Website Accessibility and the ADA: What Actually Applies to You
Every so often a client forwards us an email that starts with something like "your website is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act" and ends with a settlement figure.
Sometimes it's a real law firm. Sometimes it's a template sent to a few hundred businesses at once by someone who ran an automated scan and sorted the results by revenue. Either way it lands the same: an owner who has never thought about accessibility, a demand with a number attached, and a week of searching that turns up advice written almost entirely by companies selling accessibility products.
So here's the version without anything to sell. What the law actually says, who it actually applies to, what actually fails on most sites, and how to check yours without spending money.
One thing up front: this is not legal advice, and I'm not a lawyer. If you have received an actual demand letter, talk to one. What follows is the technical and practical picture that the legal conversation sits on top of.
What the law actually says
The ADA was signed in 1990. It does not mention websites, because in 1990 there weren't any to mention.
What it does is prohibit discrimination in "places of public accommodation" — Title III, the part that covers private businesses open to the public. For thirty years, courts have been deciding whether a website counts as one of those places, and they have not landed in the same spot. Some circuits have said a website is covered when it connects to a physical location you can walk into. Others have read it more broadly. There is no single national answer, which is exactly why this stays messy.
What does exist is WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, maintained by the W3C. WCAG is not a law. It's a technical standard, organized into levels A, AA, and AAA, and AA is the level everyone treats as the practical bar. Courts reference it. Settlements are written against it. The Department of Justice points to it. But for a private business, no federal rule has formally adopted it as the requirement.
There is one place the government got specific. In 2024 the DOJ issued a final rule under Title II covering state and local government — public schools, city and county services, public universities — and it names WCAG 2.1 Level AA directly, with real deadlines. Larger public entities had to be there by April 2026. Smaller ones and special district governments have until April 2027. If you work for or with a public entity, that one is not ambiguous and it is not optional.
For everyone else, here's the consequence worth internalizing: there is no ADA certification, because there is no adopted standard to certify against. Anyone selling you a compliance badge, a seal for your footer, or a guarantee that you're now protected is selling a thing that does not exist. That claim alone should end the sales call.
Who this actually applies to
This is where most articles wave their hands. It's worth being specific, because the answer genuinely differs depending on what kind of organization you are.
If you're a business open to the public, assume the exposure is real. A restaurant, a dental practice, a shop, a firm that takes clients — your site is the front door, and the practical risk of a demand letter is not theoretical. Whether a given court would ultimately agree matters less than you'd like, because most of these resolve long before a court sees them.
If you're a nonprofit that serves the public, you're generally in similar territory. Offering services to the public is what matters, not your tax status.
If you're a public entity or you're funded by one, see the Title II rule above. If you receive federal financial assistance, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is also in play. This is the most clearly defined corner of the whole subject.
If you're a church, this is genuinely different, and almost nobody tells you so. Title III contains an explicit exemption for religious organizations and entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship. It's in the statute. It is not a loophole or a gray area — congregations were carved out deliberately.
That exemption is narrower than it sounds, though. It doesn't automatically extend to a separately incorporated nonprofit your church started that isn't controlled by the church. It doesn't cover you if you take federal funding. It doesn't preempt state or local law, which varies. And a preschool or a counseling center operating out of your building may be a different legal animal than the congregation itself.
But the more important point is the one the legal question distracts from. The exemption means a lawyer probably can't force you. It doesn't mean the ninety-year-old member losing her central vision can read your service times. It doesn't mean the man who can't use a mouse after his stroke can fill out your prayer request form. A church of all places should not need the threat of litigation to decide whether people can get in the door — and for a congregation, accessibility is a hospitality question a long time before it's a legal one.
The overlay trap
Before the useful part, the expensive mistake.
You have probably seen the little floating icon in the corner of a website that opens a panel of toggles — bigger text, high contrast, a "screen reader mode." These are accessibility overlays, and they're sold on a very appealing promise: one line of JavaScript, monthly fee, compliance handled.
