ADA Compliance Checklist: 21 Items Every US Business Should Complete

Last updated: October 16, 2026. This checklist is general information, not legal advice — consult a licensed attorney about your own obligations.

An ADA compliance checklist is the set of organizational steps a US business runs to reduce website accessibility-lawsuit risk: assess where you stand, fix the highest-impact issues, document the work, monitor so it holds, and know what to do if a demand letter arrives. This is not a criterion-by-criterion WCAG audit — it's the process a legal or operations team owns, in 21 items across five phases.

Key numbers: ADA Title III federal filings rose 37% in H1 2025, and plaintiffs filed 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits for the full year, up 27% from 2024 (Seyfarth Shaw). In 2026, 95.9% of the top one million home pages had detectable WCAG failures, averaging 56.1 errors per page (WebAIM Million 2026). WCAG 2.2 sets 55 success criteria at Levels A and AA — the conformance target this checklist points to (W3C). Ecommerce is named in 69–77% of digital accessibility lawsuits (Seyfarth Shaw). In the history of the company, fewer than 1% of TestParty customers have been named in an accessibility lawsuit while on the platform.

All 21 items are listed in full below so you can start today — a free, printable one-page version is also available to download for your team or compliance binder.

Phase 1: How do you assess where you stand?

Assessment means finding out, with evidence, where your site actually stands — a scan, a keyboard pass, a screen-reader spot-check, an app inventory, and a dated report — before anyone touches a line of code. If you haven't done any of this yet, an 8-question self-check you can run in five minutes will tell you fast whether a full pass is overdue.

1. Run an automated scan across every key template. Scan home, category, product, cart, and checkout — not just the homepage, since most purchase-blocking failures live past it. Free automated checkers each catch roughly 60–70% of WCAG issues on their own; the rest needs a human.

2. Do a full manual keyboard-only pass. Unplug the mouse and try to complete a purchase using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, and arrow keys across your top templates, watching for anything you can't reach or escape.

3. Spot-check the purchase path with a screen reader. Use NVDA, JAWS, or VoiceOver to add an item, apply a promo code, and complete checkout by ear alone — this is where silent, purchase-blocking failures usually surface first.

4. Inventory every third-party app and widget. List everything injecting markup you don't control — reviews, chat, loyalty programs, size guides, subscription selectors — since Shopify does not review apps for accessibility before listing them. In TestParty's audits, this is the item merchants skip most, and where the highest-severity findings often hide.

5. Document your baseline with a dated report. Archive the scan output, keyboard-pass notes, and screen-reader findings with a date, before any fixes ship, so you can later prove a starting point rather than reconstruct one from memory.

Phase 2: What must you fix first?

Fix the six categories responsible for most real-world barriers first — alt text, color contrast, form labels and error handling, keyboard operability, video captions, and link purpose — each with a one-sentence test you can run yourself.

6. Alt text on every meaningful image. Every product, hero, and informational image needs a text alternative; purely decorative images get an empty alt. Pass: inspect an image's alt attribute — it describes the image, isn't a filename, and isn't missing.

7. Color contrast on text and UI components. Body text, buttons, and form borders all need enough contrast against their background to be legible. Pass: body text measures at least 4.5:1; large text and UI components measure at least 3:1.

8. Form labels and error handling. Every field needs a real, persistent label, and every validation error needs to be described in text and tied to its field. Pass: submit a form incorrectly on purpose — the error is announced in text, not shown only in red.

9. Keyboard operability with a visible focus indicator. Every interactive element — navigation, filters, add-to-cart, checkout — must be reachable and operable without a mouse, with focus visible at each stop. Pass: tab through the entire purchase path and never lose sight of where you are.

10. Captions on prerecorded video. Product and brand videos need synchronized captions carrying the actual spoken content, not auto-generated text that garbles product names. Pass: play a video muted — the captions alone tell the full story.

11. Link purpose that's clear out of context. Link and button text needs to make sense read alone, not as a string of "click here" or "read more." Pass: read only the links on a page aloud — each one tells you where it goes.

Phase 3: What documentation protects you?

Four records turn good intentions into evidence a court or opposing counsel will accept: a public accessibility statement, a dated remediation log, a documented conformance target, and accessibility requirements written into vendor contracts.

12. An accessibility statement with a contact method. Publish your target standard, known limitations, and a way to report a barrier — the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative publishes a template for this. State the current standard honestly; overclaiming "fully compliant" while scans say otherwise is worse than saying nothing.

13. A dated remediation log. Tie every fix to a commit or pull request and a deploy date, not a checklist someone marked done from memory. For the full list of what to keep and why, see our guide to accessibility compliance documentation.

