--- title: "Is My Law Firm's Website ADA Compliant? What a Scan of 13 Sites From One Bar Directory Found" url: https://guavawebcompliance.com/articles/law-firm-website-ada-compliance-scan description: "We scanned 13 sites off a county bar association's directory. All 13 had a detected WCAG 2.1 AA failure, the same few mistakes we found on Portland food businesses." published: 2026-10-01 updated: 2026-10-12 --- **We scanned websites listed in a county bar association's directory, and all 13 that returned results had at least one failure our scanner could detect against WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard courts reference in ADA website cases. They were the same few mistakes, in the same proportions, that we found on small Portland food and drink businesses nine days earlier. If you're asking whether your law firm's website is ADA compliant, being a law firm is no head start.** Start with the plainest one. Two of the twelve law practices in the sample ship this line, or a near copy of it, on every page we scanned: ```html ``` It tells a phone's browser not to let the visitor zoom, which makes it a magnifying glass with a board nailed across the lens. Someone with low vision who pinches to enlarge your phone number is asking for exactly what that line refuses. [Deque](https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.10/meta-viewport), which publishes the rule our scanner runs, rates it critical, maps it to [WCAG 1.4.4 Resize Text](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#resize-text), and calls it "problematic for people with low vision who rely on screen magnifiers." The fix is deleting two settings from one tag. ## What fails on a law firm's website? The sites came off the [Santa Clara County Bar Association's public attorney directory](https://members.sccba.com/public-attorney-directory). We kept the listings that link to the member's own site and scanned every third one, up to four pages each. Thirteen produced usable results: twelve law practices and one court reporting service. - **Low-contrast text.** [Color contrast](https://guavawebcompliance.com/articles/what-is-color-contrast) failed on 8 of the 13 sites, more than any other rule. - **Links with no name.** On 5 of the 13, a link gave a screen reader nothing to say. On two it was the firm's own logo, linking home, with blank or missing alt text on the image, so the link had no [accessible name](https://guavawebcompliance.com/articles/what-is-an-accessible-name). - **The office map.** The sample had nine embedded frames with no title, on four sites, and every one was a Google Maps embed showing where the office is. With no title, Deque notes, a screen reader falls back on things like "frame" or the URL. The embed takes a `title` attribute when the site sets one. ## Is a law firm's site any better than a restaurant's? On this evidence, no. The same scanner and the same page-picking rule, run on nine food and drink businesses from a Portland chamber of commerce, came out almost the same. The median site failed three distinct rules in both groups. Its single worst rule held 67% of its detected failures in the bar sample and 71% in the Portland one, and its top three rules held 100% in both. Law firms advise clients on regulatory exposure. The firms in this sample made the same handful of mistakes as the deli and the coffee roaster in the other. That holds for a client's site too, if you're the one advising. ## Is the contact form the problem? Not in this sample. Across the nine sites where both pages scanned, the median was two detected failures on the home page and two on the contact page. Our [July piece on contact forms](https://guavawebcompliance.com/articles/law-firm-contact-form-ada-compliant) followed one broken label. This broader look found the failures spread across each site. The zoom-blocking tag, for one, was on every page we scanned on each site that had it. ## What does it take to fix? Most of what we found is one mistake repeated: a colour, the meta tag nailing the board over the magnifier, a missing `title` on a map, blank alt text on a logo. Fix it where the template sets it, and every page built from that template changes with it. Work that repeats like that can be [priced up front](https://guavawebcompliance.com/articles/ada-website-compliance-cost). To see which of these your own site carries, [run the free report](https://guavawebcompliance.com/free-scan). No login, no credit card, no sales call. Our [law firm page](https://guavawebcompliance.com/law-firm-ada-compliance) has the rest of the picture for firms. --- ## The fine print - **How the sample was drawn.** The Santa Clara County Bar Association's public attorney directory, captured 2026-09-17: 819 member cards, of which 65 printed a website. After removing duplicates, dead links and third-party directory profiles, 49 listings survived, and we took every third in the directory's own order, with the rules fixed before any member site was opened. That gave 16 distinct businesses. Three returned no usable page: two timed out at 40 seconds on every page we tried, and one answered with a rate-limit checkpoint. That says nothing about those three sites. The other 13 produced 45 scanned pages. - **This is not a prevalence rate.** One association, one metro, one date, 13 businesses with data. It also reaches only members who put a website on their listing. It says nothing about how often law firm websites, or California ones, fail these rules. - **Twelve law practices and one court reporting service.** A bar roster lists more than law firms, and we did not filter by business type. The rule-count and worst-rule medians are the same with the court reporter dropped. The home and contact comparison includes it. The court reporter is also one of the four sites with an untitled map, and a third site that blocks zooming. - **Medians, per business.** Corpus-wide totals swing on single pages: one firm's case-results page alone carried 69 instances of one rule. The figures above are medians across the 13. - **The home and contact comparison is a null on nine firms**, and home pages are usually longer, so they have more to fail. It shows the contact page is not where these sites break. It does not show the two pages are equal. - **The two zoom-blocking tags quoted above are in the HTML those sites served**, checked by a plain fetch on the scan date. The quoted line is one of the two; the other writes `user-scalable=0`, with the same effect. Safari on iPhone has ignored this instruction since iOS 10 ([WebKit](https://webkit.org/blog/7367/new-interaction-behaviors-in-ios-10/)); browsers that honour it block the zoom. - **No firm is named, on purpose.** The finding is about ordinary law firm sites, not about any of them. - **A scan is a floor, never a verdict.** Automated testing reaches only part of WCAG 2.1 AA. Keyboard traps, focus order, whether alt text is *meaningful*, and form error recovery need a person. Findings the scanner could not decide are kept separate and never counted as failures or passes. Two of the 45 pages had zero detected violations, and that does not make them compliant pages. - **We sell ADA remediation.** This is our own scanner, our own data, and our own interest in you having a problem. The sample, the full 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 - **Santa Clara County Bar Association**, public attorney directory, captured 2026-09-17 — https://members.sccba.com/public-attorney-directory - **Deque**, axe-core 4.10 rule `meta-viewport`, "Zooming and scaling must not be disabled," mapped to WCAG 1.4.4 (AA) — https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.10/meta-viewport - **Deque**, axe-core 4.10 rule `frame-title`, "Frames must have an accessible name," mapped to WCAG 4.1.2 (A) — https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.10/frame-title - **Deque**, axe-core 4.10 rule `link-name`, "Links must have discernible text" — https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.10/link-name - **W3C**, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 — https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ - Guava scan campaigns: bar association member sites, 2026-09-17, and Portland Metro Chamber food and drink members, 2026-09-08 — Cloudflare Browser Run + axe-core 4.10.3, ruleset `wcag2a, wcag2aa, wcag21a, wcag21aa`. Findings, pre-registered samples and raw results held in our research repo.