What Does ADA Compliance Mean for Websites?

Most people think of the Americans with Disabilities Act in terms of physical access, such as wheelchair ramps, accessible parking, or elevator buttons with braille. What many business owners don't realize is that the ADA also applies to websites, and the legal exposure for ignoring that has been building for years. 

Over 4,000 lawsuits(opens in a new tab) were filed in federal and state courts in 2024 by individuals alleging that company websites and mobile apps failed to comply with Title III of the ADA. According to AudioEye's 2026 Accessibility Advantage Report,(opens in a new tab) 52% of business leaders have already faced an accessibility-related lawsuit or legal threat. AudioEye also found(opens in a new tab) that almost 4 in 10 businesses that were sued in 2025 already had some form of accessibility solution in place.

The numbers suggest that for many businesses, the legal exposure is already there, whether they've thought about it or not.

What the ADA actually says about websites

The ADA was signed into law(opens in a new tab) in 1990, years before most businesses had a website at all, so it doesn't mention the internet by name. But courts and the Department of Justice have consistently read Title III, the section covering places of public accommodation, to include websites and digital services.

One of the most referenced cases in this space is Robles v. Domino's Pizza(opens in a new tab). A blind customer sued after he couldn't order food through the company's app using a screen reader. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that the ADA applies to Domino's digital properties because they function as an extension of a physical place of business, and Domino's reached a settlement(opens in a new tab) in 2022 after six years of litigation. It's widely cited as a turning point for how courts think about digital accessibility.

If your business has a website and serves the public, it's reasonable to treat ADA compliance as something that applies to you.

What WCAG has to do with it

WCAG is the technical framework that courts and regulators use to measure whether a website is actually accessible. It's developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and sets specific standards for how content should work for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, captions, and other assistive tools.

The guidelines essentially ask four questions about your site: Can people tell what's on it? Can they use it? Can they understand it? And does it hold up across different devices and assistive tools? In practice, that means things like providing alt text for images, making sure videos have captions, ensuring a site can be navigated without a mouse, and using enough color contrast that text is readable for someone with low vision. For businesses, this matters because it means accessibility isn't subjective. There's a documented standard, courts know about it, and when someone sues over an inaccessible website, WCAG is usually how they prove it.

What non-compliance actually looks like

The part that surprises most people is just how common accessibility problems are. Research from WebAIM's annual review(opens in a new tab) of the top one million websites found that 94.8% of home pages have detectable WCAG failures. The most common issues include missing form labels, low-contrast text, images without alt text, and links that use vague or duplicate descriptions, the kind of barriers that make it genuinely difficult for someone who is blind or relies on a keyboard to use a site at all.

AudioEye's own research(opens in a new tab) found that 59% of business leaders believe their organization would be at legal risk if their site were audited today.

How businesses should approach this

The most effective path combines automated scanning with expert human review. Automated tools can quickly and consistently catch and resolve a large percentage of issues, but they don't replace the judgment required to fix more complex problems. Experts close the remaining gaps, addressing the barriers that technology alone can't reliably solve. However, neither works as well on its own. Automation without human review leaves critical issues unaddressed, and manual work alone can't keep pace with sites that update constantly. 

That challenge only continues to grow, especially as AI-powered coding tools have made it possible for smaller teams to build more and launch faster, which means accessibility gaps can appear more quickly than ever. According to AudioEye's 2025 Digital Accessibility Index(opens in a new tab), the average web page still contains 297 accessibility issues, even among organizations actively investing in compliance.

What hasn't held up legally is the overlay approach, tools that add a toolbar to your site and promise instant compliance. AudioEye found(opens in a new tab) that 38.5% of businesses sued in 2025 already had an accessibility solution in place. Most were relying on widgets that promised instant compliance but couldn't fix the things that actually matter in court, like forms, checkout flows, and navigation. That's because widgets operate at the presentation layer, a floating toolbar that lets visitors adjust font size or contrast for themselves without ever changing the underlying code. Real accessibility solutions work at the structural level, evaluating a site's code and fixing issues before a user ever interacts with the page. Widgets sell surface-level changes as structural fixes, and plaintiffs' attorneys know exactly where to look.

People with disabilities and their networks represent $18 trillion in global purchasing power, according to the Return on Disability Group(opens in a new tab), which means a more accessible website isn't just a legally safer one. It's one that more people can actually use. For most business owners, that tends to be the framing that sticks long after the legal risk stops being the only thing on their radar.

Where to start

For businesses just getting started, the most practical first step is understanding your site's accessibility, or lack thereof. A free accessibility site scan will surface the most common and most legally significant issues. Businesses have had to make their physical locations accessible for decades, and the same standard is now catching up to their websites. The ramp out front got built because the law required it, and today nobody thinks twice about it. The same shift is happening online, except the door isn't made of glass or steel. It's a homepage, a checkout flow, a contact form. The organizations that get ahead of it tend to find that keeping those doors open was never just a legal requirement anyway.