ADA compliant website: what the law asks

What “ADA compliant” means for a business website

The Americans with Disabilities Act dates from 1990, before most businesses had a website, and DOJ says Congress meant it to keep pace with technology. Title III, the part that covers private businesses, says a business open to the public must give people with disabilities full and equal enjoyment of its goods and services and must communicate with them effectively. The Department of Justice reads that duty as reaching the business's website too, but it has never written a web rule for businesses.

So "ADA compliant" is a phrase people search for, not a standard anyone publishes. In the same guidance DOJ says businesses have flexibility in how they comply, names WCAG and the Section 508 Standards as helpful guidance, and says the guidance itself is not legally binding. That leaves an owner with a duty and no checklist from the government.

The useful translation is this: a website that meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and keeps meeting it as pages change, is the most defensible answer anyone can give to "is my site ADA compliant?". The rest of this guide uses that wording, because it can be checked. "ADA compliant" cannot.

Who counts as a business open to the public? ADA.gov's examples include restaurants, hotels, shops, movie theaters, doctors' offices, day care centers and gyms, nonprofits included. Whether your own business is covered, and whether a site with no shop behind it is, are questions for a lawyer.

What DOJ counts as a barrier

DOJ's guidance does not list rules, but it does list examples of barriers. Each one maps onto WCAG success criteria you can test, which is how an auditor would read the list.

Every criterion in the table is Level A or AA, so all of them sit inside a WCAG 2.1 AA target. None of them needs a developer to find: a keyboard, a contrast check and a careful look at your forms will show most of them in an afternoon.

Why WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the working target

WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the W3C standard that DOJ points to. Its success criteria are written as tests, each at Level A, AA or AAA. Level AA means every A and every AA criterion is met on the whole page. Four things make 2.1 AA the practical floor for a business site:

• When DOJ did write a web rule, for state and local governments in 2024, it picked WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
• DOJ's guidance for businesses names WCAG as the first example of helpful guidance.
• Courts have treated a WCAG standard as a possible fix to order, as in the Domino's case below.
• It is a whole-page test with a fixed list, so you can tell when you are done.

This site recommends going one step further, to WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to 2.1 and 2.0, and W3C advises using 2.2. In numbers: meeting Level AA means meeting 50 success criteria in WCAG 2.1 and 55 in WCAG 2.2. Our WCAG 2.2 AA checklist lists every one as a plain test, and what is WCAG explains the levels and versions.

What courts and DOJ cases have said

With no web regulation, courts have filled part of the gap case by case. The best-known appeal is Robles v. Domino's Pizza, decided by the Ninth Circuit on 15 January 2019. A blind customer said he could not order through the chain's website and app with a screen reader. The court held that the ADA applied to both because they connect customers to Domino's restaurants, and that the lack of DOJ regulations did not remove the company's duty. It sent the case back to the trial court and expressly left open sites whose barriers do not block access to a physical location.

DOJ has also settled its own cases with businesses. The examples on its guidance page are ordinary ones: a pharmacy chain's vaccine sign-up portal, a test-prep company's video courses with no captions, a tax firm's website that did not work with assistive technology, and an online grocery service. Forms, video and checkout are exactly where small sites fail too.

Most owners meet the ADA through a demand letter rather than a court. How those letters and suits arise is in ADA website lawsuits, and the first steps after one arrives are in the demand letter response checklist.

How the Title II rule for governments differs

Title II of the ADA covers state and local governments: cities, counties, public schools and colleges, courts and special districts. For them DOJ did write a web rule. It was published in the Federal Register on 24 April 2024 (89 FR 31320), took effect on 24 June 2024, and names WCAG 2.1 Level AA for their web content and mobile apps, including those run for them by contractors.

It is a Title II rule: it sets no web standard for private businesses. Two cases still bring it to a business owner's desk. If you build or run a site, app or online form for a city, school or county, your work is part of their Title II duty, and their contract may well name WCAG 2.1 AA. A government buying web services or software may ask a vendor for the same standard. Dates, scope and exceptions are in the DOJ Title II web rule; federal agencies are a third regime again, covered in what is Section 508.

Why no one can certify a site as ADA compliant

No government body certifies websites under the ADA, and no body certifies the companies that test them for it. A badge, seal or "certificate of ADA compliance" is a vendor's own product, not a legal status. What does exist is narrower and more useful: a dated claim that named pages meet a named WCAG level.

Two WCAG rules shape any honest claim. Conformance is for full pages only: a page with a broken form does not conform because the rest of it is fine. And a process, such as browse, cart, checkout, conforms only if every page in it does. W3C's own example is an online store, where one failing checkout step sinks the claim for the whole sequence.

In practice owners prove effort with three documents: a test record (your own, from a checklist, or an auditor's report), a list of fixes with dates, and a public accessibility statement with a way to report problems. Our accessibility statement generator writes the last one, and WCAG audit services compared shows who tests by hand when you want the first one from someone else.

What overlays and widgets do not do

An overlay is a third-party widget or toolbar script sold as making a site conform without changing its source. Two primary sources are worth reading before you buy one.

The second is the Federal Trade Commission. On 22 April 2025 it approved a final consent order against the overlay vendor accessiBe, which must pay $1 million. The FTC alleged the company claimed its accessWidget plug-in could make any website WCAG-compliant when it did not. The order bars it from claiming its automated products can make any site WCAG-compliant, or keep it so, without competent and reliable evidence.

The underlying problem is simple. An overlay leaves your source code as it was, so a script cannot write the captions a video lacks or know what an unlabelled field is for, and the same order requires accessiBe to disclose that its widget does not fix barriers on third-party domains, such as a booking or payment page, unless they run it too. Fixes belong in the site itself. The longer version is in accessibility overlays, and what to use instead is in alternatives to accessiBe.

The route: check, fix, prove

Everything above comes down to three plain jobs, done in order and then repeated whenever the site changes.

Questions owners ask

This is general information, not legal advice. For your own situation, ask a lawyer.