They do not do that. An overlay sits on top of your site at runtime and tries to guess at problems in the underlying markup. It cannot invent alt text that describes what your photo actually shows. It cannot know which text on your page was meant to be a heading. It cannot fix a form field that was never labeled. And people who actually use screen readers every day report that overlays frequently make things worse, because now there are two systems fighting over the page.
This isn't a fringe opinion. Hundreds of accessibility practitioners have publicly signed on against them, disability advocacy organizations have been vocal, and — the detail that ends the argument — plenty of the sites that have been sued had an overlay installed at the time. The widget was not a defense. It was a monthly subscription that produced a false sense of safety.
If a vendor's pitch is "install this and you're compliant," you're being sold the thing that doesn't work.
What actually fails
Here's the encouraging part. Accessibility problems on small business and church sites are remarkably repetitive. Survey after survey of the web's most-visited home pages finds detectable failures on roughly ninety-five percent of them, and the same short list accounts for most of what's found:
Images without alt text. A screen reader announces "image" and moves on. If the picture carries information — a flyer, a chart, a photo of your storefront — that information is simply gone.
Text that doesn't have enough contrast against its background. Light gray on white is the single most common failure on the web, and it's usually a design decision someone made because it looked elegant. AA wants 4.5:1 for normal text.
Form fields with no real label. Placeholder text inside the box is not a label; it disappears the moment someone types, and screen readers handle it inconsistently. If your contact form is a problem for a screen reader user, it's often broken in more ordinary ways too.
Links that say "click here" or "read more." Screen reader users commonly pull up a list of every link on a page to navigate. A list of eleven identical "read more" entries is a dead end.
No visible keyboard focus. Someone who can't use a mouse tabs through your page. If the highlight that shows where they are has been styled away — and it often has, because designers find it ugly — they are navigating blind.
Video with no captions. This one is also just good sense; most people watch video muted.
Headings chosen for their size. If your H2 is an H2 because it looked right rather than because it's a section, the document outline that assistive technology relies on is fiction.
None of these are exotic. All of them are fixable. Most of them make the site better for everyone.
How to check yours in twenty minutes
You don't need to buy anything to find out roughly where you stand.
Put the mouse away. Load your home page and navigate the whole thing with only the Tab key. Can you reach every link and button? Can you see where you are at all times? Can you open and close the menu, and get through the contact form and actually submit it? Can you get out of anything you get into? This single test surfaces more real problems than most paid scans.
Run Lighthouse. It's already in Chrome — right-click, Inspect, Lighthouse tab, check Accessibility, run it. It's free and takes a minute.
Turn on the screen reader already on your phone. VoiceOver on iOS, TalkBack on Android. Try one page. It will be disorienting, and that's the point — you'll hear immediately whether your images and links say anything meaningful.
Zoom to 200%. Does the layout hold, or does text start overlapping and disappearing?
Do keep the honest limitation in mind: automated tools are generally reckoned to catch somewhere around a third of real accessibility problems. They're very good at contrast and missing alt attributes. They cannot tell you whether your alt text is accurate, whether your tab order makes sense, or whether your page is comprehensible. A clean Lighthouse score is a floor, not a finish line.
The bottom line
There is no certificate. There is no widget. For private businesses there isn't even a formally adopted standard — just a technical benchmark everyone has agreed to treat as the bar, and a legal landscape that varies by where you are and who you are.
What there is, is a short list of concrete things that are wrong with most websites, all of which are fixable, most of which are cheap to fix while you're already in there, and every one of which makes the site better for people who aren't disabled at all. Bigger contrast helps everyone outdoors. Captions help everyone in a quiet office. Labeled forms help everyone.
The part that gets missed is that this isn't a one-time project. Accessibility regresses. Someone uploads a photo without alt text, drops in a new section with unlabeled fields, or picks a lighter gray for a heading, and the site quietly drifts back. If nobody's watching for it, it will — which is one of the less obvious arguments for having someone on the hook for your site between the moments you think about it.
If you've had a letter, call a lawyer. If you haven't, spend twenty minutes with the keyboard test before someone else does it for you. And whatever you do, don't buy the widget.
We build and maintain sites for businesses, churches, and nonprofits, and accessibility is part of doing that properly rather than a line item we upsell. If you want a straight read on where your site stands, get in touch.