We scanned the websites of the six businesses one chamber of commerce lists under “Website Design & Management,” and all six had failures our scanner detected against WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard courts reference in ADA website cases. They were the same few mistakes we keep finding on their clients’ sites: faint text, links with no name, photos with no description. For web designers, that makes ADA compliance a checklist problem, and a short one: four fixes, added to the build checklist once, reach every site you ship.

On one agency’s page introducing its people, a blind visitor using a screen reader meets 47 images, and none of them has a description. The reader announces an image, then another, forty-seven times, and the visitor learns nothing from any of them.

What did the scan find on web designers’ own sites?

We took two categories from the Reno + Sparks Chamber of Commerce member directory, “Website Design & Management” and “Advertising & Marketing,” picked members by a rule we fixed before opening any of their sites, and scanned up to four pages each with axe-core, the engine behind our free report.

  • All 6 web design businesses had detected failures, with a median of 51.5 per site (the range ran from 18 to 110).
  • Across both categories, 13 of the 15 we could scan had at least one, and 8 had one rated critical.
  • Faint text made up 62% of every failure found, on 13 of the 15 sites. Color contrast usually comes down to one or two colour values in a theme.
  • The link back to the homepage had no name on three of the six web design sites, on every page we scanned. A screen reader says “link” and stops. On two of the three, that link is the logo: an image with no text alternative, so the link has no accessible name.
  • Two of the 15 sites never declare the page’s language, which a screen reader needs to pick the right voice.

Are agency sites worse than their clients’?

They follow the same pattern. We have now run the same scanner and the same page-picking rule on five groups: restaurants, law firms, two sets of real estate offices, and these agencies. In every group the median site failed between two and four distinct rules, and its three worst rules held 97% to 100% of everything found. Our scan of law firm sites reads almost line for line like this one.

Two of the 16 agencies load an accessibility overlay script. Both still had detected failures on the pages carrying it, and one of the two lists website accessibility compliance among the services it sells.

What does it take to fix?

The list is short, and it repeats: a contrast-safe colour in the theme, a name on the logo link, alt text in the team-page template, a language attribute on the page. Each one lives in a template, so fixing it once fixes every page built from it. Put those four on your build checklist and they reach every client site you launch from now on. Work that repeats this way is also why remediation can be priced up front.

We sell that remediation, and we work with agencies that would rather hand it off. Run the free report on your own site first, then on a client’s. It’s just as useful if you’re the business owner whose site an agency built. No login, no card, no sales call.

The fine print

  • How the sample was drawn. The Reno + Sparks Chamber of Commerce public member directory, captured 2026-09-29: the “Website Design & Management” category (9 cards) and, because that alone was too small, the adjacent “Advertising & Marketing” category (32 cards). Exclusion rules (no website listed, duplicates, a national company’s corporate site, a card that names a business that builds no websites and sells no digital marketing, a dead link) were declared before any member site was opened and left 18 listings, of which the rule took the first 16 in directory order. The marketing category includes firms that buy media or run PR, which is why the headline figure is the six web design businesses.
  • What scanned. 50 pages across 16 businesses: the homepage plus up to three pages our page selector picked, exactly as the free report would. 47 pages across 15 businesses produced usable results. Two pages served our scanner a bot check in place of the page and one timed out; those three are unknown, and one business had no usable page at all. Left uncorrected, one of the bot checks would have looked like the cleanest site in the sample.
  • Six sites is a small number. The 51.5 median is real and rests on six businesses. This is one chamber, one metro, one date. It is no prevalence rate for web agencies, in Reno or anywhere.
  • The five-group comparison is medians per business within each campaign, same scanner and selector, run between 2026-09-08 and 2026-10-06 on 9 restaurants, 13 law-firm-directory listings, 3 and 14 real estate offices, and these 15 agencies. The groups are never pooled into one rate.
  • The overlay count reads the HTML each site served. A script injected later by a tag manager never shows there, so 2 of 16 is a floor. It is a fact about a script tag and a scan result on the same page, and it says nothing about how well any widget works.
  • No business is named, on purpose. The finding is about ordinary agency sites, not about any one of them.
  • A scan is a floor, never a verdict. Automated testing reaches only part of WCAG 2.1 AA. Keyboard traps, focus order and whether alt text is meaningful need a person. Two businesses had zero detected failures, and that does not make their sites compliant; our own site scores 100 on the same scanner.
  • We sell ADA remediation, including to and through agencies. This is our own scanner, our own data, and our own interest in you having a problem. The sample, the frame and the raw results are kept with the run in our research repo, which is not public; the checkable part is the method above.
  • Courts reference WCAG; no binding holding adopts it. “ADA compliant” is a legal conclusion, not a measurement. We’re not lawyers, and this isn’t legal advice.

Sources