Website Accessibility (ADA Compliance): What Small Business Owners Need to Know

Most small business owners have never thought about whether their website works for a visitor who is blind, has low vision, or cannot use a mouse. That is understandable.

You built the site to tell people what you do and how to reach you, and it probably works fine for you.

But it is worth a closer look, both because it is the right thing to do and because ADA website lawsuits against small businesses are real and rising.

It also touches more of your customers than you might think. The CDC reports that more than 1 in 4 adults in the United States (over 70 million people) said they had a disability in 2022.

Some of those people use screen readers that read a page out loud. Some zoom the screen way up. Some move through a page with a keyboard or voice commands instead of a mouse.

If your site gets in their way, they cannot book with you, and most of them will simply go to a business whose site works.

A quick note before we start: I build websites. I am not a lawyer. This article is general information to help you understand the topic and check your own site.

It is not legal advice. If you get a demand letter or have a specific legal question, talk to an attorney.

The real legal picture

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been applied to websites for years, and there is no small business exemption under Title III.

Law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks these cases annually, reported over 3,100 federal website accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025, an increase of roughly 27% over 2024, and that does not count state-level filings.

Ecommerce sites are the most targeted, but service businesses make up a real share too.

Defending any lawsuit costs money in lawyer time, even one you end up winning, and the ADA lets a court award the winning side a reasonable attorney's fee on top of that.

I am not telling you this to scare you. An ADA website lawsuit is a real, checkable risk that a lot of small business owners simply do not know exists, and the fixes are usually simpler than people expect.

What the law says, and what it does not

Here is what the U.S. Department of Justice (the agency that enforces the ADA) says in plain terms, based on its own web guidance at ADA.gov:

• Title III of the ADA covers businesses that are open to the public. The Justice Department's list of examples includes retail stores, banks, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals and medical offices.
• ADA.gov says almost all types of businesses that serve the public must follow the ADA, regardless of their size.
• The Justice Department says it has taken the position since 1996 that the ADA applies to web content.
• There is no detailed federal regulation that spells out exact technical rules for business websites. The Department says businesses have flexibility in how they make their sites accessible, but they still have to make their online goods and services accessible to people with disabilities.
• The Department points to WCAG (more on that below) and the federal Section 508 Standards as helpful technical guides.

So the honest summary for a small business is this. The law expects your website to be usable by people with disabilities. It does not hand you a precise checklist. That is why most web designers, including us, use WCAG as the practical measuring stick.

What about the new DOJ web rule?

You may have heard that the Justice Department published a new web accessibility rule in 2024. That rule is real, and it names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard.

But it applies to state and local governments under Title II of the ADA (cities, counties, public schools, and similar public bodies), and does not cover private businesses.

In April 2026, the Department also pushed back that rule's compliance dates to April 26, 2027 for larger governments and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones.

If you run a private business, that rule is not aimed at you. It is still a useful signal of which standard the government itself treats as the benchmark.

Where the lawsuits are coming from

Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, up from 2,452 in 2024. The firm also says there are still a significant number of demand letters and state court lawsuits it does not count, especially against businesses with physical locations.

UsableNet, a company that sells accessibility services and tracks these filings, found that ecommerce made up nearly 70 percent of ADA web lawsuits in 2025, with food and service businesses at roughly 21 percent and healthcare at about 2 to 3 percent.

It also found that 36 percent of the companies sued reported yearly revenue over $25 million, which means large companies are far from the only ones on the list.

What "accessible" actually means

You do not need one giant technical overhaul. Website accessibility is a set of specific, checkable practices, mostly based on a standard called WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). The core ideas are straightforward:

• Every image has real, descriptive alt text, so a screen reader can describe it to a visitor who cannot see it.
• The site works with a keyboard alone, not just a mouse, for visitors who cannot use a trackpad or mouse precisely.
• Text has enough color contrast against its background to be readable for visitors with low vision or color blindness.
• Forms have clear labels, not just placeholder text that disappears the moment you click into the field.
• Headings are structured logically (one main heading, organized subheadings), so screen reader users can navigate the page by section instead of listening to the whole thing top to bottom.
• Videos have captions, and important information is not conveyed through color alone.

WCAG in plain words

WCAG is written by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that sets many of the web's basic standards. Version 2.2 was published in October 2023.

Its rules are called "success criteria," and each one has a level: A, AA, or AAA. Level A is the most basic and AAA is the strictest.

