Digital Accessibility in 2025: What You Need to Know to Stay Ahead of Regulations

Lindsay Holley:
Hello, and welcome to today's webinar on accessibility regulations and site compliance in 2025, brought to you by accessibility experts, Aspiritech and RaLytics. I'm Lindsay Holley, Aspiritech's VP of Product Strategy, and we're so excited to have you join us today. Whether you're here as developer, a designer, business leader, or accessibility advocate, today's session is packed with valuable insights that can help make your digital platforms more inclusive for everyone.

Here's a little bit about Aspiritech. Aspiritech is a tech services company focused on providing meaningful employment for autistic adults. We offer services such as software QA, data services, AI and LLM building, web development, creative services, of course accessibility, and more. And we're committed to neurodiversity. We create an inclusive, safe environment that fosters innovation while delivering impactful results for our clients.

RaLytics is a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business that is dedicated to making accessibility a strategic advantage through tailored solutions and lived experience. Their training and approach combines hands-on learning, real-world scenarios, and customized assessments to identify gaps and provide impactful, targeted solutions for your organizations.

Next, let's meet our speakers.

First, we have Tara May, CEO of Aspiritech, who has been a driving force in advocating for neurodiversity and digital accessibility. Tara brings a wealth of experience leading teams that build accessible technology solutions for a wide range of industries. Her leadership is transforming the way we think about and implement accessibility.

Also joining us is Jennifer Zhang, Director of Accessibility Program and Innovation at RaLytics, where she incorporates accessibility processes and governance into their offerings. Previously at Microsoft, she led accessible design and contributed to inclusive design toolkits. And she has a strong passion for teaching accessibility in accessible ways.

And finally, we have Casey Parker, Aspiritech Senior Accessibility Strategist. Casey is an accessibility subject matter expert with over five years' experience in accessibility testing, strategy, and advising companies on how to comply with accessibility standards.

Together, our speakers will be sharing their insights on how we can make digital experiences accessible for all. We will also have time for Q&A at the end of the session. So please feel free to submit your questions throughout the presentation. So without further ado, let's get started and I'll hand it over to Jennifer.

Jennifer Zhang:
Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. All right, let's dive into this.

So as a refresher, what is digital accessibility? Digital accessibility is practice that ensures people with disabilities can use technology and participate in digital spaces, like on social media. And three big pieces of this are inclusive design, designing with people with disabilities, and extending the benefits to everyone. Equal access ensuring all users can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with digital content. And it's an ongoing process with continuous improvement and adaptations to new technology and user needs.

Accessibility is not one and done. It really is a practice and should be part of all digital products, services, and websites on an ongoing basis. Everyone has a role, including product managers, designers, developers, testers, and more in the software development lifecycle. This also includes internal accessibility for employees.

Accessibility testing has many benefits. Accessibility is part of software testing, and it's important to know where you are to know the accessibility state of what you are building. Whether it's your first test passed or your hundredth, it is good to have data on what needs to be fixed or what parts of your process need to be strategically adjusted. Knowing your status helps you know where you are with regulations.

A note here. I firmly believe that following best practices and incorporating accessibility at all stages of product cycles makes compliance much less painful. It is also investment in the future of your company. People with disabilities are a huge part of everyone's audience. I guarantee you know or know of people with disabilities already. I myself have anxiety, and there are celebrities who are very public about their disabilities as well.

People with disabilities make money, and they want to spend it. It is an important business decision to integrate and continually invest in accessibility. Here’s why: it helps with customer retention; it improves user experience, drivers sales, and increases loyalty; it helps brand reputation and demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity, and it gives your SEO a boost; it improves search engine rankings with accessible content. So if you put alt text on your appropriate images that need alt text, that helps with SEO.

All right. So we have a lot of accessibility regulations in the U.S., and they are a very important piece of the puzzle, along with investing early and often. Regulations mean that digital accessibility must be invested in. The standards outline what must be done at a minimum. That minimum means people with disabilities can use a product, service, or website. Though it will likely be a bad experience if you do that minimum bar.

So integrating accessibility into processes means less fighting about minimum viable accessibility; less time and money fighting lawsuits; and lets more of the focus be on how to improve everyone’s accessibility skills and the accessibility of the product, services, and websites that you’re building.

