ADA Compliance for News, Media, and Podcast Websites

News websites face two overlapping accessibility regimes that no other publishing category has to manage in parallel. Title III of the ADA reaches the site itself under the same Robles, Winn-Dixie, and Carparts framework that governs ecommerce, while the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), enacted October 8, 2010 and implemented by the FCC at 47 CFR § 79.4, independently mandates that video programming previously broadcast with captions retain those captions when delivered over the internet.

For a daily news operation publishing dozens of articles and many hours of video each day, that combination produces a uniquely high-volume compliance surface. A single mid-size newspaper site may run 50,000 video clips, 200,000 archived images, and a subscriber portal that handles authentication, billing, household sharing, and newsletter preferences — all of which create individual WCAG failure points. Plaintiff firms have increasingly targeted news publishers since 2022 because the high volume of untagged images, uncaptioned video, and dynamically-loaded article content produces dense violation lists that translate directly into settlement leverage. Beyond the legal exposure, captioning and transcript availability also affect how Google indexes video and audio content, so accessibility work at a news publisher is simultaneously a discovery and SEO project. This guide covers the specific surfaces that get cited, the platform stack underneath most news publishers, and what real remediation looks like.

This page is informational and is not legal advice. ADA, CVAA, and state-law obligations for publishers and broadcasters vary by jurisdiction and content type — consult qualified counsel for case-specific guidance.

Why news sites are now a settlement target

For most of the 2015-2021 wave of ADA web litigation, plaintiff firms concentrated on retail, restaurants, and hotels — categories where the inaccessibility-blocks-a-transaction theory was easiest to plead. News sites largely escaped that wave because the litigation theory was less obvious: free article reading is not obviously a transaction. Two shifts changed that. First, the broad adoption of paywalls (the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and now essentially every metro daily) made news sites transactional in the relevant Title III sense — a subscription is exactly the kind of commercial relationship that establishes Title III standing. Second, the volume of WCAG-detectable failures on news sites is extraordinary, often producing demand letters citing 80-200 specific issues, which is leverage in negotiated settlement.

The 2014 settlement between the National Federation of the Blind and NPR covered npr.org accessibility and committed NPR to ongoing third-party audits and the appointment of a designated accessibility coordinator. The 2012 CNN consent decree with the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness was even more consequential because it specifically addressed online video captioning and produced ongoing compliance reporting obligations. The Boston Globe entered a structured-negotiation agreement with the NFB in 2014. The New York Times has publicly disclosed multiple settlements covering subscriber-portal accessibility, with the most recent reportedly including subscriber-account management, household-sharing consent, and digital-edition reading-mode controls. Local and regional newspapers have settled in the $25,000-$80,000 range, typically when ownership groups (Gannett, Lee Enterprises, McClatchy, Tribune Publishing) consolidate similar-platform settlements across their portfolio.

Captioning, audio descriptions, and the four time-based-media WCAG criteria

WCAG 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded) requires captions for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media. For news sites, this covers every produced video segment, archived broadcast, and explainer animation. The captions must be accurate, synchronized with the audio, and identify speakers when more than one person is on screen. Auto-generated captions from YouTube or Brightcove are not by themselves sufficient under most settlement terms — error rates above approximately 5% are routinely cited as inadequate. Human review or human-corrected ASR is the standard.

WCAG 1.2.4 Captions (Live) requires captions for all live audio content. This is the criterion that drives caption costs at broadcasters and live-event publishers. CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) services from vendors like 3Play Media, Verbit, AI-Media (formerly Ai-Live), CaptionMax, and Rev cost approximately $90-$220 per hour of live captioning, depending on accuracy SLA and turnaround. Automated live captioning is improving but most settlement terms still require human-in-the- loop for live news streams.

WCAG 1.2.5 Audio Description (Prerecorded)requires audio descriptions for all prerecorded video where visual information is not conveyed in the existing audio track. This is the most-frequently-overlooked criterion at news publishers. A two-minute campaign-rally video where the on-screen text reads "Senator Smith, R-Iowa" with no audio mention of the senator's name fails 1.2.5 because a blind viewer cannot identify the speaker. Audio-described tracks have to be authored as a second audio file or narrated into the existing track during quiet moments.

WCAG 1.2.1 Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded)covers podcasts. A text alternative — a transcript — must be provided. Best-practice transcripts are paragraph-segmented, speaker-identified, and timecoded. NPR's podcast feed is the reference implementation: every episode of Up First, All Things Considered, Planet Money, and Throughline ships a publication- quality transcript on the episode page within hours of release. Major hosting platforms — Buzzsprout, Captivate, Transistor, Megaphone (Spotify), Acast, Podbean — now offer automated transcription as a standard feature, and Apple Podcasts began displaying auto-generated transcripts in 2024.

What WCAG violations do news sites have most often?

