Accessibility standards
Accessibility law points at one technical standard and asks whether your pages meet it. UserGuard ships the parts it can genuinely ship — a consent banner every visitor can operate, visitor presentation controls, and a versioned accessibility statement — and is honest about the rest.
What the rules require
Web accessibility law rarely writes its own technical rules. It points at WCAG — version 2.1, conformance level AA is the working benchmark — and asks whether your pages meet it. What changes between jurisdictions is who is asking, which sites are in scope, and what happens when the answer is no.
Meeting that benchmark is design and engineering work: semantic markup, keyboard support, contrast, alt text, forms that make sense to a screen reader. That work lives in your templates and your content. A script cannot do it for you, and any vendor who says otherwise — including one selling you an accessibility widget — is describing a product that does not exist.
The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the technical standard nearly every accessibility regime references. Level AA is the conformance level regulators and courts treat as the working bar. It covers perceivable content, operable interfaces, understandable language, and robust markup — and it is measured page by page, in your own code.
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not name WCAG in its own text for private websites, which is exactly why litigation and settlements have converged on WCAG 2.1 AA as the practical measure. Whether and how the ADA applies to a given site is a legal question with real nuance — one for counsel, not for a settings page.
The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025, and EN 301 549 is the harmonised standard it is benchmarked against — which in turn incorporates WCAG. It reaches consumer-facing digital services well beyond the public sector: e-commerce, banking, transport, e-books. If you sell to European consumers, this is the regime most likely to be new to you.
In 2025 the FTC ordered an accessibility overlay vendor to stop claiming its product made websites compliant. The lesson generalises: claims of automatic compliance do not survive contact with a regulator. Tools can help you find and prioritise problems. The fixing still happens in your markup.
What UserGuard actually does here
Focus stays trapped in the dialog that claims to be one, the focus ring survives themes that strip outlines, button labels flip dark on light accents, and contrast is checked against WCAG 2.1 AA. The banner is often the first interactive element an assistive-technology user meets, and consent a visitor cannot give or refuse is not valid consent.
Text size to 140%, contrast, spacing, motion, readable font, link and focus highlighting, desaturation, a larger cursor. Modest by design, useful immediately, stored on the visitor’s own device. See the widget →
UserGuard generates accessibility statement drafts alongside cookie policy drafts, versioned, and always for a person to review and edit before publishing. A statement that overclaims is worse than none, so the draft is a starting point, not a verdict.
Honest answers
No. No widget alone makes a site ADA compliant or WCAG conformant, and UserGuard does not claim to. Most WCAG failures live in a site’s own code and content. The widget gives visitors practical controls — larger text, higher contrast, reduced motion, a readable font — as one layer of a broader accessibility program benchmarked against WCAG 2.1 AA, with per-site status tracked beside your cookie compliance.
WCAG 2.1 AA is the working benchmark. It is what US litigation has converged on, what EN 301 549 incorporates for the European Accessibility Act, and what most procurement checklists ask for. Building to it is the one piece of work that answers several regimes at once.
The European Accessibility Act began to apply, extending accessibility obligations to a wide range of consumer-facing digital products and services rather than just the public sector, with EN 301 549 as the benchmark. Whether your particular service is in scope, and what your obligations are, depends on facts we cannot see from here. That one is for counsel.
It’s designed to be: keyboard operable, screen-reader compatible, WCAG 2.1 AA contrast. The banner is often the first interactive element an assistive-technology user meets, and consent a visitor can’t actually give or refuse isn’t valid consent. That matters under the ADA, under Europe’s European Accessibility Act (in force since June 2025, benchmarked by EN 301 549), and under GDPR itself.
No, and we would rather say so than sell a number we cannot stand behind. UserGuard’s scanner is built for cookie evidence. Accessibility conformance is assessed against your markup, by testing tools and by people, and the remediation happens in your templates. What UserGuard contributes is an accessible consent surface, visitor controls, and a statement draft.
Three tests. Walk away from anything that promises compliance in one click. Prefer tools that state plainly what they do not replace. And check that the settings, statements, and records the tool produces leave with you if you ever cancel. Then spend the time you saved on the work that moves the needle: keyboard-test your most important pages, fix your headings and alt text, and read your own site with the widget’s settings turned all the way up.
This page is general information about accessibility standards, not legal advice. UserGuard helps you operate accessibility controls and documentation as part of a broader program. Conformance work and legal outcomes remain yours. Consult qualified counsel for your situation.
Start today
Create an account, drop one script on a site, and the first scan verifies your cookies in minutes. Honest consent UX, consent analytics and accessibility controls, from $10 a site. Thirty days to get your money back if it is not right.