There have been some recent updates in the U.S. on regulations. Um, the ADA has been strengthened recently and Lainey Feingold, who was a formidable expert on accessibility laws and regulations is the one that I follow on all of this. She gave her legal update, her yearly legal update recently, and I’ve pulled some information from there.

So the ADA expansion, um, state, it covers state and local governments for web and mobile, including libraries, public universities, um, and anything they procure along with city websites and city calendars and things like that. And then it specifically calls out WCAG 2.1 AA web content accessibility guidelines as the specified minimum technical standard. And also, um, there are deadlines for state and local governments that have a deadline for accessibility for their websites and mobile, um, for April 24th, 2026, for municipalities smaller than 50K—50,000—and April 26th, 2027, for municipalities with more than 50,000. In addition, states like Washington state, for example, where I live, has laws and policies above and beyond that federal requirement, including Washington state just had a very recent policy update.

All right, so let’s look at a snapshot of the accessibility lawsuits statistics. UsableNet is an organization that puts out a yearly report of lawsuits and it has shown a year-over-year increase in the number of lawsuits in the last six years. In 2024, there were over 4,000 lawsuits on websites, videos, and mobile apps or mobile websites, with New York coming in at a whopping 63% of those. Florida at 16%, California at 10%, and other at 11%. You may be asking, why does New York have such a huge number? I mean, yes, population density is part of it. And also, New York has a law that says, if the company is not based in New York, you can still sue them. So if you wanted to order smoked salmon from New York, from Seattle, and their website is not accessible, then you could sue them, even though they’re not based in New York.

Some tidbits here on investment, or the data. Go back a slide, Tara. As Lainey said, lawsuits come with the following: you might have more scrutiny for a while from the DOJ—Department of Justice—they could penalize you $150K; you have to pay the people with disabilities who were affected by the barriers, you have to pay their lawyers, and your own lawyers for defense; and, I mean, you have to fix what’s broken.

So basically, if your accessibility processes and procedures need some work, one, you’re not alone. Two, you can do something about this to avoid going through a lawsuit. And since you’ll have to fix what’s broken anyway, it would be way better to fix things or avoid breaking them in the first place up front. But we’ll talk more about that in a bit. Next slide, please.

All right. So today’s environment in the unknown. There are quickly-changing regulations and government environment things that can make it hard to understand what’s to come. Despite that uncertainty, here’s what we do know: It is the law now. Digital accessibility requirements are legally enforceable and cannot be ignored. It’s also a global thing. If you’re a global business, you really have to do it. Working toward compliance is a great business practice beyond legal requirements.

Accessibility efforts also improve user experience and expand your market reach like we talked about earlier. Accessibility best practices are UX best practices, so what works for users with disabilities also benefits everyone through clearer navigation and better content structure, and progress is the most important. Continuous improvement towards compliance and beyond demonstrates good faith and reduces legal risk. I also personally think that accessibility is fascinating, exciting, and fun. For me, I like being in a fulfilling and meaningful part of the tech world.

And now I’ll hand it over to Casey to talk about how to get better at accessibility.

Casey Parker:
Okay, so there are five main steps to achieve compliance with accessibility. The first one is to plan a strategy. The second one is to, well, you have to teach your staff and vendors on what the guidelines are. The third is testing—that’s the main thing—manual and automated tests.The fourth is, um, sorry, accessibility also has to be a long-term priority. It’s easier and it’s much lower cost to start out with accessibility testing at the beginning instead of waiting till the end. It just makes everything easier.

And then the next step is to audit, so you can ensure that you’re compliant. Some of the most common accessibility mistakes I run across are text with low contrast. This isn’t just an issue for people who have low vision or color vision issues. It can be a UI issue and it can lead to a poorer UX experience.

Another common issue is missing form labels, lack of keyboard accessibility, missing alternate text for images, and empty links and buttons. Some of the other common accessibility mistakes are using accessibility as an afterthought. A lot of times companies will ignore accessibility and then just at the end try to fix everything, and this makes it extremely difficult and pretty expensive for the company to do so.

Another is keeping a checkbox mentality focusing on the compliance rather than the experience. It’s easy to follow a list and say this works, this works, this works, but if you’re actually using it as a disabled person would, you can encounter difficulties. And another thing is lack of user testing, not having people with disabilities actually do the testing.

