WCAG, EAA, and ADA: What Website Accessibility Laws Actually Require

If you've researched website accessibility, you've likely seen three acronyms thrown around interchangeably: WCAG, EAA, and ADA. They're related but not the same thing, and knowing the difference helps you understand what you're actually being asked to comply with.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the technical standard everything else points back to. It's published by the W3C and organized into testable success criteria at three conformance levels (A, AA, AAA). Image alt text is covered directly — WCAG 1.1.1 ("Non-text Content") requires that images have a text alternative serving the same purpose, so that the content is available to people using screen readers or other assistive technology. Most legal and regulatory frameworks reference WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at Level AA as the practical bar to meet.

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is U.S. civil rights law, not a technical spec. It doesn't spell out pixel-level requirements — but U.S. courts and the Department of Justice have consistently treated inaccessible websites (including e-commerce sites) as a form of discrimination under the ADA's "public accommodation" language, and have pointed to WCAG conformance as the practical way to demonstrate compliance. This is why ADA lawsuits over inaccessible websites almost always cite specific WCAG failures — missing alt text being one of the most common.

The EAA (European Accessibility Act) is EU legislation, in force since June 2025, that requires a defined set of products and services — including e-commerce — to meet accessibility requirements, again anchored to WCAG-equivalent standards (via the EN 301 549 standard). It applies more broadly across the EU than the ADA's court-driven approach in the U.S., with member states enforcing it through their own regulators.

The practical summary: WCAG is the actual technical bar, and the ADA and EAA are two different legal mechanisms (U.S. litigation risk and EU regulatory requirement, respectively) that both point back to it. Missing alt text is one of the most commonly cited, most straightforward-to-fix failures under all three — which is exactly why it's worth fixing site-wide rather than one page at a time.