The ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in places of public accommodation. Courts and the Department of Justice have increasingly interpreted websites operated by businesses as places of public accommodation subject to the ADA, particularly when those websites provide access to goods, services, or information that would otherwise require visiting a physical location. Federal courts in multiple circuits have affirmed this interpretation, and while there is no single definitive Supreme Court ruling, the weight of case law and regulatory guidance points toward websites being covered.
The volume of ADA website accessibility lawsuits has grown significantly over the past decade. Most lawsuits are filed by a small number of serial plaintiffs targeting businesses across multiple industries. Retail, hospitality, food service, and healthcare have seen the highest rates of litigation, but no category is immune. The typical pattern is a demand letter alleging specific WCAG violations followed by a settlement demand. Settlement amounts for small businesses have historically ranged from five to twenty-five thousand dollars plus attorney fees. Even when the lawsuit lacks merit, the cost of defense can exceed the settlement demand.
The most common allegations in accessibility lawsuits involve missing alt text on images, forms that cannot be operated by keyboard, lack of proper heading structure that prevents screen reader navigation, videos without captions, and insufficient color contrast. These are not obscure technical failures. They are basic implementation gaps that can be identified through free automated tools like WAVE or axe DevTools and corrected in most cases without rebuilding the site from scratch.
State laws add an additional layer of risk in some jurisdictions. California's Unruh Civil Rights Act provides broader disability protections than the federal ADA and has been used to bring accessibility claims with higher statutory damage amounts. New York, Florida, and other states with active plaintiff bars have also seen elevated filing volumes. If you operate in or target customers in these states, the risk profile is higher than the national average.
The most practical response to accessibility risk is proactive remediation rather than reactive defense. Run your site through WAVE at wave.webaim.org and Google's Lighthouse tool today. Fix the issues that appear in the automated scan. Then either conduct a manual keyboard navigation test yourself or hire an accessibility consultant to do a more thorough review. The cost of making your site reasonably accessible is almost always less than the cost of a demand letter, and it also produces a better experience for the roughly twenty-six percent of US adults who have some form of disability.
Website accessibility is both the right thing to do for your users and the legally prudent thing to do for your business, and the gap between a non-compliant and a reasonably compliant site is smaller and cheaper to close than most founders expect.