ADA Website Lawsuits Are Rising. Here’s What US Businesses Actually Need to Do.

If you run a business in the United States with a website, you have a legal exposure most people in your position have not thought about. It is not hypothetical, it is not rare, and it disproportionately hits small and mid-size companies rather than the large ones you would expect.

I have spent a significant part of the last few years doing accessibility remediation on US client sites. This is the plain-English version of what I tell clients when they call me after a letter arrives — and, better, what I tell the ones who call before.

The short version of the legal situation

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires “places of public accommodation” to be accessible to people with disabilities. US courts have broadly extended that to commercial websites — a position that has held across most circuits, even though the ADA predates the commercial web and Congress has never passed a statute spelling out web requirements.

Because there is no federal web standard written into the statute, courts and settlements have converged on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA as the practical benchmark. If someone asks what standard your site should meet, that is the answer.

Several states layer their own requirements on top. California’s Unruh Act is the most consequential, because it provides statutory damages per violation, which is why a disproportionate share of these cases are filed there.

Who actually gets targeted

The pattern is consistent and it is not what most business owners assume:

• Small and mid-size businesses make up the large majority of defendants. Big companies have already been sued and have remediated.
• eCommerce is the most common sector by a wide margin. Checkout flows fail accessibility more than almost any other page type.
• Restaurants, clinics, law firms, real estate, hospitality and local service businesses follow.
• Most matters never reach court. They arrive as a demand letter proposing a settlement that is cheaper than defending — which is exactly the economics the sender is counting on.

A meaningful share of filings come from a small number of repeat plaintiffs and firms running automated scans to find targets. That does not make the underlying problem less real: the sites being flagged genuinely are unusable for people relying on screen readers.

Why the overlay widget is not the answer

You have seen the ads. A line of JavaScript, $49/month, an accessibility icon in the corner, “instant ADA compliance.”

Do not buy it. Here is why, specifically:

• It does not fix your markup. An overlay runs in the browser and attempts to patch things at runtime. The underlying HTML — the thing assistive technology actually reads — is unchanged.
• It frequently makes things worse. Screen reader users have their own software, configured the way they want it. An overlay injecting its own behaviour on top routinely breaks that. The National Federation of the Blind has publicly objected to these products.
• It has not protected defendants. Businesses using overlay widgets have been sued anyway, and in some cases the overlay vendor has been named too.
• Automated tooling catches roughly 30% of issues at best. Keyboard traps, illogical focus order, meaningless alt text, unlabelled form controls in context — these need a human.

There is no $49/month version of this. There is source-level remediation, and there is pretending.

The practical checklist

Here is what actually gets fixed in a real remediation, roughly in the order of how often it is broken.

Images

• Every meaningful image has alt text describing what it conveys — not the filename, not “image”, not a keyword stuffed phrase.
• Decorative images have an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them instead of announcing noise.
• Images containing text have that text in the alt, or better, are not images of text.

Keyboard access

• Everything clickable is reachable and operable with the Tab key alone. Try it on your own site right now — it takes two minutes and is usually revealing.
• Focus is visibly indicated. If your designer removed the focus outline because it was “ugly”, that is a failure; replace it with something that matches the brand, do not delete it.
• Tab order follows the visual order of the page.
• No keyboard traps — you can always Tab out of a modal, menu or embedded widget.
• A working skip link so keyboard users do not Tab through forty navigation items on every page.

Forms

• Every input has a real <label> programmatically associated with it. A placeholder is not a label — it disappears when you start typing.
• Required fields are marked in a way software can detect, not just with a red asterisk.
• Error messages are tied to the field they relate to and announced when they appear.
• Related inputs (address blocks, radio groups) are grouped with fieldsets.

Structure and semantics

• One H1 per page, headings in logical order, no skipping from H2 to H4 for visual reasons.
• Real landmarks — header, nav, main, footer — so screen reader users can jump between regions.
• Lists marked up as lists, tables with proper headers, buttons that are buttons and links that are links.
• Link text that makes sense out of context. “Read more” repeated eleven times tells a screen reader user nothing.

Colour and contrast

• Body text at 4.5:1 contrast against its background; large text and UI components at 3:1.
• Check text over images and over brand colours, which is where it almost always fails.
• Colour is never the only way information is conveyed — error states need an icon or text too.

Media

• Video has captions. Audio-only content has a transcript.
• Nothing auto-plays with sound.
• Carousels and animations can be paused.

What a real remediation project looks like

1. Automated scan with axe and WAVE to catch the mechanical issues fast.
2. Manual keyboard traversal of every template type — this is where the real problems surface.
3. Screen reader testing with NVDA and VoiceOver on your highest-value pages: home, services, contact, checkout.
4. Fix in the source, template by template, so the fix applies to all current and future content.
5. Re-test and document what was tested, what was fixed and what remains.
6. Publish an accessibility statement with a contact route for anyone who hits a barrier. This matters: a documented good-faith effort and a working feedback channel is meaningfully better than silence if a complaint ever arrives.
7. Train the content team, because the next person who uploads an image without alt text undoes part of the work.

The part nobody mentions in the lawsuit conversation

Roughly one in four US adults has a disability of some kind. Accessible sites are also better for everyone else: they work on keyboards, they work in bright sunlight, they work for the 60-year-old with reading glasses who is probably in your target market.

Accessible markup is also cleaner markup, which search engines parse more reliably. The SEO benefit is real, if secondary.

The legal risk is the reason most people call. It should not be the only reason you do it.

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If you want to know where your site currently stands, send me the URL. I will run a proper audit — automated plus manual keyboard and screen-reader testing on your key pages — and give you a prioritised list of what is actually broken, including the ones you can fix yourself.