Probably yes. If your business is open to the public, your website almost certainly does need to be ADA compliant, because the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to it the same way it applies to your front door. The harder question is not whether it applies, but what “compliant” means in practice, because the ADA never mentions websites at all.
That gap is where most of the confusion lives, and where a lot of fear gets sold.
This is a plain explanation of who the law covers, what enforcement actually looks like, and how to check your own site. We are a web agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. If you have received a demand letter, talk to an attorney before you talk to anyone else.
Does the ADA apply to websites?
The ADA was signed in 1990, before commercial websites existed, so it does not name them. What it does is prohibit discrimination in “places of public accommodation,” and courts have spent two decades deciding whether a website counts as one.
The short version of where that has landed: if your business serves the public, courts have generally treated your website as an extension of it. The Department of Justice has taken the same position. Its guidance on web accessibility and the ADA states that the Department:
“has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.”
A few practical markers that make it more likely to apply to you:
- You sell to the general public, online or in person
- You are in healthcare, education, hospitality, retail or professional services
- You are a government entity or work under government contract
Note that headcount is not on that list. The ADA’s employment rules have an employee threshold, and it gets repeated in accessibility marketing as though it applies here. It does not. Public accommodation obligations turn on whether you are open to the public, not on how many people you employ, so a three-person practice is in the same position as a three-hundred-person one.
If you are a business open to the public with a website, assume it applies and stop looking for the exemption. Most of the time you will not find one.
What standard am I actually being measured against?
This is the part almost nobody explains, and it matters more than the legal question.
Because the ADA does not define a technical standard for websites, courts, regulators and settlements have converged on one that already existed: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG. It is maintained by the W3C, the same body that maintains the standards behind the web itself.
WCAG has three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA. AA is the level that gets referenced in practice, and when someone says a site “needs to be compliant,” AA is nearly always what they mean.
Be careful about where that comes from, because this is widely misreported. There is no federal regulation that adopts a WCAG level for private businesses. The DOJ’s guidance points at WCAG and Section 508 as “helpful guidance” without naming a level. The rule that does formally adopt WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the April 2024 web rule, and it applies to state and local governments under Title II, not to private businesses. If you run a shop, a practice or a firm, that rule is not the one that binds you.
So AA is your target because it is what settlements, procurement requirements and courts keep landing on, not because a regulator has told your business to hit it. That distinction matters if anyone ever tells you a specific deadline applies to you. The deadlines in that rule, April 2027 and April 2028, are for government entities.
Section 508 is a related but separate rule that applies to federal agencies and, by extension, to organisations that sell to them. If you have ever been asked for a VPAT or Accessibility Conformance Report during a procurement process, that is Section 508 at work.
What happens if my website is not ADA compliant?
Almost never what people picture. There is no inspector, no fine in the post, and no courtroom scene.
What actually happens is a demand letter. A law firm identifies a site with accessibility failures, often using automated scanning at scale, and writes to the business proposing a settlement to avoid litigation. Most of these resolve before a court is involved, which is precisely why the practice is common.
Two things follow from that, and they point in opposite directions:
- It is a real cost. Settlement plus remediation plus legal fees is a meaningful number for a small business, and it arrives with no warning.
- It is not the emergency the marketing implies. You are not one missing alt tag away from a lawsuit. Sites that receive letters usually have substantial, obvious barriers, the kind that would stop a screen reader user from completing a purchase at all.
The more common cost is quieter and rarely counted. A customer who cannot use your booking form does not send a demand letter. They go somewhere else, and you never learn why.
How do I check if my site is ADA compliant?
You can get a useful signal in about twenty minutes without buying anything.
Run an automated scan. Free tools like WAVE or Lighthouse’s accessibility audit, built into Chrome, will surface missing alt text, poor colour contrast, unlabelled form fields and heading structure problems.
Two things to know about what that tells you. The first is scale: WebAIM’s annual analysis of the top million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9 percent of them, so a scan finding problems on your site puts you with almost everyone, not in unusual trouble. The second is the ceiling, in WebAIM’s own words:
“Absence of detected errors does not indicate that a page is accessible or conformant.”
A clean automated report is not a clean site.
Then test it yourself. These four checks take minutes and catch what scanners cannot:
- Unplug your mouse. Navigate your whole site with the Tab key alone. Can you reach every link, open every menu, and complete your main form? Can you always see where you are?
- Zoom to 200 percent. Does the text reflow, or does the layout break and hide content?
