Is Your Apartment Website Accessible and ADA Compliant?

Having an accessible website is more important than ever—just ask Fashion Nova.

Its e-commerce clothing website was found to be inaccessible to legally blind individuals using screen reading software. The result? Fashion Nova agreed in July 2025 to pay a $5.15 million class action settlement...ouch.

As of June 2025, UsableNet reports that 2,109 new website accessibility lawsuits have been filed, which is on pace for roughly 5,000 lawsuits by year's end—far surpassing annual records.

So, the consequences are real for apartment websites. If prospective residents with disabilities cannot fully interact with your website, you're not only risking losing a lease, you're at legal risk that could come with a hefty pricetag.

In this resource, we'll explain what website accessibility is, whom it affects, and why it should be incorporated into your apartment community's website.

We'll also dive into accessibility widgets—a popular option amongst multifamily marketers—and how they may not make your apartment websites more accessible.

What is Website Accessibility?

Website accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring no barriers prevent interaction with websites by people with disabilities.

Disabilities that affect how websites are accessed include auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual. Individuals who are limited due to these types of disabilities navigate the web in different ways.

Some may require assistive technologies, including:

• Screen readers
• Magnifiers
• Voice recognition

Others may use adaptive technologies, which allows them to increase text size, reduce mouse speed, or turn on captions.

What Disabilities May Affect Accessing a Website?

People's interactions with websites depend on what they're able to see, hear, say, or touch. And there are three levels of disability that impact those interactions:

1. Permanent disabilities. These include afflictions such as blindness, hearing loss, missing limbs, etc., that are the most prohibitive for users needing to perform one or more basic interactions.

2. Temporary disabilities. These classify non-permanent disabilities that affect how an individual interacts with the world around them. They can be either physical, such as a broken hand that requires a heavy cast impacting their ability to type, or contextual, like ordering dinner in a foreign country where there's a language barrier.

3. Situational disabilities. These include anything about an individual's current environment hindering them from their ability to perform tasks. Perhaps they can't hear because they're in a large crowd, or they're a brand new parent who only has one hand free to use throughout the day.

To help solve the challenges that disabled individuals face when using a website, developers rely on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to improve accessibility.

What are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (or WCAG)?

Web content breaks down into two categories:

1. The website's text, images, or sound.
2. The code that defines the website's structure and presentation. 

The WCAG Guidelines help web designers improve those two categories.

Its four main principles are:

Perceivable

• Provide text alternatives for non-text content and captions for multimedia.
• Create content that can be presented in different ways, such as assistive technologies.
• Make it easier for users to see and hear content.

Operable

• Make all functionality available through the use of a keyboard.
• Do not include content that causes seizures or similar physical reactions.
• Give users enough time to read and use the content.
• Help users find and navigate content.

Understandable

• Make text easy to read and understand.
• Make content appear and operate in predictable ways.
• Help users avoid and correct mistakes.

Robust

• Maximize compatibility with current or future user tools.

Levels of WCAG Conformance

WCAG classifies a website's accessibility with three levels of conformance:

• Level A (basic web accessibility features)
• Level AA (the biggest and most common barriers encountered by disabled users)
• Level AAA (the highest and most involved level of accessibility).

Currently, the recommended guidelines for website accessibility conformance are WCAG 2.2, which were released in October 2023. However, WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance remains the legal standard for state and local government websites as set by U.S Department of Justice in March 2024. 

Why Should My Apartment Community's Website Be Accessible?

The amount of content on your community's website is staggering:

• Floorplan pages with photos and video tours
• Amenity details and media
• Prices and fees
• Unit availability
• Online applications
• Resident portals
  
• Contact forms

Without built-in accessibility features, it would be nearly impossible for disabled users to gather all the relevant information they'd need to rent from you or perform basic tasks.

Not only could you be facing a potential lawsuit, but you could also be in danger of violating Fair Housing laws.

The National Apartment Association warns that fair housing attorneys are targeting property management companies for website accessibility issues and recommends that communities do whatever they can to make their online experience accessible for all.

Making your community's website accessible isn't only the right thing to do—it also makes practical business sense. Look at it this way: when all users can access your site, you reach a wider audience. That could result in more leads for your community.

After all, for potential residents to feel comfortable making such a life-changing decision that also comes with significant financial implications, they need to be able to consume all the information available on your website entirely—regardless of their ability.

Accessibility Widgets Won't Make Apartment Websites Fully Accessible

Many multifamily companies have begun turning to popular third-party accessibility widgets like UserWay and accessiBe to ensure their community website's meet accessibility standards.

Accessibility widgets offer a broad range of functions that users can manipulate to match their varying accessibility needs, such as adjusting text sizes, text spacing, or color contrast. Essentially, they're creating two different versions of the same website.

Unfortunately, accessibility widgets won't make your apartment website fully accessible. In fact, they may make it harder for someone with a disability to browse your website and complete key steps in their leasing journey. Here's why.

1. Accessibility Widgets Don't Meet Required Compliance

While many accessibility widget companies tout that their products meet required WCAG compliance, simple research shows otherwise. 

This is an example of UserWay's accessibility widget on an apartment community's website.
The overlay is activated when a user clicks the button located in the lower left corner.

When comparing the features of UserWay's widget to WCAG 2.1 standards, for example, we found that only seven of its features relate to the success criteria for accessibility compliance, as illustrated in the table below:

UserWay vs. WCAG 2.1 Success Criteria

Comparing accesiBe's features to WCAG 2.1 standards also shows that many aren’t related to these success criteria either.

acessiBe vs. WCAG 2.1 Success Criteria

These comparisons are a fraction of the standards needed to be fully WCAG 2.1 compliant, comprising over 50 success criteria.

Property management companies planning to rely on accessibility widgets as a preventative measure against getting sued by a prospective resident who couldn't fully interact with their community websites should be warned before using one.

This is not to suggest that accessibility widgets aren't helpful just because they don't meet all accessibility standards. But it's important to know that these companies are misleading in saying they're fully compliant. 

2. Disabled Users Report Having Issues With Using Accessibility Widgets

When asked to rate the effectiveness of accessibility widgets, 67% of all respondents, including 72% of respondents with disabilities, said accessibility widgets were ineffective in one study.

Some users with disabilities have even taken steps to block accessibility widgets from appearing on websites because they are unusable. One user wrote of their experience:

I know with 100% certainty, any site which has deployed
an overlay (accessibility widget) in the past year and a half
has been less usable for both my wife and me—both blind.

As a result, websites with accessibility widgets aren't avoiding legal trouble either. UsableNet reported that there were 99 new lawsuits in June 2025 alone against defendants who were using third-party accessibility widgets on their websites. 

What RentVision Is Doing to Ensure Apartment Website Accessibility Compliance

At RentVision, we're making apartment community websites more accessible. To be clear, this is a work in progress, and we cannot claim full compliance. Our roadmap is to meet Level AA accessibility from the WCAG guidelines eventually. See our website accessibility statement for more information.