Don’t Skip Website ADA Compliance or Privacy Compliance

My wife and I were talking about a presentation she watched during a lunch networking meeting, about marketing. Near the end, the audience asked the presenter a few key questions:

• What about ADA compliance in the websites you build?
• Do you help businesses deal with recent privacy laws and stay aligned with them?
• What about the recent news about NY AI images in ads?

The presenter’s response to all three was a form of cop-out, ranging from, “It’s changing so quickly and hard to track, so that’s really for your legal team,” to, “we don’t do anything with AI images, so we don’t care.”

Here’s why you should care, and what we’ll cover:

1. Examples of where companies have gotten stung from non-compliance
2. What ADA compliance often comes down to on websites
3. Details about some of these laws
4. Where you can get help

Feel free to flip right to the heading you need most.

Fines and Legal Notices Are Rampant Right Now.

Alpha M, a men’s lifestyle YouTuber with a big following, posted last year about how he was being sued for his website allegedly not accessible enough to a visually-impaired visitor. As he reports, he was shocked at this because he actually paid for a premium plugin that helps ensure the site is ADA-compliant for just those sorts of things.

In his case, a part of it is very likely the size of his following. Reach a certain level of prominence and you become a target of stuff like this.

But as laws around this evolve, there will likely be more and more attention on websites for organizations. Legal concerns, both legitimate and otherwise, will need to be considered.

Another one that’s going around involves California’s “Invasion of Privacy Act.” The gist of it is, any website firing invasive code, especially that involves tracking cookies, without a user’s consent is now illegal. The big thing to know here is that it doesn’t matter if your business is in California or not, or if it even sells to California customers. If anyone IN California visits your website this still applies.

Non-compliant NC businesses have started receiving threat letters. Since the law is on the sender’s side, they feel emboldened to demand this payment to avoid going to court, which they know most business owners won’t want to do. (This happened recently to someone I work with.)

Examples of Swings and Misses With ADA Compliance

Some of the particulars are more complex, such as the percentages of visual contrast between color choices. Others are simpler, but still things people miss all the time. Largely because being simple makes them easier to overlook, such as:

• Alt text on images, which screen readers for the visually impaired will use to announce what the images are about.
• Web forms that aren’t accessible for some users. Forms with CAPTCHA that a visually impaired person may not be able to see or solve, or with labels that don’t work with screen readers prevent these users from using them.
• Videos without captions. Captions are helpful for context anyway.
• Calls to action or other elements that are highly color-dependent. Color blind users may not be able to distinguish between those colors, and the entire cue system won’t make sense.
• Text contrast ratios. Contrast ratio for text refers to the visual contrast between the surrounding color and the text itself. The larger and bolder the text is, the more contrast it creates. You can get away with smaller text if it’s bold, or if the color contrast between the text and its background is high enough. There are numerical measurements for the amount of contrast any given text has, and if the text is below those thresholds it isn’t compliant.
• Interface elements and contrast against surrounding elements must also reach certain ratios.
• Lack of keyboard navigation options. Most websites are set up for a mouse or trackpad, or possibly a touch interface. But those who cannot use a mouse or trackpad will often opt for keyboard control instead. But not all websites are set up for that to happen.

You get the idea. There’s more, and that’s where someone with specific expertise can change the game.

Overview of the Privacy Laws

Quite a few US states have passed forms of privacy laws related to websites and tracking information. The main one mentioned above is the expansion California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, which originally covered wiretapping. I certainly urge you to read more about it, but I’ll cover my understanding of the core concerns here:

• This law now deals with what it calls “pen registers” which include forms of tracking a user’s behavior on the site and collecting data, such as IP addresses, how that user behaves on the site, etc. Information that could be used to build a profile about that user.
• In this case, the issue is largely when this form of tracking is employed without obtaining the user’s consent first. You’ve likely seen consent banners displayed on websites, and this is what they are accomplishing. Ideally, if a user declines consent on these banners, tracking software like Google Analytics does not activate and does not collect information about these users.
• WordPress plugins like Complianz help handle this for you, where you can place your tracking ID into the plugin and it will create the banner, and then it can control whether or not the tracking code is employed or not based on consent.

A colleague of mine recommended Plausible as an alternative to Google Analytics. Its selling point is that it provides much the same info to you as the website owner, but the way it collects that data is GDPR and CIPA compliant. That’s their claim, and it’s currently the best workaround I am aware of.

As far as I understand it, Google Search Console being connected to your website is not a privacy violation in the way Analytics is. The reason for this is Search Console is actually reporting data straight from Google search and not your website. So its data is from Google.com and subject to Google’s terms of service. That’s different with Analytics, since it’s gathering data from your website and the users within it.

New York also recently passed a law related to AI images and advertising, as of June 9, 2026. I’d shared this one on LinkedIn earlier. The gist of it is this:

• If you are running ads that are visible in New York, whether you reside in NY or not, any AI created images shown in your ads must disclose that they are AI created.
• This is specific to images involving realistic looking people, meaning you can’t use AI images depicting realistic people who are implied to be endorsing your product.
• If you DO use images like these, from what I read you can make it compliant by placing an obvious banner across the image that says, “Image Created Using AI.”

This is obviously worth noting for anyone running ads right now. But it also stands out to me because right now the law is just about ads. But if it changes at some point to include websites, it’d make sense to be proactive about the types of images you’re using so you aren’t scrambling to fix dozens of blog posts.

There Are Web Professionals Who Can Do These Kinds Of Audits For You.

Yes there are a lot of moving parts involved in this. But agencies in Winston-Salem like Creative Force deal with ADA compliance pretty regularly. Kristie Staton even offers an ADA audit, where you’ll have a clear picture of what things (if any) your site is missing and a straightforward action plan to resolve it.

I’ve worked with Kristie on various website projects over the years, and I highly recommend her work. Follow my link there to check it out, and give her a shout.