Website accessibility, and the lawsuit letters going to small businesses
US courts have increasingly treated business websites as covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and thousands of claims are filed each year, many against small businesses rather than large ones. There is no certificate that makes you safe. What reduces both your legal exposure and your lost customers is fixing the same short list of problems, and the accessibility overlay widgets sold as a one-line fix have not reliably prevented claims.
This is not legal advice and we are not lawyers. If you have received a demand letter, speak to one before you do anything else, including replying.
What follows is what we see on small-business sites, what the claims tend to target, and what actually helps. It is worth knowing because the businesses receiving these letters are usually not the ones you would expect.
What is actually going on
The Americans with Disabilities Act was written for physical places. Over the last decade US courts have increasingly applied it to websites, on the reasoning that a business’s site is part of how it serves the public. Court decisions have not been uniform across the country, and Congress has not settled it, which is why the situation stays unclear.
What is not unclear is the volume. Thousands of website accessibility claims are filed in US courts every year, plus a much larger number of demand letters that never become filings. A meaningful share go to small businesses: restaurants, clinics, retailers, service companies. Many are sent in volume by a small number of firms, identified by automated scans rather than by anyone actually trying to use the site.
That last detail matters, because it tells you what to fix first. If the initial sweep is automated, the problems an automated tool can find are the ones that put you on the list.
The standard everyone actually uses
There is no ADA regulation for private business websites that states a technical standard. In practice, courts, settlements and the Department of Justice’s own guidance all point at the same document: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, at level AA.
Treat WCAG 2.1 AA as the working target. It is not law for a private business in the way a building code is, but it is what a settlement agreement will name, and it is what any expert assessing your site will measure against.
Why the overlay widgets do not solve it
There is a category of product that promises accessibility for a monthly fee and one line of JavaScript. A toolbar appears on your site offering larger text, higher contrast and a screen-reader mode.
Two problems. The first is that businesses using these products have still received demand letters and still been sued; the widget is not a defence. The second is that a large part of the accessibility community regards overlays as actively harmful, because they interfere with the assistive software people already use and have configured. Hundreds of accessibility practitioners have signed public statements opposing them.
They are also a poor deal on the merits. You are paying monthly, permanently, for something layered over the problem rather than fixing it, and the underlying site stays exactly as inaccessible as it was.
We do not install them. If somebody quotes you accessibility as a widget, ask what it changes in the actual site, and listen carefully to the answer.
The seven things that cover most of it
Most real problems on a small-business site are in this list, and most of it is not expensive if it is done during a build rather than retrofitted.
Images without alt text. Every meaningful image needs a text description. Decorative ones need an explicitly empty description so screen readers skip them rather than reading a filename. This is the single most common finding.
Contrast that is too low. Grey text on a white background, or thin light type on a photograph. The threshold is 4.5:1 for normal text. It is measurable, and it fails more often on well-designed sites than on ugly ones.
Nothing works with a keyboard. Try it: press Tab through your own site. If you cannot reach the menu, open the dropdown, complete the form and submit it without a mouse, neither can somebody using a screen reader or a switch device.
No visible focus indicator. When you Tab, something should be clearly outlined. Designers frequently remove this because they dislike how it looks, which breaks the site for everyone navigating by keyboard.
Form fields with no labels. A placeholder is not a label. It disappears when typing starts and it is not announced reliably. Every field needs a real label, even when the design hides it visually.
Video without captions. Any video with speech needs captions. Automatic ones are a starting point, not a finish, and they are usually wrong on exactly the words that matter, like your business name.
Structure that only exists visually. Headings should be real headings in the markup, in order, not text made large. This is how anyone not looking at the screen navigates the page, and it is also how search engines read it.
How to check your own site in twenty minutes
Three checks, no cost, no specialist knowledge.
Run one page through a free automated checker such as WAVE or the accessibility audit built into Chrome’s developer tools. It will find perhaps a third of the real problems, and importantly it finds the same third the scanners generating demand letters find.
Then Tab through the site yourself, from the top, without touching the mouse. Try to reach the phone number, open the menu and complete the contact form. Most sites fail this within the first ten seconds and the failure is obvious once you look.
Then turn the sound on and try your site with your operating system’s built-in screen reader for two minutes. It will be uncomfortable and it will teach you more than either of the other two.
What this has to do with money
The legal exposure is the reason people start. It is not the reason worth continuing.
Somewhere around one in four US adults reports a disability. Some of that is vision, some is motor control, a great deal of it is age. A site that is hard to use with imperfect eyesight is hard to use for a large and generally solvent part of your market, and they do not complain, they leave.
Most accessibility fixes also improve the site for everybody. Proper contrast is easier to read in sunlight. Real headings make a page scannable. Captions get watched in silence on a phone. Keyboard navigation tends to indicate a site built properly rather than assembled.
Where we stand on it
Every site we build is checked against contrast and target-size thresholds before it goes live, and we treat a failure as a bug rather than as a suggestion. Our own site’s viewport deliberately allows pinch-zoom, because blocking it is an accessibility failure and the previous version of this business’s site shipped exactly that on every page.
We do not sell an accessibility product, we do not install overlays, and we will not tell you a site is compliant, because nobody can honestly promise that. What we can do is build one that passes the checks, and tell you plainly where it still falls short. The web design service page covers what is included, and who built your website is worth reading if you are not sure who could even make these changes on your current site.
The short version
The risk is real and it lands on small businesses. There is no certificate that makes you safe and the overlay widgets do not work. Fix alt text, contrast, keyboard navigation, focus indicators, form labels, captions and heading structure, and you have addressed most of what both the scanners and the actual humans encounter. Then talk to a lawyer rather than to us if a letter arrives.