Accessibility standards
Accessibility law points at one technical standard and asks whether your pages meet it. UserGuard ships the parts a tool can ship: a consent banner every visitor can operate, presentation controls for visitors, and a versioned accessibility statement. We’ll also tell you what those don’t cover.
What the rules require
Web accessibility law rarely writes its own technical rules. It points at WCAG, with version 2.1 at conformance level AA as the working benchmark, and asks whether your pages meet it. What changes between jurisdictions is who’s 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, and forms that make sense to a screen reader. You do that work in your templates and your content. A script can’t do it for you. Any vendor who says otherwise, including one selling you an accessibility widget, is describing a product that doesn’t 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 whether people can perceive your content, operate your interface and understand your language, and whether your markup holds up with assistive technology. It’s measured page by page, in your own code.
The Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t name WCAG in its own text for private websites, which is 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 nuanced legal question, so take it to counsel.
The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025. It’s benchmarked against the harmonized standard EN 301 549, which in turn incorporates WCAG. It reaches consumer-facing digital services well beyond the public sector, including e-commerce, banking, transport and 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 takeaway goes beyond that one vendor: claims of automatic compliance don’t hold up with a regulator. Tools can help you find and prioritize problems, but you still have to fix them in your markup.
What UserGuard does here
Focus stays trapped inside the banner when it’s a modal dialog, the focus ring still shows on themes that strip outlines, button labels turn dark on light accents, and we check contrast against WCAG 2.1 AA. The banner is often the first interactive element an assistive-technology user meets, and consent a visitor can’t give or refuse isn’t valid consent.
Visitors can raise text size to 140% and adjust contrast, spacing and motion. They can also switch on a readable font, link and focus highlighting, desaturation and a larger cursor. The controls are modest, they work right away, and the settings are stored on the visitor’s own device. See the widget →
UserGuard generates versioned accessibility statement drafts alongside cookie policy drafts, always for a person to review and edit before publishing. A statement that overclaims is worse than none, so treat the draft as a starting point.
FAQ
No. No widget alone makes a site ADA compliant or WCAG conformant, and UserGuard doesn’t claim to. Most WCAG failures are in a site’s own code and content. The widget gives visitors practical controls like larger text, higher contrast, reduced motion and a readable font. It’s one layer of a broader accessibility program benchmarked against WCAG 2.1 AA, and we track its status per site beside your cookie compliance.
WCAG 2.1 AA is the working benchmark. It’s what US litigation has converged on, what EN 301 549 incorporates for the European Accessibility Act, and what most procurement checklists ask for. If you build to it, that one piece of work answers several regimes at once.
The European Accessibility Act began to apply. It extends accessibility obligations beyond the public sector to a wide range of consumer-facing digital products and services, with EN 301 549 as the benchmark. Whether your particular service is in scope, and what your obligations are, depends on facts we can’t see from here, so that’s a question for counsel.
It’s designed to be keyboard operable and screen-reader compatible, with WCAG 2.1 AA contrast. The banner is often the first interactive element an assistive-technology user meets, and consent a visitor can’t give or refuse isn’t valid consent. That matters under the ADA, under the European Accessibility Act (which has applied since June 2025, benchmarked by EN 301 549), and under GDPR itself.
No. We’d rather say so than sell you a number we can’t stand behind. UserGuard’s scanner is built for cookie evidence. Accessibility conformance is assessed against your markup, by testing tools and by people, and you fix the problems in your templates. What we contribute is an accessible consent banner, visitor controls and a statement draft.
We’d use three tests. Walk away from anything that promises compliance in one click. Prefer tools that tell you clearly what they don’t 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 matters: 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.
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Create an account, add one line of code, and the first scan runs in minutes. If it isn’t right, you have thirty days to get your money back.