- Check your images. Does every meaningful image have alt text that describes it? Decorative images should have empty alt text, not a filename.
- Try your forms with the labels hidden. If placeholder text is doing the work of a label, a screen reader user gets nothing once they start typing.
If the keyboard test fails, stop there. That is the most common serious barrier and the one most likely to appear in a complaint.
Do accessibility overlays actually work?
You have probably seen the ads: one line of JavaScript, instant compliance, no rebuild.
The honest answer is that overlays do not deliver what the marketing promises, and this is no longer a matter of opinion.
The Overlay Fact Sheet has been signed by hundreds of accessibility practitioners, including W3C working group chairs and blind developers who contribute to the screen readers this software claims to help. Its conclusion is blunt:
“No overlay product on the market can cause a website to become fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard and therefore cannot eliminate legal risk.”
Read that last clause again, because it inverts the entire sales pitch. Businesses running overlays have still received demand letters.
Then a federal regulator agreed. In January 2025 the FTC required the overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented its product’s ability to make any website WCAG compliant. The FTC also alleged the company formatted paid articles to look like independent reviews. As the Bureau of Consumer Protection put it:
“Overstating a product’s AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive, and the FTC will act to stop it.”
That is worth knowing before you spend money on one, because it means the risk runs in the direction opposite to the one the marketing describes.
The reason is structural. An overlay is a script that tries to patch a page after it has loaded. It cannot know what your image is supposed to convey, it cannot restructure a form built without labels, and it sometimes interferes with the assistive technology a visitor has already configured to work the way they need.
That is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument that the fix belongs in the site, not on top of it.
What does fixing it actually involve?
Less than people fear, and more than a plugin.
Most sites fail on the same handful of things: colour contrast below the required ratio, images without alt text, forms without labels, headings used for visual size rather than structure, and interactive elements that cannot be reached by keyboard. None of those are exotic. They are the kind of thing a developer fixes properly once and then does not reintroduce.
The work usually runs in three stages: an audit against WCAG AA that produces a specific list rather than a score, remediation in priority order starting with anything blocking a core task, and then a habit for new content so the problem does not quietly return.
There is a bonus worth knowing about. Most of what makes a site accessible also makes it more legible to search engines. Proper headings, descriptive alt text, clear link text and sensible structure are the same signals a crawler reads. We wrote about that overlap separately, because plenty of businesses are paying two vendors for one fix.
Does this change anything for a Jacksonville business?
Yes, and not in the direction most people assume.
The law itself is identical. The ADA is federal, so a business in Jacksonville carries the same obligations as one in Minneapolis. What is not identical is your odds of hearing about it, and this is the part almost nobody tells Florida business owners.
Florida is the second most sued state in the country for website accessibility. According to Seyfarth Shaw’s annual count, which manually reviews federal court filings rather than estimating them, 961 federal website accessibility lawsuits were filed in Florida in 2025. Only New York had more, at 1,021. Illinois, in third, had 585.
Two details make that worse rather than better. Florida’s number roughly doubled in a year, up from 470 in 2024. And nationally these filings rose about 27 percent over the same period, to 3,117. Florida is not just high, it is climbing faster than the national trend.
Adjusted for population, Florida sits close behind New York. This is not a big-state artifact. It is a genuine concentration of filing activity, and Jacksonville businesses are inside it.
None of that means you are about to be sued. Most businesses never hear anything. But if someone tells you this is a New York and California problem, they are working from information that is at least two years out of date.
The practical side is more ordinary. Most Jacksonville small businesses we talk to have never had their site checked at all, so the common failures are still sitting there: contrast that fails on a phone in daylight, booking forms that cannot be completed by keyboard, PDFs of menus and price lists with no accessible alternative. None of those are expensive to fix. They are just invisible until someone looks, and in this state the person who looks is somewhat more likely to be a law firm than it was two years ago.
If you want a specific list of what is wrong with your site rather than a score out of a hundred, that is what our ADA accessibility and compliance work produces. We are a creative agency in Jacksonville and this is one of the few things we check on every site we touch, whether or not anyone asked us to.
The short version
If your business serves the public, assume the ADA applies to your website. Aim at WCAG 2.2 level AA: it is the current version, and meeting it also means meeting 2.1 AA, which is the level settlements and procurement keep referencing. Run a free scan, then do the keyboard test, because the keyboard test is the one that finds the serious problems. Do not buy an overlay and consider it handled.
And if a demand letter has already arrived, call a lawyer first. Everything above still applies, but the order changes.