Kartra Accessibility Checklist 2026 | WCAG 2.1 AA & EAA Compliance
Last updated: 2026-07-02
Kartra is an all-in-one marketing platform that bundles a drag-and-drop page builder, checkout and order forms, email automation, membership sites, and video hosting into a single subscription. It is popular with coaches, course creators, and small businesses who want their funnels, sales pages, and member areas in one place rather than stitched together from separate tools. That convenience is also where the accessibility risk hides: the same person building the funnel is usually not a developer and cannot see how the generated markup behaves for someone using a keyboard or a screen reader. Kartra's templates lean heavily on hero sections with text over images, tightly styled buttons, and multi-step opt-in and checkout forms, all of which are exactly the components that tend to fail WCAG when left at their defaults. Because Kartra pages frequently sell products, take payments, and gate paid content behind a login, they fall squarely under the European Accessibility Act and the ADA, so accessibility is a legal obligation and not a nice-to-have. The good news is that most of the highest-impact issues can be fixed from inside Kartra's builder settings or its custom code area without touching the platform's underlying engine. This checklist walks through the accessibility barriers most common on Kartra-powered sites and gives you a practical fix for each one.
Common Accessibility Issues
Kartra's sales and opt-in templates frequently place light or white text over gradient backgrounds and hero images, and use pale gray for subheadings and helper text. These combinations often fall below the 4.5:1 ratio WCAG requires for normal text (3:1 for large text), making headlines and body copy hard to read for users with low vision or anyone viewing on a bright screen.
Check every text-and-background pairing on your Kartra pages with a contrast checker, paying particular attention to text over images, subheadings, and button labels. In the page builder, raise the text color or darken the background until each pairing passes, and add a semi-transparent dark overlay behind any text placed on a photo so it stays readable regardless of the image.
Kartra opt-in and order forms commonly show the field name only as placeholder text inside the input. Placeholder text disappears as soon as the user starts typing, is announced inconsistently by screen readers, and usually fails contrast because of its light styling, so a user relying on assistive technology can reach a payment field with no idea what it is for.
Where Kartra allows it, enable visible labels above each field rather than relying on the placeholder alone, and keep the placeholder only as a supplementary example. For fields the builder will not let you label directly, use Kartra's custom code / HTML block to add associated labels, then test the full opt-in and checkout flow with a screen reader to confirm each field announces its purpose.
On Kartra order forms, validation errors and required fields are often communicated with a red border or a red asterisk with no accompanying text, and error summaries may not be programmatically tied to the field that failed. Screen reader users and colorblind users may not realize which field is wrong or that the payment did not go through.
Add explicit text such as 'Required' to mandatory fields instead of relying on a colored asterisk, and make sure each error message is rendered as text next to its field. Test a deliberately failed submission with a screen reader to confirm the specific error is announced and that focus moves to the first invalid field.
Kartra-generated pages typically ship without a skip-to-content link, so keyboard users must tab through the entire header and navigation on every step of a funnel before reaching the offer. Long sales pages also tend to style large text as plain divs rather than real headings, leaving screen reader users without a heading outline to navigate by.
Use Kartra's header custom code area to add a skip-to-content link as the first focusable element, pointing at the main content wrapper. In the builder, use the actual heading elements (H1 for the page title, H2/H3 for sections) instead of oversized paragraph text, so assistive technology can build a usable outline of the page.
Kartra hosts video for sales pages and membership lessons, but creators frequently upload videos with no captions or transcript. This locks deaf and hard-of-hearing users out of the core content, and also excludes anyone watching without sound. Auto-captions, where available, are often inaccurate for product names and specialized terms.
Add accurate captions to every video used on a sales page or inside a membership, uploading a corrected caption file rather than trusting auto-generated text. Provide a downloadable transcript alongside each membership lesson, and confirm the video player's play, pause, and volume controls are reachable and operable with the keyboard.
Kartra-Specific Tips
- Kartra's custom code / HTML blocks are your escape hatch for anything the visual builder will not let you label or structure correctly. Use them to add skip links, associated form labels, and proper heading markup.
- Test the entire funnel end to end, not just one page: opt-in, checkout, thank-you, and membership login are separate templates, and an accessibility fix on one does not carry over to the others.
- Because Kartra reuses the same components across pages, fixing contrast and label issues in your base template or theme once will propagate to every page that inherits from it.
- Run each order form through a keyboard-only pass and a screen reader before you send traffic to it, since a checkout that assistive-technology users cannot complete is both a lost sale and a compliance gap.
Recommended Tools
WebAIM Contrast Checker
Test the text and background colors in your Kartra templates to verify they meet the WCAG 2.1 AA contrast thresholds.
axe DevTools
A browser extension that scans your published Kartra pages for WCAG violations, surfacing missing labels and structural issues the builder preview hides.
WAVE
A free web-based evaluation tool that overlays accessibility errors directly on your Kartra funnel pages so you can locate missing labels and low contrast.
Further Reading
Other CMS Checklists
- Kajabi Accessibility Checklist
- Systeme-io Accessibility Checklist
- Clickfunnels Accessibility Checklist
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