14. A conformance target on record. Name WCAG 2.2 Level AA — the current W3C standard, and the one courts, DOJ guidance, and settlement agreements measure against — rather than leaving "accessible" undefined in your files.

15. Vendor and app accessibility requirements in procurement. Before installing an app or signing a theme contract, ask for its accessibility posture in writing — Shopify's own theme requirements cover only 16–22% of WCAG success criteria, and apps aren't reviewed for accessibility before listing.

Phase 4: How do you keep it compliant?

Compliance isn't a one-time project. Three habits keep it from decaying: a monitoring cadence, a regression check after every theme or app update, and one named owner accountable for the program.

16. Set a monitoring cadence. Run automated scans at every deploy at minimum — daily is better — with a full manual pass at least twice a year across your top templates.

17. Run a regression check after every theme or app update. A theme swap or app install can reintroduce fixed issues overnight: Shopify's free Dawn theme ships with 30–100 detectable violations, and premium themes typically carry 100–350.

18. Assign ownership and train the team that touches the storefront. Name one person accountable for the program, and give anyone editing product pages, themes, or apps basic training on what breaks accessibility and what to check before publishing.

Phase 5: What if you receive a demand letter?

Three moves determine most outcomes: don't ignore the letter, hand it to counsel who specializes in ADA digital cases rather than general litigation, and let your documentation do the negotiating.

19. Don't ignore it. Calendar the deadline the day it arrives. Letters that go unanswered commonly turn into filed complaints, and a filed complaint carries court deadlines an unanswered letter never had. For the full anatomy of a letter and who typically sends one, see our ADA demand letter guide.

20. Engage counsel experienced in ADA digital cases. A specialist knows the small group of firms that send most letters, their typical settlement floors, and which alleged barriers are boilerplate versus real. Don't contact the sending firm yourself in the meantime — an informal reply routinely shapes the negotiation against you.

21. Produce your documentation. The scan series, audit reports, and remediation log are what turn a negotiation from "caught" into "already fixing it." In one public matter, a $74,999 demand against Dorai Home settled for $2,000 once documented, source-code remediation was on the table. Our seven-step demand letter response playbook walks through that sequence step by step.

How is this different from a WCAG checklist?

ADA compliance is the legal duty and the organizational process — assess, fix, document, monitor, respond — while WCAG 2.2 is the technical standard, currently 55 success criteria at Levels A and AA, that courts and this checklist's fixes point back to.

This page deliberately stays at the process level: item 6 says "fix contrast" rather than stepping through every visual-presentation success criterion, because Phases 1 through 5 need to work no matter which theme, cart, and apps a given business runs. A separate technical checklist walking through all 55 WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria is the natural next stop for developers once Phase 2's fixes are underway. Use this checklist to run the program; use a criterion-by-criterion WCAG reference to do the engineering. For the full legal landscape behind both, see our master guide to ADA website compliance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a printable version of this checklist? Yes. Every item above is also available as a free, one-page printable PDF for a team member, a compliance binder, or an internal ticket. The content matches this page exactly — the download is a convenience, not a way to hide anything behind a form.

Does completing all 21 items make my site ADA compliant? No single checklist can certify that, because no government agency certifies ADA website compliance. Completing these 21 items builds the practice and paper trail that prevent disputes and improve outcomes; pair it with a technical WCAG 2.2 AA assessment specific to your templates.

Who should own this checklist inside a company? One named person — usually an ecommerce, digital, or compliance manager — not "whoever notices a problem first." Ownership means the monitoring cadence runs, vendor requirements get enforced at signup rather than after a lawsuit, and documentation gets filed monthly instead of reconstructed under pressure.

Do accessibility overlays or widgets satisfy any of these 21 items? No. A widget sits on top of a page instead of fixing the underlying code, so it doesn't satisfy the fix-first items in Phase 2 or the source-code remediation log in Phase 3. Based on TestParty's analysis of Court Listener public records, more than 1,000 businesses with widgets installed were named in accessibility lawsuits in 2024.

How often should I work back through this checklist? Re-run Phase 1's assessment items after any major redesign or platform migration, check Phase 2's fixes at every deploy, and revisit Phase 3 and Phase 4's documentation and ownership items quarterly. Sites drift: a theme update or new app can silently reintroduce issues that were already fixed.

What if a demand letter arrives before I've finished the checklist? Move to Phase 5 immediately — an incomplete checklist doesn't change the sequence. Calendar the deadline, engage specialist counsel, and produce whatever documentation you already have. Partial, dated evidence still beats having nothing on file at all.

Like everything at TestParty, this article reflects our cyborg philosophy: AI handles the heavy lifting, humans bring the expertise. The data and opinions here are based on publicly available sources as of publication. TestParty is a participant in the accessibility market — we believe in transparency, so we encourage you to cross-reference our claims and evaluate all options for your business.