So some of the best practices, like I said, are to integrate it early and often, focus in on the user experience and not just the guidelines, and work towards continuously improving the website, and the final step is have expert testing such as Aspiritech come in and test your websites or apps.

Tara May:
Thank you so much, Casey. So, um, as Casey and Jennifer both mentioned, accessibility can expand from websites to software and apps. And also in 2025, there’s certainly the consideration of AI.

So AI can be both a friend and an enemy to accessibility. There are many ways that it can help improve accessibility, can help us understand what’s going well and what’s going wrong on our website. But it is no replacement for both manual and user and lived experience testing, right? So when we’re using AI to look at our websites and look at our software, it can help us get a head start. That’s great, but we also need to have the human-centric approach to fully understand the accessibility standards and the tools that the disabled community will need and use and rely on to make your sites accessible. So certainly a great tool to use to give you a jump start or look at accessibility, but should be one piece of a larger puzzle. Because it will produce errors and it will flag issues and accelerate the need to get into compliance, right? So use AI carefully, cautiously, and in combination with human testing to really understand accessibility.

The next thing we want to talk about is the global approach to accessibility. So Jennifer mentioned and discussed the U.S. regulations, but we are living in a global economy. And when you look at digital access to websites, we are absolutely sharing our websites and our software and applications with the world, right? So one of the leaders in accessibility changes has been the EU.

So the EU is taking a, a really dramatic shift in asking or mandating businesses and organizations to comply with digital accessibility standards. So June 28th, 2025, the European Accessibility Act will take full effect. That means right now, as we talk to our EU partners, many are scrambling to look at requirements, scope, and understanding what implementation is going to look like to hit those deadlines. And think the most important things, right, that the EU is looking for is progress. Are you doing the audits? Are you taking the steps? And are you looking to how you are going to get in compliance with these deadlines? This is applicable across a wide range of digital products.

So they’re looking at services, business, sites, apps, government organizations, absolutely anything where the public is coming to a digital experience needs to be accessible. And they have been giving time, right? They started having these discussions in 2022 and have asked people to be in compliance of June of this year if it’s a new product. So if you’re launching something new into the market, it needs to be launched and birthed with accessibility in mind. If you are working to make an existing product into compliance, you have a bit longer. So that deadline goes until June 28th, 2030. But if you think about that, right, it’s not that far away. 2025 came upon us very quickly. And if you have a huge digital presence and a large scope website, you need to be thinking about that now and thinking about what your new products look like.

So they’re absolutely looking at computers, smartphones, e-readers, absolutely everything that you have a digital experience on to be accessible. They are using the WCAG standards. So we’re all familiar with those here in the U.S. Those do extend into the EU. And they are also in India applying the WCAG standards, and we’ll talk about that as well. But they go a little bit further than we do, looking for audiovisual media, TV and streaming, banking and financial services absolutely have to have assistive tech, and transportation services need to be user-friendly. So they’re really looking at making sure their citizens and their digital users have equal access to everything. So it’s really modeled and created with the citizen in mind. They’re also enforcing it in a pretty meaningful way.

So noncompliance has significant fines and even, even market removal. And they are standardizing these rules across the borders of the EU. So they’re taking it very, very seriously. They are sort of moving into the private sector. So prior laws focused on public. This absolutey includes everything from ATMs, ticketing machines, kiosks. Again, I keep saying this, but if there is a digital component to the experience, it needs to be accessible in the EU. And this is going to require significant effort and undertaking. They want to have an inclusive digital environment and equal access for all.

Similarly, India, which represents a significant portion of the world, is making major strides to have all organizations, both public and private, comply with accessibility standards. This has been a work in progress for them over the past 16 years.

So they initially introduced the guidelines for Indian government websites in 2009. But then they’ve gone ahead and made significant advancements in the private sector as well, since then, and have also adopted the WCAG standards. They are also using the four standards that Jennifer referenced. Right? So they want it to be in the same level of compliance as the EU. They have taken additional steps since 2022. And now in 2025, even deeper to expand all of those provisions from the public entities into the private sector. And in 2025, the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities will be implementing a new set of guidelines that are very comprehensive and very similar to what the EU is looking at for digital inclusion across all sectors and all digital experiences.

