboard and has properly labeled fields. A statement communicates your commitment and gives visitors a reporting option — it does not, by itself, establish that your site is compliant or substitute for fixing problems.
How this overlaps with search
The same practices that help screen reader users — semantic HTML, descriptive headings, useful alt text, clear labels — also help people and search systems understand a page. Google's documentation on its AI search features notes that they rely on established search fundamentals, so accessible, understandable content supports good SEO without requiring any special accessibility-related optimization. WCAG conformance does not guarantee rankings, AI citations, or traffic; it simply gives both people and machines a better-structured experience. For a North Carolina service provider, that means making it easy to understand what you do, where you work, and how to contact you — the same foundations we build into our contractor website guidance, WordPress services, and local SEO services.
A quick check is a start, not a finish
This 15-minute check can help you find obvious barriers, but it cannot answer the question "is my website compliant?" definitively. It won't test every page, assistive technology, document, video, third-party booking tool, or custom feature, and automated scanners have limits of their own.
For a fuller picture, combine automated testing with manual keyboard review and, where appropriate, testing with assistive technologies and people with disabilities. Prioritize the customer journeys that matter most: requesting a roofing estimate, booking an HVAC visit, contacting a construction company, or scheduling care.
Want to know where your site stands? SS Design Media can help you identify accessibility barriers and outline practical next steps for your site, your forms, and your customer journeys. Contact our team to start the conversation.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice: Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA
- W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview
- W3C: Easy Checks – A First Review of Web Accessibility
- W3C: Understanding Contrast Minimum
- W3C: Developing an Accessibility Statement
- North Carolina Digital Accessibility and Usability Standard
- UsableNet: Inside the 2026 Midyear Numbers
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website
The takeaway
A 15-minute accessibility check is a practical start, not a verdict. Run it on your homepage and one key page, note what you find, and ask your developer about anything you can't verify. If you want help identifying barriers and planning next steps, contact us. Steven reads every message and replies personally.
