ADA Title III and Business Websites: What Small Business Owners Need to Know
Owners hear conflicting things about the ADA and websites. This is a practical read on what Title III covers, where the law is unsettled, and what a measured response looks like.
Updated with additional research.
Owners who look into website accessibility tend to hear two very different messages. One says a website must be accessible or the business is at serious legal risk. The other says the whole thing is overblown and a widget will take care of it.
Neither is quite right.
This is a practical read on what Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers, where the law is unsettled, and what a measured response looks like for a small service business. The small business guide to website accessibility covers the wider picture.
What Title III Says
The ADA was signed into law in 1990. Title III prohibits disability discrimination in places of public accommodation, which means businesses and services open to the general public.
The statute predates the public web and does not mention websites. The Department of Justice takes the position, in its 2022 web accessibility guidance, that Title III covers goods and services a business offers on the web. That guidance is not a regulation. It sets no technical standard and names WCAG only as helpful guidance.
Courts have not settled the question everywhere. The Ninth Circuit held in Robles v. Domino’s Pizza that the ADA applied to a pizza chain’s website and app. Other courts have disagreed, so the answer can vary by region.
The April 2024 DOJ rule that sets WCAG 2.1 AA applies to state and local governments under Title II. It does not apply to private businesses. Current regulations cite WCAG 2.1. I recommend building to WCAG 2.2 AA, which meets 2.1 AA as well.
How Much Exposure There Is
Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, about 36% of all federal ADA Title III suits. Its count covers federal courts only, found by keyword search, and leaves out state-court cases and demand letters.
That count does not show how many of the defendants were small. Small businesses do receive demand letters. The exposure exists but is not a certainty for every business, so a measured response fits better than panic.
The sites that draw the most attention have booking, forms or e-commerce, serve the general public, and carry barriers that are straightforward to identify and fix.
Common Barriers
No source ties specific barriers to demand letters. What the data does show is how common the barriers are. WebAIM’s 2026 scan of one million home pages used an automated tool and found low-contrast text on 83.9% of pages, missing image descriptions on 53.1%, and missing form labels on 51%. The scan covered top-ranked sites, not small businesses.
Screen readers describe images aloud from alt text. An image with no alt text, or with a filename like “image123.jpg,” tells a screen reader user nothing, and a missing description on a button or product photo is a barrier.
A form field without a proper label, an error message that does not say what went wrong, or a form that cannot be completed by keyboard blocks a core business action for some users.
Keyboard navigation is another common failure. Some users with motor disabilities navigate without a mouse. A dropdown that traps focus, or a modal that cannot be closed by keyboard, makes a site unusable for them.
Contrast is another. WCAG AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. Light gray text and brand colors chosen for looks are common causes of failure.
Video captions follow. The W3C says automatic captions do not meet accessibility requirements unless they are confirmed to be fully accurate.
These issues are ordinary ones that an audit will identify and a developer can fix.
The EU Angle
A business with customers in Europe may also fall under the European Accessibility Act. It applies from June 28, 2025 to listed products and services, and service businesses with fewer than 10 employees and under EUR 2 million in turnover are exempt, per the European Union’s Your Europe business guidance. The European Accessibility Act post covers who is in scope.
What Does Not Protect a Business
Accessibility overlays are widget tools sold under names like accessiBe and UserWay. The Overlay Fact Sheet, a statement from accessibility practitioners, says no overlay product can make a website fully compliant with an accessibility standard. Overlays work by adding JavaScript on top of a page rather than fixing the source code.
In April 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million over claims that its widget made websites WCAG-compliant. A business that was sold an overlay as a compliance fix still needs an audit to learn what barriers are present.
The Practical Response
The goal is an accurate picture of the site.
The appropriate starting point for most small service businesses is an audit. An audit is not a compliance certification, and it is not a remediation project priced at tens of thousands of dollars. It lists the barriers a site has, which ones matter most, and a sensible order for fixing them.
Some barriers take hours to fix. Others need a developer and more time. Knowing which is which comes first.
The COREaccess™ Accessibility Leadership System covers the full audit, remediate, train and monitor framework. For anyone unsure whether a website has barriers that could create legal exposure, a 15-minute conversation is a reasonable place to start.