Acute SEO Team 
Written by Derrick Tulali — SEO Expert with 9+ Years Experience. Read more about the author.
Most law firms don’t discover their website has accessibility problems until a demand letter shows up in their inbox. By then, the options are expensive and stressful. Running a proper ADA accessibility audit before that happens costs a fraction of what a settlement does, and it makes your site genuinely usable for the roughly 26% of American adults who live with some form of disability, according to the CDC.
This post walks you through how to actually run that audit — not just what tools to open, but what to look for, how to read the results, and what to prioritize fixing first. The focus here is on the audit process itself, which is something most guides skip over in favor of listing violations or explaining the law.
Why an Audit Is Different From a One-Time Fix?
Treating accessibility as a checkbox is one of the most common mistakes law firms make. A website changes constantly — new blog posts, updated practice area pages, staff photos, intake forms, chatbots. Every one of those changes can introduce a new barrier for someone using a screen reader or navigating by keyboard alone.
An audit is a snapshot, not a permanent solution. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 from the W3C define the technical standard most courts and the DOJ treat as the benchmark for accessible web content. The DOJ’s 2024 web accessibility rule reinforced that state and local government entities must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA — and private businesses, including law firms, are increasingly held to the same standard in litigation. Knowing this, your audit shouldn’t be a one-time project. Think of it as a quarterly maintenance task.
Start With an Automated Scan
Automated tools are the right starting point. They catch roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG failures quickly, and they give you a prioritized list to work from. Free tools like WAVE (from WebAIM) and Google’s Lighthouse audit built into Chrome DevTools are solid options. Paid tools go deeper.
Acute SEO AI’s accessibility compliance scanner is worth running on your site because it’s built specifically for business websites and ties findings directly to WCAG 2.1 Level AA criteria. It also flags auto-fixable issues, which saves time when you’re working through a list of dozens of problems. You can find more on how this works on the Acute SEO AI platform.
When you run your first automated scan, pay attention to four categories of output: errors, alerts, structural issues, and contrast failures. Errors are confirmed violations — they need to be fixed. Alerts are possible problems that require a human to confirm. Structural issues relate to how the page is organized for assistive technology. Contrast failures affect anyone with low vision or color blindness.
Export the full report as a spreadsheet before doing anything else. This becomes your audit document. Add a column for priority, a column for page location, and a column for status. You’ll update it as you work through fixes.
Manual Testing Is Not Optional
Here’s where most DIY audits fall short. Automated tools cannot test everything. They can’t fully evaluate whether a form is actually operable by keyboard, whether a PDF is tagged correctly for screen reader navigation, or whether your site’s reading order makes sense when CSS is stripped away.
Manual testing for an ADA compliant legal website should cover at least four areas.
Keyboard navigation is the first. Unplug your mouse and try to complete a full user session using only the Tab key, Shift+Tab, Enter, and the arrow keys. Can you reach every link? Can you open and close any dropdown menus? Can you get to your contact form, fill it out, and submit it? If the focus indicator disappears at any point — that small outline that shows where you are on the page — that’s a failure. Law firms that use custom navigation menus or multi-step intake forms tend to have the most keyboard navigation problems.
The second area is form accessibility. Your contact form is often the most critical element on your site from a legal intake perspective. Each field needs a properly associated label — not just placeholder text. Error messages need to be announced by screen readers, not just displayed visually. If you’re using a more advanced AI-guided intake form, confirm that the tool is built with ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes and works with common screen readers like NVDA and JAWS.
Third, test your PDFs. Law firms publish a lot of PDFs — intake packets, fee agreements, case summaries. A scanned PDF is essentially an image to a screen reader. It reads nothing. Tagged PDFs created from Word or InDesign can be read by screen readers, but only if the tagging is done correctly. Adobe Acrobat Pro has a built-in accessibility checker. Run every public-facing PDF through it.
Fourth, review your heading structure. Open any page on your site and use a browser extension like HeadingsMap to visualize the heading hierarchy. You should see one H1, followed by logical H2s and H3s. Skipping from H1 to H4, or using headings as visual styling rather than structure, breaks the navigation experience for screen reader users who jump between headings to scan a page.
Prioritizing What to Fix First
After your automated scan and manual testing, you’ll have a list of issues. Some are serious legal exposure. Others are minor inconveniences. Prioritize in this order.
Fix broken form labels and missing input field associations first. These directly block a potential client from contacting you. A screen reader legal intake problem means a disabled person literally cannot hire your firm. That’s both a legal risk and a lost client.
Next, address missing alt text on any images that carry meaning — headshots, infographics, graphics that replace text. Decorative images should have empty alt attributes (alt=””), which tells screen readers to skip them.
After that, fix color contrast failures on body text, headings, and button labels. The WCAG 2.1 Level AA standard requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Browser DevTools and the WebAIM contrast checker make this easy to verify.
Finally, work through structural issues — skip navigation links, landmark regions, page titles, and language attributes. These are less likely to cause an immediate lawsuit but they matter for the full experience.
Document Everything
Once you’ve completed your audit and worked through the fixes, document what you did and when. This creates a paper trail that shows good-faith effort — which matters in litigation. Courts and plaintiffs’ attorneys pay attention to whether a defendant was aware of accessibility problems and ignored them versus whether they had an active program to identify and fix issues.
Acute SEO AI keeps a record of scan history and remediation activity, which makes this documentation easier to maintain over time. You can see what our clients say about the results in their client reviews.
For law firms managing their own WordPress sites, resources on WordPress web design and development can help you understand which plugins and themes create the least accessibility friction from the start.
If you want to go deeper on audit methodology, Search Engine Journal and Moz both publish solid technical content on site auditing broadly, some of which crosses over into accessibility considerations. The Ahrefs blog covers technical SEO audits in detail, and many of the structural issues they flag — heading structure, crawlability, page titles — overlap directly with WCAG requirements.
Take Action Now
An accessibility audit on your law firm website takes a few hours to run and organize. Ignoring it can cost tens of thousands of dollars in settlement fees and legal costs, plus the reputational damage that comes with being publicly named in a law firm ADA lawsuit.
If you’d rather not do this alone, Acute SEO AI’s AI accessibility tools can scan your site, flag failures, and help implement fixes automatically. You can also schedule a consultation with our team to walk through your specific site and build a remediation plan that fits your firm’s size and budget.
The audit is the starting point. Everything else follows from knowing exactly what’s on your site and what needs to change.
