If your business has a website — and almost every local business does now, even if it’s just a menu, a booking page, or a contact form — you may be exposed to a type of lawsuit that most owners have never heard of until they get a letter about it. Web accessibility litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act has been climbing for years, and 2026 is on pace to be the worst yet: filings are up 37% in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2025, after more than 5,000 such lawsuits were filed in 2025 alone. Nearly 70% of those cases targeted online retailers, but restaurants, salons, gyms, and service businesses with an online presence are increasingly named too.
The uncomfortable part for local owners is that the ADA was written in 1990, decades before most businesses had a website, and it has never been formally updated with website-specific rules. That ambiguity hasn’t stopped plaintiffs’ firms from suing — it’s actually made the legal landscape murkier and, in some ways, riskier for small businesses that assume the law doesn’t apply to them.
Why courts treat your website like a storefront
Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination based on disability in “places of public accommodation” — a category that has always included stores, restaurants, and service businesses. Courts across multiple circuits have extended that concept to websites, reasoning that if a business uses its site to sell products, take reservations, or advertise services connected to a physical location, the site functions as an extension of that place of public accommodation. The Department of Justice’s own guidance on web accessibility confirms this reading: businesses covered by the ADA must ensure their websites provide people with disabilities “full and equal enjoyment” of the goods and services offered, and that obligation applies regardless of business size.
What the DOJ guidance does not do is hand small businesses a simple checklist with the force of law. Instead, it points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a technical standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, as “helpful guidance” for figuring out what compliance looks like in practice. That flexibility is exactly what plaintiffs’ attorneys exploit: without a bright-line rule, almost any website can be characterized as falling short of “full and equal enjoyment” for a screen-reader user or someone who navigates by keyboard.
What a typical case actually looks like
Most of these cases don’t start with a lawsuit — they start with a demand letter. A law firm, often working with a client who has visited (or claims to have visited) your site using assistive technology, identifies specific barriers and offers to settle before filing. If a business doesn’t respond, or the settlement demand isn’t met, a federal lawsuit follows, and the numbers are not trivial for a small operation: the average loss in these cases runs $20,000 to $35,000 before legal fees and the cost of actually fixing the site are factored in. For a single-location business, that’s a serious hit, and it often arrives with no warning beyond one letter.
The frustrating part is how avoidable most of it is. Audits of small business websites consistently find the same handful of problems driving the majority of legal exposure. Roughly five issues account for about 40% of all defects found across sites: missing descriptions on product or menu images, vague link text like “click here” that means nothing to a screen reader, buttons with no accessible label, text-to-background color contrast that’s too low to read, and the absence of a “skip to content” link that lets keyboard users bypass repetitive navigation menus. None of these require a website rebuild. They require someone to go through the site methodically and fix them.
A practical starting point, not a guarantee
No fix makes a business immune from a demand letter — that’s simply the reality of a legal area without a formal regulatory standard. But a documented, ongoing effort to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA (the version most courts and settlements reference) meaningfully reduces both the odds of being targeted and your negotiating position if you are. A reasonable first pass looks like this:
- Run a free automated scanner (tools like WAVE or axe DevTools) across your homepage, menu or product pages, and any contact or booking form. These catch missing alt text, contrast failures, and unlabeled buttons in minutes.
- Write real alt text for every image that conveys information — a product photo, a menu item, a team photo with names — not just decorative graphics.
- Check that every link and button describes its destination or action on its own, without relying on surrounding text.
- Tab through your entire site using only the keyboard. If you can’t reach every link, button, and form field without a mouse, neither can a keyboard-dependent visitor.
- Post a short accessibility statement describing what you’ve done and how visitors can report a problem. It signals good faith and gives you a paper trail if a dispute arises.
Because sites change constantly — new menu items, new promotions, a redesigned booking widget — this isn’t a one-time project. The Small Business Administration’s local assistance directory can connect you with a free SBDC advisor if you want a second set of eyes, and many web platforms (Squarespace, Wix, WordPress accessibility plugins) now include built-in scanning tools worth turning on.
The takeaway
Treat your website the way you’d treat a ramp at your front door: not a legal formality, but a basic expectation that some of your customers genuinely need in order to do business with you. Spend an afternoon running a scan, fixing the top five issues, and posting a short statement — it’s cheap insurance against a five-figure demand letter, and it makes your site better for every visitor in the meantime.
