Website ADA compliance: a plain guide for businesses
Web accessibility lawsuits keep climbing, and "we didn’t realize" is not a defense. Here is what ADA compliance actually asks of a website, in plain terms, from a team that audits them for a living.
March 10, 2026
2 minutes
Why this became a legal issue
Courts have increasingly treated a business’s website as an extension of its storefront, which brings it under the Americans with Disabilities Act. When a site cannot be used by someone relying on a screen reader or a keyboard, that is treated as denying access — and the number of lawsuits filed on exactly that basis has climbed from a few hundred a year to roughly four thousand.
The volume has held near that level even as it shifts between courts, and the filings cluster heavily in a handful of states — but the exposure is real for private businesses of every size, in every state, and it does not require bad intent. A site that was simply never tested for accessibility is enough.
| Year | Number of lawsuits |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 814 |
| 2018 | 2,314 |
| 2019 | 2,890 |
| 2020 | 3,503 |
| 2021 | 4,055 |
| 2022 | 4,334 |
| 2023 | 3,862 |
| 2024 | 3,188 |
| 2025 | 3,948 |
Source: EcomBack annual ADA website accessibility lawsuit reports, 2017–2025.
| State | Number of lawsuits |
|---|---|
| New York | 1,108 |
| Florida | 950 |
| California | 787 |
| Illinois | 576 |
| Minnesota | 160 |
| Pennsylvania | 101 |
| Missouri | 85 |
| All other states | 181 |
Source: EcomBack 2025 annual ADA website accessibility lawsuit report.
What compliance actually means
The ADA itself does not publish a technical checklist, so courts and regulators lean on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the working standard. In practice that means the essentials show up again and again: text alternatives for meaningful images, everything operable by keyboard, sufficient color contrast, form fields with real labels, captions for video, and a semantic page structure that assistive technology can actually parse.
None of these are exotic. They are the baseline a site should meet to be usable by everyone, and the same items that show up in almost every complaint when they are missing.
The overlay trap
A cottage industry sells accessibility "overlays" and widgets that promise instant compliance. They cannot deliver it. Accessible names, roles, focus order, and structure live in the underlying code, and a script layered on top does not repair them. If the markup underneath is broken, an overlay changes nothing about what a screen reader encounters — or what a complaint will allege. We wrote more about how this looks from inside a case in what ADA website lawsuits look like from the inside.
How to actually get compliant
Real compliance is unglamorous and durable: audit the site with actual assistive technology rather than a scan tool alone, fix the issues in the code, document conformance in a VPAT, and keep it current as the site changes. We have delivered more than 200 accessibility audits and VPATs, and the pattern never changes — addressing this at the design stage costs a fraction of addressing it under a demand letter.