Accessibility is a legal floor and a product-quality ceiling. This 2026 guide covers the practical standards — WCAG 2.2 AA, alt text, semantic structure, accessible forms, color contrast, captions, keyboard navigation — mapped to specific success criteria with the new 2.2 additions.

Roughly 1 in 4 US adults lives with some form of disability. This 2026 guide covers how accessibility affects users in each major disability category — vision, hearing, motor, cognitive, speech — what assistive technologies they rely on, and which WCAG 2.2 practices make your site usable for them.

Federal ADA Title III web accessibility lawsuits climbed from ~800 in 2017 to over 4,600 in 2023, and the DOJ just (April 20, 2026) extended Title II compliance deadlines by a year. Here’s the 2017-2026 recap — courts, the DOJ, the FTC, and what site owners should do now.