AA sits in the middle, and it is the level the Justice Department's 2024 rule for state and local governments uses, so it is a sensible target for a business site too.

A few AA rules that come up on almost every small business site:

• Contrast: normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Large text needs at least 3 to 1. Light gray text on a white background usually fails.
• Zoom: text should still work when someone zooms it up to 200 percent, with nothing cut off or broken.
• Visible focus: when someone moves through the page with the Tab key, they need to see where they are, usually as an outline around the link or button.
• Tap size: buttons and links should be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or have enough space around them, so people with shaky hands can hit them. (This one is new in WCAG 2.2.)

You do not need to memorize any of this. You just need to know it exists, so you can ask your web designer about it by name.

What the most common problems look like

WebAIM, a nonprofit accessibility group, tests the home pages of the top one million websites every year. Its 2026 report found an average of 56.1 accessibility errors per home page. Besides low contrast and missing alt text, two of the most common problems were:

• Empty links, found on 46.3 percent of home pages. These are links with no text a screen reader can read, like a Facebook icon that just gets announced as "link."
• Empty buttons, found on 30.6 percent. A search button that is only a magnifying glass icon, with nothing behind it, is a typical example.

WebAIM also found that about 1 in 10 images that did have alt text used junk text like "image," "graphic," or a file name. That is barely better than nothing.

A dental office example

Say you run a dental office in Union City, Indiana. Your website has a homepage, a list of services, a "New Patients" page, an appointment request form, and a page with your hours and a map.

Here is how accessibility shows up on a site like that, page by page.

On the homepage, say you have a big photo of a smiling patient with your phone number printed on top in thin white letters.

A screen reader user gets nothing from that phone number, because it is part of the picture. A patient with low vision may not be able to read it either.

The fix: put the phone number in real text, make it tappable to call, and give the photo short alt text like "Dentist talking with a patient in the exam chair."

On the appointment form, the fields say "Name," "Phone," and "Preferred day" in light gray inside the boxes, and the words disappear once you start typing.

There are no real labels, so a screen reader may just say "edit text" for each box. The required fields are marked only in red.

The fix: add visible labels above each box, write the word "required" next to required fields, and make sure an error message explains what went wrong ("Please enter a phone number") instead of just turning the box red.

On the New Patients page, your forms are scanned paper forms posted as images. A person using a screen reader cannot read them at all.

The fix: offer the forms as real web pages or properly tagged documents, and always offer a plain alternative, like "Call us and we can fill this out with you over the phone."

On the hours and map page, your hours sit inside a map graphic. Put the hours in plain text on the page, and add your street address as text too, so nobody has to rely on the map.

None of that is exotic. It is the same work that makes the site easier for every patient, including the one checking your hours on a phone in a parking lot.

If you are a dentist thinking about a new site, our dental website design page covers what we build for dental offices.

A quick self-check you can do today

You do not need special software to catch some of the biggest issues:

1. Unplug your mouse and try to navigate your own homepage using only the Tab and Enter keys. Can you reach every link and button?
2. Turn your monitor's brightness down and squint at your own text. Can you still read it?
3. Right-click a few of your images and check the alt text (or ask whoever built your site to show you). Is it descriptive, or blank?

If any of those fail, you have found a real, fixable gap.

Four more checks that take 30 minutes

Once you have done the first three, try these:

1. Zoom test. In your browser, press Ctrl and the plus key (Command and plus on a Mac) until the page is at 200 percent. Does the text still fit? Can you still reach the menu and the contact button?
2. Screen reader test. Every iPhone has a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver (Settings, then Accessibility, then VoiceOver). Android phones have one called TalkBack. On a Windows computer, NVDA is a free screen reader you can download. Turn one on, open your homepage, and just listen for a minute. Do you hear your business name, your services, and your phone number? Or a stream of "link, link, button, image"? Practice turning it off first, since it changes how your phone responds to taps.
3. Contrast test. Use WebAIM's free contrast checker. Enter your text color and background color, and it tells you whether you meet the 4.5 to 1 AA ratio.
4. Automated scan. Run your homepage through WebAIM's WAVE checker. It flags missing alt text, empty links, missing form labels, and contrast problems right on the page.

A word of caution about that last one. Automated tools only catch part of the picture. WebAIM itself says the absence of detected errors does not mean a page is accessible.

The Justice Department says the same thing: a "clean" report does not necessarily mean everything is accessible, and pairing a manual check with automated checkers gives you a better sense of where you stand.

