Avoid Lawsuits By Complying With ADA Legislation

According to ADA, a disability is defined as a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” While the Act doesn’t list any specific impairments, it is generally viewed as a document that guarantees equal opportunity for everybody in the majority of situations.

The Department of Justice has long taken the position that the ADA applies to what businesses offer online, not only in their physical locations. Hence, a business website is expected to serve its visitors efficiently and equally regardless of visual impairments, motor skill level, and cognitive disabilities.

Website ADA compliance is usually measured against the WCAG guidelines, which have three levels: A for the lowest, AA for medium, and AAA for the highest. There's no federal rule that tells a private business which level it needs, but it is still the business's responsibility to make its site usable. If a company fails to do so, the consequences can be expensive.

This post is about the legal side: what the law says today, who it covers, how these claims usually start and what does and doesn't protect you.

Trending ADA lawsuits

In the United States, there has been more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025 alone. And since the ADA lets a plaintiff who wins recover attorney's fees from the business, filing a case carries little risk for the person suing. Because of that, some high-profile cases have involved large corporations, such as Netflix, Domino’s Pizza, and Amazon.

However, these lawsuits do not target only well-known brands: in 2025, 64% of the companies sued had less than $25 million in annual revenue, and UsableNet puts e-commerce sites at nearly 70% of all ADA web lawsuits. The same report found that a large share of cases were filed against companies that had already been sued before. A non-complying website can have serious consequences for a mom-and-pop shop.

What the law actually says right now

The ADA was passed in 1990 and doesn't mention websites. What applies to you depends on who you are.

State and local government (Title II)

In April 2024 the Department of Justice published a rule that requires state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. In April 2026 the DOJ pushed the deadlines back by a year: April 26, 2027 for governments serving 50,000 or more people, and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. Private companies that build or run sites for those agencies are covered through that work.

Private businesses (Title III)

There is still no DOJ regulation with a technical standard for private business websites. The DOJ's 2022 web accessibility guidance says businesses open to the public must make what they offer online accessible, calls WCAG "helpful guidance," and says businesses have flexibility in how they comply. In practice, WCAG 2.1 AA is the benchmark that lawsuits, settlements and auditors point to. At the moment, WCAG 2.1 is widely used to measure web accessibility, and WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023, is the latest version. If you're fixing a site now, aiming at 2.2 AA covers 2.1 AA as well.

What if I only sell online?

Federal courts don't agree on this. The Ninth Circuit, which covers California, held in Robles v. Domino's (2019) that the ADA applies to a website that connects customers to the goods and services of a physical location, in that case Domino's restaurants. Courts elsewhere have gone different ways on websites with no physical location at all. Don't treat that as a safe harbor. Online-only stores get sued too.

What a plaintiff can actually win

Under federal Title III, a private plaintiff can't recover money damages. What they can get is a court order to fix the site, plus attorney's fees if they win. So a business that loses pays its own lawyer, the plaintiff's lawyer and the cost of the fix, which is why most of these cases settle. Some states go further. California's Unruh Act adds statutory damages per violation, which we cover in website accessibility lawsuits in California.

How these claims usually start

Many claims start with a demand letter rather than a lawsuit. It usually says the writer, or their client, tried to use your site with a screen reader or keyboard and couldn't, lists some problems (missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, a checkout that can't be completed), cites the ADA and WCAG, and asks for a settlement payment plus a commitment to fix the site by a certain date.

If one arrives:

• Don't ignore it and don't answer it yourself. Send it to an attorney who handles ADA website claims.
• Before changing anything, save screenshots or an archived copy of the pages as they were on the date in the letter, and ask your lawyer about timing for fixes.
• Get the pages in the letter audited, so you know which claims hold up and what the fix costs.
• Keep a record of every fix and when it went live. Showing an ongoing, good-faith effort matters.

Caring for the customer

But it’s not just about the risk of being taken to court. About 16% of the world's population, 1.3 billion people, has a significant disability, and not accommodating this huge group of people closes your doors to a lot of customers. For many of them, shopping online is the easier option, and a site they can't use sends them straight to a competitor.

Additionally, many companies claim inclusivity as a core value. The way an inclusive business operates on a daily basis is informed by the awareness that some of the customers may be disabled. Hence, ensuring that the website is ADA-compliant is one of the ways to demonstrate that value in action.

What does ADA compliance involve?

ADA aims to improve accessibility for people with physical and mental disabilities. In practicality, that usually involves improving UI so that anybody can meaningfully browse your website. That often means changing the contrast between colors, making sure text can be enlarged to 200% without breaking the layout, and making everything work with a keyboard for people who can't use a mouse. Additionally, it requires providing adequate alt text for images so that someone utilizing a screen reader can successfully navigate the website and complete a transaction without being able to see the product photo. Another example is flashing images and animation. WCAG says nothing should flash more than three times a second, and anything that moves, blinks or scrolls on its own for more than five seconds, like a sliding banner, needs a way to pause or hide it.

While these requirements are absolutely reasonable requests to make the website easy to use for everybody, they may seem like a tall order for an owner of a busy company. Creating a website has become a relatively simple task, and many small businesses forego professional website development. Instead, they use a popular CMS such as Shopify to make their site themselves. This may be a fine choice at an early stage of business development since it’s a cheap and fast solution. However, in the long term, it leaves your business vulnerable to ADA-related lawsuits if the person who creates the website has a lack of experience in the web development field.

Making an existing website ADA-compliant

Let’s say we have a working website that brings in traffic and sales, but it’s not ADA-compliant. What’s the best and quickest way to tackle this issue?

You can approach it from several directions. You can consult a lawyer specializing in ADA and try to adjust things accordingly. If that sounds too complex, you can order a custom redesign from a professional web development studio. Web studios do not provide legal consultations, but they make it easy to outsource the challenging task of complying with ADA in accordance with the current guidelines and standards. The downside of both of these approaches is that you’ll still have to keep up with the ADA legislation since it is prone to change with time. If you want to see where your site stands first, is my website ADA compliant? walks through a free first check.

Why an accessibility widget won't keep you out of court

Be careful with accessibility widgets, also called overlays, that promise to make a website compliant automatically. An overlay is a script that runs on top of your site after it loads. It doesn't change the HTML underneath, so an unlabeled form field or an image with no alt text is still broken for the screen reader the visitor already uses, and that's what a plaintiff's tester checks.

The numbers back this up. UsableNet's 2025 data shows lawsuits against sites with a widget installed every month of the year, roughly 95 to 155 a month. And in April 2025 the FTC finalized an order requiring accessiBe, the maker of accessWidget, to pay $1 million over claims that its tool could make any website WCAG compliant.

Is there a tax break for accessibility work?

Possibly. You might be eligible to take advantage of the Disabled Access Credit that provides up to a $5,000 tax credit for eligible accessibility expenses if your business has 30 or fewer full-time employees or $1 million or less in gross receipts for the previous year. Ask your accountant whether your website work qualifies.

If you need help, Abra can help review your website and fix the accessibility issues in its design and code.

Related reading

• Is my website ADA compliant?
• Website accessibility lawsuits in California