The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, long before most businesses had websites. Courts and the DOJ have spent the years since establishing that it applies to websites anyway. Whether your site is compliant is no longer an academic question — it’s a legal and business one.
Here’s what you need to know.
What the Law Actually Requires
The ADA doesn’t specify a technical standard for websites. What courts have consistently done is look to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C, as the de facto standard for what “accessible” means.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the benchmark. It’s organized around four principles:
Perceivable — Can users perceive all content? This covers things like alt text for images, captions for video, and sufficient color contrast between text and background.
Operable — Can users operate all functionality without a mouse? Keyboard navigation, no seizure-inducing content, and enough time to complete tasks all fall here.
Understandable — Is the content readable and predictable? Language must be defined, navigation must behave consistently, errors must be identified and described.
Robust — Does the content work with assistive technology? Screen readers, voice control software, and other tools must be able to parse your content reliably.
What the Legal Risk Looks Like
ADA website lawsuits are a real and growing category of litigation. The plaintiffs’ bar has developed an efficient playbook: identify sites with accessibility failures, send demand letters, and settle for low five-figure amounts. Businesses that ignore demand letters face federal court.
Who gets targeted:
- Retail and e-commerce — the highest volume of cases
- Financial services — banks, insurance, lending
- Healthcare and wellness
- Hospitality — hotels and restaurants with online reservations
- Any business with a physical location — the connection to a physical place strengthens ADA applicability arguments
Smaller businesses aren’t immune. The legal costs of defending a suit — even one you’d win — often exceed the settlement amount plaintiffs are asking for.
The Most Common Failures
In practice, most WCAG AA failures cluster in a handful of areas:
Missing or inadequate alt text. Every non-decorative image needs a text alternative that conveys its meaning. “image.jpg” or empty alt attributes fail. So does generic alt text like “photo” that doesn’t describe what the image shows.
Insufficient color contrast. Normal text needs at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background. Large text (18pt+ or 14pt bold) needs 3:1. This fails silently — it looks fine to most people — but affects low-vision users significantly.
Form inputs without labels. Every form field needs a programmatically associated label, not just placeholder text. Placeholder text disappears when you start typing and isn’t reliably read by screen readers.
Keyboard navigation that doesn’t work. Everything interactive — links, buttons, forms, modals, carousels — must be operable with a keyboard alone. Focus states must be visible.
Videos without captions. Prerecorded video with audio needs synchronized captions. Auto-generated captions (YouTube’s, for example) rarely meet the accuracy standard without manual cleanup.
PDFs and documents. Linked PDFs must also be accessible. Scanned documents — images of text with no actual text layer — fail entirely.
What an Accessibility Audit Delivers
A proper ADA compliance audit is more than running an automated scanner. Automated tools catch roughly 20–30% of WCAG failures, depending on the tool and the criteria tested. The rest require human judgment — testing with actual keyboard navigation, running a screen reader through your pages, evaluating whether alt text is actually meaningful.
A thorough audit covers:
- Automated scan across all page templates
- Manual keyboard navigation testing
- Screen reader testing (NVDA/JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac)
- Color contrast analysis across all text/background combinations
- Form and interactive element review
- Document and media accessibility
- Prioritized remediation report
What Remediation Involves
Most accessibility issues are fixable in code — they don’t require redesigning the site. Common fixes:
- Adding or correcting alt attributes in HTML or CMS
- Updating CSS to fix color contrast
- Adding
<label>elements andaria-*attributes to forms - Fixing focus management in JavaScript components
- Adding keyboard event handlers to interactive elements
- Replacing or captioning video content
Timeline and cost depend heavily on the state of the codebase. A well-structured site built on a modern framework can often be brought to AA compliance in a few days of focused work. A legacy site with embedded inaccessible UI patterns can take weeks.
Accessibility Overlays: Don’t
You’ve seen the accessibility widget buttons on websites — click a button, a sidebar appears with options to increase text size or enable high-contrast mode. These products (accessiBe, UserWay, AudioEye, and others) are marketed as compliance solutions.
They’re not. By now, the case against overlays is well-documented:
- Courts have repeatedly ruled against sites using overlays — roughly 25% of ADA website lawsuits in 2024 were brought against companies that had overlays installed.
- The FTC fined accessiBe $1 million for deceptive advertising claims about its compliance capabilities.
- The DOJ’s own guidance states that overlays “can add barriers” — the opposite of what they’re marketed to do.
- The NFB and ACB have both published formal statements against them.
Overlays don’t fix the underlying code. They apply a JavaScript layer on top of a broken site, which creates new problems while not reliably solving the original ones. They are compliance theater that has repeatedly failed in court.
Actual compliance requires fixing the actual code.
At Webward, we conduct full WCAG 2.1 AA audits and handle remediation — fixing the code, not just reporting the problems. Get in touch to discuss your site.