That is why a real person should always test the site too.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Writing alt text like "image1.jpg" or stuffing it with keywords. Describe what the picture shows, in a short sentence.
• Using "Click here" or "Read more" for every link. A screen reader user who jumps from link to link hears the same words over and over. Say where the link goes.
• Skipping heading levels just because you like the look of a smaller font. WebAIM found skipped heading levels on 41.8 percent of home pages in 2026.
• Putting important text inside images, like specials, hours, or phone numbers.
• Autoplay videos or sliders that move on their own with no way to pause them.
• Pop-ups that cannot be closed with the keyboard.

Why accessibility widgets are not a shortcut

You may have seen ads for a one-line plugin or "overlay" that promises to make your site ADA compliant overnight. I understand the appeal. It sounds cheap and fast. But be careful.

In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the overlay company accessiBe to pay $1 million.

The FTC said the company claimed its plug-in could make any website compliant with WCAG, when it did not make all user websites compliant, and those claims were false, misleading, or unsubstantiated.

UsableNet's lawsuit tracking also found no meaningful drop in lawsuits against sites using widgets in 2025.

The Justice Department's guidance says automated checkers and overlays can be helpful tools, but they need to be used carefully. The real fix is in the site itself: real labels, real alt text, real headings, and good contrast, built into the code.

What fixing it usually costs

This depends on how your site was built. On a simple site, adding alt text, fixing contrast, labeling forms, and cleaning up headings is often a small job.

On an older site built with a heavy theme and a lot of plugins, some problems come from the theme itself, and a rebuild can end up cheaper than patching.

Before you spend anything, know that the IRS has a Disabled Access Credit for small businesses with 30 or fewer full-time employees or $1 million or less in revenue.

ADA.gov describes it as a credit of up to $5,000 (half of eligible expenses up to $10,250, with no credit for the first $250) for access costs.

Whether a particular website project counts is a question for your tax preparer, so ask before you assume it does.

Questions to ask your web designer

Whether you hire us or someone else, ask these questions before you pay for a new site or a fix:

1. Do you design and test to WCAG 2.2 Level AA?
2. Who tests the site with a keyboard and a screen reader, and when?
3. Will every form field have a visible label and clear error messages?
4. How do you check color contrast when we pick our brand colors?
5. Do you rely on an overlay or widget, or do you fix the code itself?
6. If we use outside tools, like an online booking system or patient portal, do those vendors have an accessibility report? (Many software companies publish one, often called an ACR or VPAT.)
7. When we add new pages or photos later, how do we keep them accessible?

If the answers are vague, keep looking.

Give visitors a way to tell you about problems

The Justice Department's guidance notes that websites that give the public a way to report accessibility problems allow owners to fix them.

That can be as simple as a short line near the bottom of your site: "If anything on this site is hard to use, please call us or email us and we will help." Then make sure someone actually reads those messages and responds.

It costs you almost nothing, and it turns a frustrated visitor into a phone call.

Why this also just makes your site better

Website accessibility overlaps heavily with good design generally. Clear headings, readable text, and a site that works without a mouse all help every visitor, not just visitors with disabilities.

It also overlaps with SEO: the same clean heading structure and descriptive alt text that helps a screen reader also helps Google understand your page. See our technical SEO services for how these pieces connect.

Think about who else benefits. Captions help anyone watching a video in a quiet waiting room. Strong contrast helps someone reading your hours on a phone in bright sunlight.

Big, well-spaced buttons help anyone with a cracked screen or cold hands. Good heading structure and well-optimized images help search engines and people at the same time.

Many of these problems also drive customers away in ways owners never see, which we cover in signs your website is costing you customers.

Website accessibility is also never "done." Every new photo, blog post, or form is a new chance for a problem to slip in. A quick check a few times a year, using the steps above, keeps small problems from piling up.

How BuzFind builds for this

In all my years of building websites, one thing has stayed true: a website should work for every customer, including people with visual disabilities.

Every site we build starts with proper heading structure, real alt text on every image, and keyboard-friendly navigation, as part of the build itself rather than a separate fix applied later.

We treat accessible website design as part of doing the job right, and a real person tests the site, not just a tool.

If you are not sure where your current site stands, a free SEO audit will flag real technical and accessibility issues you can act on.

For a full rebuild, see our web design and development services for pricing and what is included. And if you have a specific legal question about ADA compliance for your website, bring it to an attorney.

We can handle the fixing part.