Website accessibility: what the ADA and the EAA require

An accessible website is one that people can use if they don't see well, navigate only with a keyboard, zoom text to 200% or can't tell red from green. For US businesses it's also a legal exposure, and for anyone selling to the EU it has been a legal requirement since 2025. Here's who's covered, what it means in practice and how to check a site.

What the ADA says about websites

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers businesses open to the public: shops, restaurants, clinics, hotels, gyms, professional offices. In its 2022 guidance, the Department of Justice says the ADA's requirements apply to all the goods and services these businesses offer, including those offered on the web.

What the DOJ doesn't have is a regulation with technical standards for private businesses. Its guidance says businesses have flexibility in how they comply and that existing standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide helpful guidance. In practice, settlements and court orders almost always use WCAG 2.1 level AA.

State and local governments are different: a 2024 DOJ rule sets WCAG 2.1 AA as their standard. In April 2026 the DOJ pushed its deadlines back by a year, to 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 people or more and 26 April 2028 for smaller ones. That rule doesn't apply to private businesses.

How common lawsuits are

Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that tracks ADA litigation, counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal courts in 2025, up 27% from 2,452 in 2024. New York federal courts saw the most (1,021), followed by Florida (961) and Illinois (585). Those numbers leave out state courts, where many plaintiffs now file, particularly in New York and New Jersey, and where businesses with physical locations are frequent targets.

There's no small-business exemption in Title III. A typical claim says a blind customer using a screen reader couldn't view a menu, book a table or complete a purchase.

What an accessible website means in practice

The most important WCAG 2.1 AA rules for a small business site:

• Enough contrast between text and background: at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text.
• Alt text on images that carry information, read aloud by screen readers.
• Labels on form fields, so people know what goes in each one.
• Keyboard navigation: everything works with Tab and Enter, and you can see where you are.
• Text that zooms to 200% without overlapping or disappearing.
• A declared page language, so screen readers pronounce it correctly.
• Clear error messages on forms that say what's wrong and how to fix it.
• No information conveyed by colour alone, such as an invalid field marked only in red.
• Menus and PDFs that work too: a restaurant menu posted only as an image or a scanned PDF is one of the most common problems.

How often sites get it wrong

WebAIM, a US nonprofit, runs automated checks on the home pages of the top million websites every year. In its 2026 report, 95.9% had detectable WCAG failures, an average of 56 per page:

Automated tools catch only part of the problems, so the real picture is worse. The good news: most of these are easy to fix when a site is built correctly from the start.

Overlays don't replace an accessible site

Accessibility overlays add a toolbar with options for contrast, text size or read-aloud. They can help some visitors, but they don't fix the code: an image with no alt text or a form with no labels is the same for a screen reader with or without the toolbar. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million for claiming, without evidence, that its automated tool could make any website WCAG-compliant.

If you sell to the EU

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025 to e-commerce services offered to consumers in the EU, along with banking, passenger transport, e-books and telecoms. It applies to businesses outside the EU that sell to EU consumers. Micro-enterprises providing services, those with fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2 million in annual turnover or balance sheet, are exempt. A site that only presents a business, without selling, isn't covered.

In practice, the EAA is checked against the European standard EN 301 549, which uses WCAG 2.1 AA for websites, so a site built for one market works for the other. EU rules also expect a public statement of how the service meets the requirements, usually an accessibility statement page linked from the footer.

How to test a site in 15 minutes

1. WAVE (wave.webaim.org) or Lighthouse in Chrome (right-click, Inspect, Lighthouse) shows automated errors: contrast, alt text, labels.
2. Keyboard: put the mouse aside and move through the page with Tab. Can you always see where you are? Can you open the menu and send the form?
3. Zoom: press Ctrl and + up to 200%. Is everything still readable, with nothing running off the screen?
4. Screen reader: VoiceOver on iPhone and Mac, or NVDA, free, on Windows. Listen to how the menu and the booking or checkout form sound.

The sites we build start from the rules above: checked contrast, required alt text, labelled forms and keyboard navigation. For an online store, we also check the whole path from search to payment. The details are on our web design page, and the other legal basics are in what a business website legally needs.