They are also very intentional and very strict about compliance. So they are also looking at legal penalties and fines for failing to meet accessibility standards. Websites need to be compliant, and they are running into some business difficulties around this. I reached out to a couple of our Indian business partners, and they are saying organizations are struggling to meet these standards, right? There is not a lot of establishments that have successfully both audited and remediated to the accessibility standards that the law requires. And so there’s going to be a significant amount of work and effort being put in by businesses and organizations to make these changes.

And the Indian government is saying that it needs to be made a priority or higher penalties will be established. So it is definitely a focus for enforcement and for organizations working to comply with it. So absolutely, you’re going to hear more about that from a global scale, as all of these organizations that either exist in India and the EU, or who do business there, really work to make accessibility a priority in an unprecedented way.

Okay, so Jennifer, that means some organizations might be looking for some help and some expertise around all this. So I would love to turn it over and back to you to chat a little about what that could look like.

Jennifer Zhang:
Yeah, so that was a great summary of the global stuff, Tara. So how can we help? Well, Aspiritech offers comprehensive digital accessibility audits and identification of critical accessibility gaps. Casey is a fantastic tester. And this also includes WCAG compliance evaluations, detailed reporting on accessibility barriers, and prioritizing remediation recommendations based on user severity and impact.

RaLytics can help with accessibility maturity assessments to see where you are as an organization, and help with strategic step-by-step accessibility improvement plans to get to your next maturity level. We can also help integrate accessibility practices into software development lifecycle workflows with a bunch of tools that meet people where they are, and also tailored training plans. All of that growth and the additional need to hire up or train up accessibility expertise means that training is going to be very necessary. So we also offer that as well.

And then a note. So yes, reach out to any of us if any of that sounds interesting. I also will say a note here: If you’ve heard of ESG—environment, social, governance—these are indexes that care about that. And that is something that aligns very well with accessibility on the social and governance sides with social impact, as well as illegal regulation laws.

So I’m also going to put a note in here on the intersection of accessibility and neurodiversity. Beyond compliance, accessibility is about creating digital experiences that work for everyone, including neurodivergent individuals. And trust me when I say there is a lot to get to beyond compliance, which is why accessibility should be a practice and an ongoing level of investment.

So both of our companies have a strong commitment to neurodiversity. Aspiritech has been leading the way by employing autistic professionals as software and accessibility testers—they are highly skilled at this. And, you know, the way that software testing has to be done actually lends itself really well to the autistic strengths and the skillset.

RaLytics has also conducted research on the intersection of accessibility and neurodiversity. Together, we’ve seen first-hand how accessible digital spaces can empower neurodivergent users and improve usability for all.

And I’ll share an anecdote here: During some of the research, I had taken some key screens from products and websites and incorporated and mocked up some features that address neurodivergent needs. I’d put them side by side with the existing screens as kind of a before-and-after. And boy, when I shared those, the befores-and-afters that really sparked some—some conversations and some real product change. So I was really proud of that. And it was—it was such a fun activity.

A few examples of some of the things that were incorporated in those afters were reducing text and visual color. Excuse me—reducing text, reducing visual clutter, and helping users single-task and focus using flows in the UI and UX. So those are all critical for neurodivergent—neurodivergent individuals—I’m tripping over my tongue here—and very helpful for everyone.

And I will say, in the U.S. with tax season being right now, you may have noticed that some tax software is very good at pushing you in the right direction to finish your taxes for the most common tax considerations, and then maybe they get a bit confusing for the less common flows, or there’s some software that’s not as good at that. But just an anecdote: Maybe next time you’re doing some taxes or looking at UI, you can kind of keep some of those in mind and maybe think, 'oh, this is not so great for neurodivergent individuals.'

But anyway, I digress. I’ll pass it back over to Lindsay to close us out.

Lindsay Holley:
Thank you so much. This was great. Thank you to Tara, Casey, and Jennifer, and thank you to all of you for joining today. We hope you gained valuable insights into how you can create more accessible digital experiences. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

A recording of today’s webinar will be available shortly. Thanks again for being here, and we look forward to seeing you in the future.