95.8% of Home Services Websites Fail the Standard Behind ADA Lawsuits

Almost every home services website now fails the web-accessibility standard that plaintiffs cite in disability lawsuits, according to a new study from Fervor Studio. Across 380 contractor websites inspected in May 2026, 95.8% (364 of 380) carried at least one serious violation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, the guideline United States courts treat as the working test in Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) website cases.

The study is part of the Contractor CRO Index 2026, Fervor Studio's annual benchmark of contractor website conversion potential. It inspected 130 roofing, 146 remodeling, and 104 HVAC websites with axe-core 4.10.2, an open-source accessibility engine. Serious violations appeared on 97.7% of roofing websites, 92.5% of remodeling websites, and 98.1% of HVAC websites. In the engine's severity scale, a serious violation marks a significant barrier for users with disabilities. Critical violations, the most severe tier, showed up on 61.3% of websites (233 of 380), and accessibility was the lowest-scoring category in the entire study.

The timing raises the stakes as well. In the United States, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website-accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025, a 27% increase over the prior year, according to law firm Seyfarth Shaw. Those cases made up 36% of all ADA Title III federal filings. And while the ADA names no specific technical standard, courts have settled on WCAG 2.1 AA as the working test, the same standard the sampled contractor websites were measured against.

"Contractor websites are failing older homeowners, who are among the most likely to hire them. Someone in their 60s with aging eyes can't read a low-contrast button, and someone with arthritis can't reliably tap a button that's too small. Both of them would leave the website. That first barrier is what WCAG 2.1 AA's contrast rule exists to prevent, and that standard is the one courts apply in ADA cases. The second is what the newer WCAG 2.2 added a target-size rule to catch."

Nenyi Keborku, Founder, Fervor Studio

"Paid-ad benchmarks measure what happens after you buy traffic. Our Site Inspections measure whether the traffic you already have can use your site at all. And for home services businesses in this study, a meaningful share of their visitors can't."

Nenyi Keborku, Founder, Fervor Studio

For a home services contractor, an unusable website is a direct barrier between their business and their potential customers.

Fervor scored each website across six categories on a 100-point framework, and measured mobile performance with Google Lighthouse 13.3.0. The full results, per-trade breakdowns, and downloadable reports are published at the Contractor CRO Index statistics page, alongside a public performance ranking of the individual brands and their grades.

The accessibility gap was part of a wider pattern. Across all 380 websites, the average score was 66 out of 100, a D on a standard American grading scale, and fewer than 1% scored 90 or higher, the threshold for an A.

Methodology

Where these numbers come from

Every figure traces to the Contractor CRO Index 2026. Fervor inspected 380 home services contractor websites (130 roofing, 146 remodeling, and 104 HVAC) in May 2026, running every captured page through axe-core 4.10.2 against WCAG 2.1 Level AA and measuring mobile performance with Google Lighthouse 13.3.0. Each site was scored across six categories on a 100-point framework Fervor calls the Fervor Grade. Per-trade reports, the full methodology, and a public ranking of every named brand and its grade live on the statistics page. The 3,117 lawsuit figure and the 27% year-over-year increase are from law firm Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III federal filing report.

About

About Fervor Studio

Fervor Studio is a conversion rate optimization (CRO) and web design studio for home services contractors across North America, based in Cochrane, Alberta. It publishes the Contractor CRO Index, a public benchmark that measures contractor website conversion potential using a proprietary framework and reproducible, open-source methods such as axe-core and Google Lighthouse. Fervor Studio is operated by Fervor Group Inc.