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ADA Website Compliance, Explained Without the Legalese

10 min read · updated

There is no federal web rulebook, yet thousands of suits get filed every year. Here is what is actually being enforced, and against whom.

The strange gap at the center of this

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990. It says that places of public accommodation may not discriminate on the basis of disability. It does not mention websites, because in 1990 there were essentially none.

Thirty-five years later there is still no general federal regulation telling a private business what an accessible website must do. The Department of Justice has started and abandoned that rulemaking more than once. What exists instead is a large and growing body of litigation, and a standard that everyone has agreed to treat as the standard without a statute ever saying so.

So the honest summary is this: the obligation is real, the rulebook is borrowed. Understanding that is the difference between spending money usefully and spending it on a widget.

The standard everyone actually uses

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are published by the W3C, not by any government. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is what you will see named in almost every settlement agreement, consent decree, federal procurement requirement and state contract. WCAG 2.2 AA is the current version and adds nine criteria on top.

Two places where WCAG has been formally adopted rather than merely borrowed:

  • Section 508 — federal agencies and anyone selling technology to them. Its refreshed standard incorporates WCAG 2.0 AA by reference.
  • DOJ Title II rule, April 2024 — state and local government web content and mobile apps, adopting WCAG 2.1 AA. This is a real regulation with real deadlines and the closest thing to a federal web standard that exists. The deadlines were extended in April 2026: 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 people or more, and 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special districts.
  • European Accessibility Act — enforceable since 28 June 2025, measured against EN 301 549, which builds on WCAG 2.1. It reaches e-commerce, banking, transport and e-books sold to EU consumers regardless of where the seller sits, so a US store shipping to Europe is in scope and is expected to appoint an EU-based authorized representative.

If you are a private business, neither of those binds you directly. Both are why WCAG 2.1 AA is the number your lawyer will name anyway.

Who is actually being sued

Federal web accessibility filings hit 3,117 in 2025, up 27% on 2024 and the second-highest annual total recorded. Including state courts, the total passed 5,000. Web cases made up 36% of all ADA Title III federal filings, against 28% the year before.

The geography is concentrated: New York, Florida and California account for most of it, with Illinois jumping from 28 cases in 2024 to 237 in 2025. The defendants are mostly not household names. This is a volume practice built on the fact that the same handful of defects appear on almost every commercial website, and that each one is cheaper to settle than to litigate.

California deserves its own sentence. Web accessibility claims there are commonly brought under the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act rather than under the ADA directly — Unruh treats a violation of the ADA as a violation of state law — which keeps cases in state court and is part of why California stays in the top three year after year. If your business or your customers are in California, the practical takeaway is not a different fix list; it is that the same fix list carries state-law exposure on top of the federal kind.

Sources: Seyfarth ADA Title III, EcomBack 2025 annual report.

What the complaints actually say

Read a few and they rhyme. The allegations are rarely exotic. They are, over and over:

  • Images conveying information with no text alternative, so a screen reader announces nothing useful
  • Form fields with no programmatic label — checkout, search, contact, newsletter
  • Buttons and links whose accessible name is empty, or is the word “link”
  • Text that cannot be read at the contrast it is rendered at
  • Content that cannot be reached or operated with a keyboard alone
  • Video with no captions

This is good news, in a narrow sense. It means the exposure that matters is concentrated in a short list of concrete, checkable defects rather than in the full 55-criterion sprawl of WCAG AA. Fixing that list does not make you immune, but it removes what the complaints are built from.

What to actually do, in order

  1. Find out what you have. Run an automated scan to catch the machine-detectable failures. That is roughly 30–40% of WCAG, and it happens to overlap heavily with what gets pleaded. The free scan here orders findings by litigation frequency for exactly this reason.
  2. Do the keyboard pass yourself. Ten minutes, no tools. Most of the remaining exposure lives here and no scanner can see it — see the keyboard guide.
  3. Fix the concrete list first. Alt text, labels, control names, contrast, captions. These are hours of work, not months, and they are what the complaints cite.
  4. Write an accessibility statement that says what you have done, what you know is outstanding, and how to contact a human about a barrier. It is not a legal shield, but a documented good-faith effort with a working contact route is materially better than silence.
  5. Get a human audit if you have real exposure. High-traffic e-commerce, healthcare, finance, anything with a booking or checkout flow. Automation will not get you there, and a real audit tests with actual assistive technology.

What not to do

Do not buy an overlay widget and consider the matter closed. Sites running overlays were named in more than 400 ADA suits in 2024 and nearly 500 in the first half of 2025, and in January 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe — the largest vendor — to pay $1,000,000 over claims that its automated product could make websites WCAG-conformant. The final order bars the company from repeating those claims without evidence.

The mechanism of failure is worth understanding rather than just the outcome: why overlays do not work.

Source: FTC, January 2025.

The bottom line

There is no certificate to obtain and nobody to file with. What there is, is a short list of defects that appear in nearly every complaint, a published standard everyone has agreed to use, and a large industry selling shortcuts around both. Fix the list, document the effort, test with a keyboard, and get human help where the stakes are real.

And if the scan comes back showing that the problem is not a list of patches but the way the site was built — controls made of divs, templates with no structure — that is a development project rather than an accessibility chore. It is the kind of work our web development team does, including for California businesses, where the exposure described above is at its most concentrated.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an official ADA standard for websites?

Not for private businesses. The Department of Justice has repeatedly declined to issue a general web accessibility regulation under Title III, so there is no federal rulebook that tells a shop or a restaurant exactly what to build. On 24 April 2024 the DOJ did issue a final rule under Title II covering state and local government web content and mobile apps, and that rule adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA. For everyone else, WCAG 2.1 AA has become the de facto standard because it is what settlement agreements, consent decrees and procurement contracts name.

When is the Title II deadline, and did it move?

It moved. The 2024 rule originally set 24 April 2026 for entities serving populations of 50,000 or more and 26 April 2027 for smaller entities and special districts. In April 2026 the DOJ extended both by a year, to 26 April 2027 and 26 April 2028 respectively. If you are a public entity or you sell to one, plan against the new dates and check them yourself before you commit budget — this rule has already slipped once.

Does the ADA apply to my website if I have no physical store?

It depends where you are. Federal circuits disagree. The First and Seventh Circuits have treated websites as covered places of public accommodation in their own right. The Third, Sixth, Ninth and Eleventh have generally required some connection to a physical location, though the Ninth reads that nexus broadly. Because plaintiffs choose where to file, the practical answer for most businesses is that the risk exists regardless of the circuit you happen to sit in.

What does a demand letter usually ask for?

Typically a settlement in the five figures, plus a commitment to remediate, and it is usually cheaper than defending a filing. That asymmetry is the whole business model: the cost of fighting exceeds the cost of paying, so most cases settle quietly and never appear in the statistics as outcomes.

Does the European Accessibility Act affect a US company?

It can. The EAA became enforceable on 28 June 2025 and reaches products and services offered to consumers in the EU — e-commerce, banking, telecoms, transport, e-books and audiovisual media — regardless of where the business is established. The technical reference is EN 301 549, which builds on WCAG 2.1. Non-EU businesses in scope are expected to appoint an EU-based authorized representative, and penalties include fines and removal from the EU market. It is a separate obligation from the ADA, not the same one.

Keep reading

Nothing here is legal advice. Accessibility obligations vary by jurisdiction and by how a site is used. If you have received a demand letter, talk to a lawyer.