Is Your HOA Website ADA Compliant? Understanding Accessibility Laws

Why Accessibility Matters for Your Neighbors

Digital accessibility means ensuring that residents with visual, auditory, or motor impairments can use your community portal with the same ease as anyone else. Many of your residents may rely on screen readers or keyboard-only navigation. If your bylaws are posted as an unreadable image scan rather than a text-based PDF, you are effectively locking those residents out of their own community governance.

Legal challenges regarding ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance for HOA websites are on the rise. Courts are increasingly siding with residents who argue that if a website is the primary method for receiving meeting notices or paying dues, it must be accessible under WCAG 2.1 standards.

3 Steps to a Compliant Community Portal

1. Text-Based Documents

Stop uploading "photos" of documents. When you scan a document, use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so that the text can be read aloud by screen readers. This also makes your documents searchable for everyone—a win-win for the whole neighborhood.

2. Keyboard-Only Navigation

Many residents with motor impairments cannot use a mouse. A compliant accessible HOA site allows a user to "tab" through every menu, button, and form field in a logical order. If your current site "traps" a user in a popup window they can't close with the 'Esc' key, you have a compliance gap.

3. Alt-Text for Visuals

Every image on your site should have "Alt-Text"—a short description in the code that explains what the image is. For example, a photo of the community pool should be tagged as "HOA Community Pool with accessible ramp." This allows visually impaired residents to understand the full context of your community updates.