Increasingly, yes, and the places where it isn’t strictly required still produce lawsuits and lost customers. The good news is that the most common failures take minutes to fix.
This is a practical guide, not legal advice. If real money, health data, children or a regulator’s letter is involved, talk to a lawyer.
United States
The Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t mention websites, but courts have applied it to them for years, and thousands of suits are filed annually, mostly against businesses that sell to the public. They’re often triggered by automated scans for the basics: images with no descriptions, forms with no labels, pages that can’t be used with a keyboard.
European Union
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to many consumer-facing services, including e-commerce. New services must comply now; services already on the market have a transition period until June 2030. There’s a real exemption for small teams: a microenterprise providing services, meaning fewer than 10 people and no more than €2 million in annual turnover or balance sheet, is exempt from the service requirements. The exemption ends the moment you grow past either limit, and it doesn’t cover physical products.
The standard everyone points to
WCAG 2.1 level AA. You don’t need to read it to cover most of the ground.
The five-minute fixes
- Give your
<html>tag alangattribute, so screen readers pronounce your content correctly. - Give every page a real, unique title.
- Write alt text for every meaningful image; use an empty alt for purely decorative ones.
- Label every form field, with a real
<label>rather than placeholder text alone. - Tab through your site with the keyboard. If you can’t see where you are or can’t reach a button, neither can a lot of people.
- Check text contrast: light grey on white is the most common failure on AI-built sites.
Beyond the homepage
Homepages get the care; inner pages keep the template’s title and images with no descriptions. vibeliq checks the basics on your homepage and across your inner pages. It’s a first pass, not a full audit: keyboard use and contrast still need your own eyes.