Does my business website need to be accessible under the ADA?

This question usually arrives in my inbox attached to a demand letter: a small business owner with a physical storefront gets a letter claiming their website discriminates against disabled users, and wants to know whether that can possibly be right. The direct answer: if your business has a physical location open to the public, then yes, courts have held that your website needs to be accessible too, and the exposure is bigger than most owners expect.

The Americans with Disabilities Act has required physical accessibility for decades, and businesses largely comply. The newer development is digital. Under the ADA and California's Unruh Act, courts have found businesses liable when their websites cannot be used by, for example, a visually impaired person with a screen reader. Businesses with no physical presence open to the public are usually outside this rule, but a restaurant, a shop, a medical office, a gym, anyone who invites the public through a door, is squarely inside it.

Here is the part that makes this a business problem rather than a technical one. The Unruh Act sets damages at $4,000 per violation, which sounds painful but survivable. The real danger is attorney's fees: the law lets a prevailing plaintiff recover fees from the business, but not the reverse. A certain kind of plaintiff's firm has built an entire practice on that asymmetry. They no longer need to visit your premises; they can find a non-compliant website with a few clicks, send a demand letter, and count on the math pushing you toward settlement regardless of the claim's merit. And the reach is long: businesses outside California have been sued here by California plaintiffs.

What people get wrong, in my experience, comes in two flavors. The first group assumes an accessibility widget or overlay makes them compliant. It usually does not; courts and plaintiffs look at whether the site actually works with assistive technology, and overlays frequently fail that test. The second group assumes this is a theoretical risk. It is not; these suits have been filed by the thousands, and small businesses are the preferred targets precisely because they settle.

The benchmark courts have pointed to is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, at level AA. Earlier cases referenced version 2.0; current guidance points to 2.1 and now 2.2, and federal rulemaking for government websites has confirmed WCAG as the reference standard, a strong signal of where private-sector expectations are heading.

The practical takeaway: have your website audited against WCAG AA now, before the letter arrives, fix what the audit finds, and post an accessibility statement telling users how to reach you if they hit a barrier. The audit costs a fraction of one settlement. If you have already received a demand letter, do not ignore it and do not pay it reflexively; both moves are expensive. Get counsel to evaluate whether the claim has merit and what remediation actually resolves it.