Accessibility Watch › Data Study
Family Law Firms Accessibility: We Tested 9 Sites Against WCAG 2.1 AA
Web accessibility is a legal requirement — under the ADA in the U.S. and the European Accessibility Act in the EU. We ran an automated WCAG 2.1 Level AA scan on 9 family law firms to see how the group measures up.
How many family law firms pass accessibility checks?
89% failed the automated checks (grade C, D, or F). Of 9 sites scanned: 1 scored an A, 4 graded C, 4 graded D, and 0 graded F.
Grades reflect the high-frequency barriers automated scanners most often flag — so an A means a site is clean on those, not that it has zero issues of any kind. Across the full set of WCAG 2.1 AA checks, sites averaged 4.9 types of barrier.
The most common accessibility failures
| Barrier | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Some content on the page isn’t inside a recognized region (header, nav, main, footer, aside). | 78% |
| Some text on this page is too light to read against its background. | 67% |
| Some links have no readable text — usually icon-only links. | 56% |
| This page has no ‘main content’ region marked. | 44% |
| Some buttons or links are too small to tap reliably on touch screens. | 44% |
| Heading levels skip — for example, an H2 jumps directly to an H4 with no H3 between them. | 33% |
| Ensure landmarks are unique | 22% |
| An element has a screen-reader hint that doesn’t apply to its role. | 22% |
| A button’s visible text doesn’t match the description it announces to screen readers. | 11% |
| An element is marked as decorative but is also focusable or has a description — contradictory. | 11% |
The most accessible family law firms
These scored an A — clean on the high-frequency barriers we grade:
- walzermelcher.com
Methodology
We scanned each site with axe-core 4.11.4 against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, in its default state, and reported automatically-detectable failures. Automated testing catches a portion of accessibility barriers; full conformance also requires manual and assistive-technology testing. See our methodology for details.
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