• Photo galleries and slideshows with non- descriptive alt text. Wire-service photos arrive with caption metadata in IPTC fields, but most CMSs strip or fail to surface that metadata into the rendered alt attribute. WCAG 1.1.1.
• "Read more" and "click here" links repeated across hundreds of article cards on a homepage. WCAG 2.4.4 (Link Purpose) requires that link text alone identify the destination, which excludes the generic phrasing.
• Infinite-scroll article feeds that load additional content without notifying assistive technology. WCAG 4.1.3 (Status Messages) requires that newly-loaded content be announced via aria-live or comparable mechanism.
• Pull-quote contrast failures where designer- chosen accent colors fail the 4.5:1 ratio under WCAG 1.4.3. Light gray byline metadata and timestamp text are the second most-common contrast failure on news sites after pull-quotes.
• Video player keyboard traps where the player gains focus and the user cannot Tab out without first pressing an undocumented key combination. WCAG 2.1.2 (No Keyboard Trap).
• Comment sections from third-party providers (Disqus, Coral, Spot.IM, Talk) that fail label association on the reply input, sort dropdown, and reaction buttons. WCAG 1.3.1 and 4.1.2.
• Embedded social posts from Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook that ship as iframes with no accessible name on the iframe element. WCAG 4.1.2 requires that iframes have a title attribute or aria-label.
• Newsletter signup modals that auto-launch and trap focus, blocking screen-reader access to the underlying article. The fix is a focusable, dismissable dialog that follows the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices dialog pattern.
• Interactive election graphics and data visualizations built in D3 or Datawrapper without text alternatives. WCAG 1.1.1 and 1.3.1. NYT graphics desk and ProPublica News Apps have led accessible-data-viz publishing; both now ship long-form text equivalents inline with most graphic packages.
• Paywall modals with focus-trap bugs that prevent keyboard users from reaching the "sign in" vs "subscribe" choices. This shows up in subscriber-portal demand letters specifically.

Platform stack: how the underlying CMS shapes the violation list

Arc XP (formerly Washington Post-developed Arc Publishing) powers the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Tribune Publishing chains, Advance Local properties, and many international newspapers. Arc's default PageBuilder blocks ship reasonable semantic HTML and ARIA, but the most common violations come from custom feature blocks built by individual newsrooms — inline timelines, scrollytelling stories, and election dashboards routinely lack alt text and keyboard support.

WordPress VIP hosts FiveThirtyEight, the New Yorker (selected properties), Time, Variety, and many regional publishers. The accessibility profile depends on the active theme and Gutenberg block set. WordPress core has steadily improved its accessibility (the Twenty Twenty-Four theme passes more than 90% of WCAG 2.1 AA out of the box), but news publishers heavily customize, and custom Gutenberg blocks frequently lack semantic structure.

Drupal remains the dominant CMS at NBC, NPR stations, the Economist (historically), and many public-media properties. Drupal core accessibility is strong — the project has a formal accessibility maintainer and audits against WCAG 2.1 AA — but contrib modules and custom Twig templates often regress.

Sitecore powers many legacy newspaper publishers and television-station group sites. Sitecore deployments tend to run older codebases with custom layout services that bypass modern accessibility patterns. The single biggest finding pattern on Sitecore news sites is unlabeled custom form components.

Custom Next.js and Remix stacks are increasingly common at digital-native news publishers (the Information, Semafor, Puck, Punchbowl, Axios, the Athletic). Single-page- application route changes that fail to update the document title or move focus to the new H1 are the consistent finding here. WCAG 2.4.2 (Page Titled) and 2.4.3 (Focus Order) both fail on most Next.js news sites that have not implemented an explicit route- announcement mechanism.

Subscriber portals, paywalls, and household sharing

The subscriber-account portion of a news site sits on a separate stack from the article content — typically Piano, Zephr (now part of Zuora), Recurly, Stripe Billing, or an in-house identity stack built on Auth0/Okta. Each layer has its own accessibility profile. Piano's ID and Composer products improved their WCAG 2.1 AA posture significantly after 2022, but legacy templates that publishers customized in 2018-2020 still ship in production. The most-cited subscriber-portal failures are unlabeled credit-card inputs (PCI-scope iframes from Stripe, Adyen, or Spreedly that inherit no accessible labels), recurring-billing consent checkboxes that fail label association, change-of-plan flows that do not announce confirmation, and pause-subscription dialogs buried behind a JavaScript-only chat widget.

Household-sharing surfaces (the New York Times All Access bundle, the Athletic family-plan add-on, Wall Street Journal corporate-access flows) all create a separate signup-and-invite UX where the invitation acceptance email is itself a Title III surface. Plain-text invitation emails accessible to screen readers are a settlement-term standard now.

What does news-site remediation cost?

Cost is driven by archive volume (alt-text remediation across historical photos), video library size (caption backfill at $1.50-$8 per video minute depending on turnaround), and the complexity of the subscriber portal. Newspapers with deep archives face the largest one-time cost; digital-natives with small archives but heavy real-time video face the largest ongoing cost.

Frequently asked questions

What to do today

Run an automated WCAG 2.1 AA scan on five specific page templates first: homepage, article detail with embedded video, photo gallery, subscriber-account dashboard, and newsletter signup landing. Those five cover the surfaces that produce most demand-letter findings. Pair the automated scan with a manual review of one live video segment for caption accuracy and one podcast episode for transcript completeness — both are easy enough to do in 30 minutes and surface the CVAA-side issues that automated tools miss. Compare your findings to our list of the most common ADA web violations to triage what to fix first, and review our guidance on writing alt text for editorial photography since news archives are typically the largest backfill surface.

For publishers facing imminent deadlines, see our breakdown of what an ADA demand letter actually requires and our state-specific guidance for New York publishers under NYSHRL and NYCHRL, where the largest concentration of news-publisher litigation is filed.