Website accessibility and the ADA, without the scare tactics

Sooner or later somebody will tell you your website breaks the law. Sometimes it is a letter from a lawyer. More often it is an email selling a small widget — one line of code, a little blue icon in the corner — that promises to make your site compliant for a monthly fee.

The first deserves to be taken seriously. The second is mostly a sales pitch built on the first.

This is the honest version: what the law actually asks of a small business website, who is really being sued, why the widget does not help, and the handful of things that genuinely matter.

I am a web developer, not a lawyer. Nothing here is legal advice — if a letter arrives, talk to one.

• The ADA applies to businesses open to the public, and the Department of Justice says that includes what you offer online.
• There is no official technical checklist for private businesses. The standard everybody measures against in practice is WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
• Lawsuits are real and most are against small companies, but they cluster in online shops and restaurants.
• Accessibility widgets do not protect you. Over 1,400 sites that had one were sued last year anyway, and the best-known vendor paid the FTC $1 million over its claims.
• What protects you is a site that is actually built properly: readable contrast, described images, labelled forms, and everything usable from a keyboard. That is cheaper to do at the start than to bolt on later.

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers "places of public accommodation" — shops, restaurants, clinics, gyms, most businesses a customer walks into. The Department of Justice's position, set out in its March 2022 guidance, is that this reaches the web too:

Title III prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public.

The same guidance is candid about what does not exist yet:

Businesses and state and local governments can currently choose how they will ensure that the programs, services, and goods they provide online are accessible.

In other words, there is no federal regulation telling a private business exactly what its website must do. DOJ points to existing standards instead:

Existing technical standards provide helpful guidance concerning how to ensure accessibility of website features. These include the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

WCAG is what courts, settlements and plaintiffs' lawyers measure against in practice, and WCAG 2.1 at level AA is the level most people mean when they say "accessible".

In 2024 DOJ did publish a hard rule requiring WCAG 2.1 AA — but under Title II, which covers state and local governments: cities, counties, public schools and universities. Those deadlines were pushed back a year in April 2026, to April 2027 for larger governments and April 2028 for smaller ones.

If you run a bakery or a dental practice, that rule does not apply to you. It is still the clearest signal of where things are heading, and a sensible benchmark.

Washington and Oregon sit in the Ninth Circuit, which in Robles v. Domino's Pizza (2019) held that the ADA applied to Domino's website and app because they connected customers to its physical restaurants. If your site is how customers find you, book you or order from you, assume it is covered.

UsableNet, which tracks every one of these cases, counted 5,114 digital accessibility lawsuits in 2025 — 3,195 in federal courts and 1,919 in New York and California state courts.

A few numbers from that report are worth knowing:

• 64% were against companies with less than $25 million in annual revenue. Small businesses are the majority of defendants, not the exception.
• 70% were against online shops and 21% against food service. Together that is nine cases in ten.
• 45% of federal cases were against companies that had already been sued before. A settlement without actually fixing the site mostly buys a second letter.
• New York leads by a distance, then Florida and California — and you do not need to be based there to be sued there, only to serve customers there.

So the honest risk picture: if you sell online or take food orders online, it is real. If you are a service business with a brochure site, it is much lower — but not zero, and the fixes are the same either way.

The overlay pitch is simple: add our script, an icon appears, visitors can enlarge text or change colours, and an AI "fixes" the rest. You are compliant.

Three problems.

It does not stop lawsuits. In 2025, 1,416 lawsuits were filed against companies that already had an accessibility widget on their site — more than the year before. UsableNet's own conclusion: widgets "offer little protection against legal claims."

The biggest vendor was fined for saying it did. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalised an order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million. It had claimed its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant. The order bars it from saying so without evidence — and found it had dressed up paid reviews as independent ones.

It can make things worse. Blind visitors already have a screen reader, and people who need large text already have their browser set up for it. A widget that layers its own controls on top can fight the tools they rely on. Many disabled users actively dislike them.

The underlying problem is in the site itself — missing labels, unreadable contrast, buttons a keyboard cannot reach. No script sitting on top can reliably fix what the page was built without.

WebAIM scans the home pages of the top million websites every year. In 2026, 95.9% had detectable WCAG failures, averaging 56 errors a page. And those are only the errors a computer can find.

Almost all of them are the same six mistakes:

• Low-contrast text (83.9% of home pages). Pale grey on white — unreadable in sunlight or with weaker eyesight.
• Images without descriptions (53.1% of home pages). A screen reader says "image", or reads out a file name.
• Form fields without labels (51% of home pages). "Edit text, blank" — no idea what to type where.
• Empty links (46.3% of home pages). An icon-only link that announces nothing.
• Empty buttons (30.6% of home pages). A button with no name, so nobody knows what it does.
• No page language set (13.5% of home pages). Text read out in the wrong accent or pronunciation.

None of these is exotic. Each is a few minutes' work when the site is built, and a slog when it is retrofitted across dozens of pages. That is the real argument for doing it from the start: not fear of a letter, but that it is cheap early and expensive late — and that more than one in four American adults has some kind of disability. Plenty of them are your customers.

• Build to WCAG 2.1 AA from the first line, not as an audit at the end.
• Measure colour contrast rather than eyeballing it, including on buttons and on text over photos.
• Give every image a real description, every form field a label, and every button and icon-link a name.
• Make the whole site usable from a keyboard alone, with a visible focus outline so people can see where they are.
• Respect the reduced-motion setting — every animation on my demos page has a calmer version for visitors who ask for one.
• Write your site's accessibility statement honestly, including anything that is not perfect yet and how to reach you if something is in the way.
• No overlay widgets. Ever.

Put the mouse away. Press Tab repeatedly from the top of your home page. Can you see where you are at every step? Can you reach the menu, the booking button and the contact form, and use them with Enter?

Zoom to 200%. Hold Ctrl (or ⌘) and press + a few times. Does text still fit, or does the page break sideways?

Read it in the sun. Look at your site on your phone outside. Anything you squint at is failing contrast for somebody indoors too.

Check one form. Click into each field. Does it have a visible label that stays there once you start typing, or just grey placeholder text that vanishes?

If any of that goes badly, send me the page address. That is usually enough for me to tell you how much work it is.