Squarespace Accessibility Audit: Pretty Templates, Mixed Results

What We Keep Finding

Squarespace templates are designed hard, and design-forward defaults age differently for assistive technology. Thin gray text that measures under the contrast bar. Galleries and image blocks that ship without prompting for alt text. Motion that nobody has thought about since launch day.

Motion is worth splitting properly, because the two halves sit at completely different levels and reports blur them constantly. Anything the page starts by itself, so an autoplaying slideshow or a ticker, is a Level A obligation and needs a way to pause, stop or hide it. Anything the visitor triggers, so a parallax effect that only moves because they scrolled, sits at Level AAA, which is above the bar most people are working to. And if there is sound in it, that is a third rule again, one that also wants a volume control independent of the system volume. Same background video, three different answers.

Squarespace publishes a list of what it gives you for free, and it doubles as a five-minute self-check anybody can run. A skip link. A keyboard focus outline. Semantic structure. Captions and transcripts for media. Playback controls. Every one of those is something you can verify on your own site this afternoon. Where one turns out to be missing, it is usually because the template or your own styling took it away rather than because Squarespace never shipped it.

Most of what we find is fixable inside your settings and content, which makes Squarespace audits unusually fixable for non-developers. The exception is code injection, which is where the last few fixes usually live and which sits behind a paid plan. So the report ranks the settings fixes first and says plainly which items need an upgrade before you can act on them.