Is Your Website Exposing You to Legal Risk?

No - and any tool that claims otherwise is misleading you. Automated scans are a critical first step, but they typically catch around 30% of WCAG issues. Keyboard navigation flows, screen reader behavior, dynamic content, and content quality all require manual review. For legal protection, you need a combination of automated monitoring plus a professional audit. The scan tells you where to start - not where to stop.

First, don't panic - but don't ignore it either. The most important thing is to document your remediation effort immediately. Courts and plaintiffs look at whether you were making a good-faith effort to fix issues. Running a scan and acting on findings counts in your favor. For serious legal exposure, you'll need a compliance platform with legal support services, VPAT documentation, and an accessibility statement. We cover what to look for in the solutions section.

Yes. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into enforcement in June 2025. Private businesses offering digital products and services in the EU are now required to meet EN 301 549 - which maps closely to WCAG 2.1 AA. This applies to e-commerce, SaaS, banking, transport, telecoms, and more. Non-compliance can result in fines and enforcement actions at the national level across EU member states.

A free scan gives you a snapshot - it identifies common WCAG violations on a single page at a point in time. A full compliance platform does much more: it monitors your entire site continuously, auto-remediates certain code issues, generates legal documentation (VPAT, accessibility statement), supports manual audit workflows, and in some cases provides legal defense assistance. If your site has more than a few pages, changes frequently, or is in a regulated industry, a platform is the appropriate tool.

The scan is organized around WCAG 2.2 patterns and surfaces risk signals relevant to ADA (US), EAA and EN 301 549 (EU), Section 508 (US federal), and AODA (Canada). It does not guarantee legal compliance with any of these frameworks - no automated tool can - but it gives you a structured view of where your site likely falls short relative to each standard.

Any time you publish new content, launch a new page, update your CMS theme, or add a new third-party script, your accessibility status can change. For low-traffic informational sites, a monthly scan is a reasonable baseline. For e-commerce, SaaS products, or sites in regulated industries, continuous automated monitoring is the right approach - which is what paid compliance platforms provide.

The scanner checks for the most common and highest-impact WCAG failure categories, including: missing or inadequate image alt text, insufficient color contrast ratios, missing form labels, absent or incorrect ARIA attributes, improper heading structure, keyboard navigation barriers, missing skip navigation links, and inaccessible interactive elements. It flags issues by severity and affected element so your team knows where to focus first.

Start with the critical and high-severity items - these are the issues most likely to block users with disabilities and most likely to appear in a legal complaint. Share the report with your developer or agency. If you don't have in-house capacity to fix issues, or if you need ongoing monitoring and legal coverage, a compliance platform can automate a significant portion of the remediation. The solutions we recommend are vetted for quality, compliance coverage, and support.