Guide · accessibility
The WCAG floor for apartment websites
A rental website is how people find housing, which makes its accessibility both a legal exposure and a leasing problem: a renter who cannot use your tour form is a lead you paid to acquire and then turned away. Here is the floor, what usually fails on apartment sites, and how to keep it passed permanently.
Why the floor is WCAG 2.1 AA
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the standard courts, regulators and settlement agreements keep converging on. The Department of Justice has repeatedly taken the position that the ADA reaches the web presence of public accommodations, and accessibility complaints against housing websites are a steady, public pattern rather than a hypothetical.
There is also a fair housing angle that is specific to rentals: when a renter with a disability cannot obtain the same listing information or submit the same inquiry as everyone else, the website itself has become the barrier to housing. That is why we treat accessibility as a publishing requirement, not a nice-to-have.
What actually fails on apartment sites
The same five defects account for most of what we find in portfolio audits.
Brand color used as text
The floor is a 4.5 to 1 contrast ratio for body text, 3 to 1 for large text. Brand accents are the usual culprit: one client's orange scored 3.04 to 1. The fix is never to change the brand; it is deriving a darkened variant for the places the accent is used as text, and keeping the true accent everywhere else.
Images that say nothing
Floor plans as image-only files, gallery photos without alt text, amenity icons without names. A screen reader user gets a page of silence where the facts should be. Every image needs an accurate text alternative, and decorative art should be marked decorative.
Unlabeled tour forms
Placeholder text is not a label: it vanishes on focus and is inconsistently read by assistive tech. Every field on an inquiry or tour form needs a real, programmatic label. This is also the defect that most directly costs leases.
Broken structure and keyboard traps
Heading levels that skip around, missing landmarks, carousels and map widgets that cannot be operated by keyboard, and focus that disappears into a menu and never comes back. Structure is what makes a page navigable without a mouse.
Audited once a year, or passed on every build
The standard industry answer is an annual audit and a remediation backlog. The problem is arithmetic: pages change weekly, and an audit is a photograph of one Tuesday.
Sitewide's answer is the same as for fair housing language: make it structural. Contrast is computed against your actual brand tokens, alt text, labels, heading order and landmarks are checked on every page, and the publishing gate refuses to ship a build that fails. Our own marketing site passes the same checks, because a compliance product whose own site fails its audit is finished before it starts.
Automated checks are a floor, not a certification: they cannot judge whether alt text is truthful or a caption is clear, and this page is not legal advice. What they can do is guarantee the mechanical failures above never ship again.
Know where you stand
Find out what your portfolio publishes today
The Exposure Record runs the accessibility floor and the published-language rules across every public page of your portfolio, dated and sourced. It credits in full against a build.
See the Exposure Record