Hey, it's Jeane 👋

Here's a piece of mail I'm proud to say none of our clients has ever received: an ADA website demand letter. Over a thousand of them turned into lawsuits in the first three months of this year alone, mostly aimed at small businesses. Restaurants. Shops. Not corporations with legal departments.

Not one of our clients has gotten this letter

That's not luck. Every site that leaves our shop is built ADA compliant from day one: real contrast, real alt text, real heading structure. We've done it that way for years, and honestly, for years it was the least glamorous thing we do. Nobody ever hired us because of it.

Then AI search happened, and our least glamorous habit became a secret weapon. Because when an AI agent visits your website, it doesn't see your pretty design. It reads the accessibility tree, the same structured version of your page that screen readers use for blind and low-vision visitors. If a screen reader gets lost on your site, so does the AI deciding whether to recommend you.

So the work I could never sell anybody on now pays you three ways at once. Your human visitors who need it are served, and that's 1 in 4 people in the US living with a disability. Your legal risk drops. And every AI reading your site gets clean, structured content it can actually quote. One study of 10,000 sites found WCAG-compliant sites earned about 23% more organic traffic. Accessibility stopped being a legal checkbox only. It's a findability boost now.

Three more things worth knowing

1. Six basics cause 96% of all failures: low-contrast text, missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, empty links, empty buttons, and a missing page language. That's the whole villain list. Not exotic, just unglamorous.

2. It's the same work we've been doing all year. Headings written as real questions, one clear H1, descriptive links, images that say what they show. If you've been following along since the "get cited or get skipped" issue, you're further along than you think.

3. This is exactly why I tell clients accessibility is a technical SEO project wearing a compliance costume. Proper structure and image descriptions are what search engines and AI reward. The inclusion is the point; the rankings are the bonus.

Your one move this week

Find out where your site actually stands. We run free accessibility audits, no strings: get your free accessibility audit here. Two minutes to request, and you'll know whether you're already fine (plenty of sites are closer than they think) or which of the six basics needs attention first.

See you next Tuesday,
Jeane (sounds like Genie) Sumner
Website HQ + Findability OS

P.S. Did you read all of that thinking "I am never going to do any of this myself"? Fair, and you don't have to. That's why we partner with accessiBe, the plugin we trust to bring sites up to ADA compliance without you touching a line of code. If handing off this whole worry sounds better than learning it, that's the place to start.

P.P.S. Know someone whose site still says "image123.jpg"? Forward this. They can subscribe here: websitehq.kit.com/findable-email