Compliance · ADA
ADA website compliance
ADA website compliance means a website usable by people with disabilities: in practice, conformance with the WCAG accessibility criteria that courts and the Justice Department reference in Americans with Disabilities Act cases. Complidar checks websites against those criteria with axe-core, the same engine accessibility auditors use, across up to 120 pages, and attaches settlement-cited liability context to every barrier it finds.
Who it applies to
Title III of the ADA covers 'places of public accommodation,' and courts have repeatedly applied it to commercial websites, most famously in Robles v. Domino's Pizza, where the Ninth Circuit held the ADA applies to the website and app of a business with physical locations, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb the ruling. If your site sells, books, or serves customers in the United States, the safe operating assumption is that Title III reaches it.
State law often stacks on top: California's Unruh Act converts ADA violations into claims carrying $4,000 statutory damages per occurrence, which is why California leads web-accessibility filings. New York's volume is comparable. None of this depends on your company's size. Small businesses receive a large share of filings and an even larger share of pre-suit demand letters.
What it costs when it goes wrong
Web-accessibility suits are volume litigation: thousands of federal Title III web cases are filed every year (Seyfarth Shaw's annual count tracks them), and demand letters that settle quietly outnumber the filings. The resolutions you can actually read run lower than the numbers usually quoted. Two fully documented small-business web cases closed all-in at $4,805 (Isakov v. Parched Hospitality Group, a single-location NYC bar: $1,500 in damages plus $2,825 in fees and $480 in costs) and $9,708 (Gomez v. The Curious Palate, a single restaurant: $4,000 in Unruh statutory damages plus $5,708 in fees). New York default judgments in this line award $1,000 to $1,500 in damages. Five DOJ web resolutions closed at $0. Most settlements are confidential, so treat that record as the shape of the small-business band, not a quote.
Two things sit outside that band in both directions. Domino's litigated instead of settling and spent four years losing, with a $325,000 all-in outcome ($75,000 in damages plus $250,000 in fees), which is what a national chain paid to make a point. And fees run both ways: in Garcia v. Zarco Hotels, a single independent hotel that beat a frivolous claim was awarded $142,584.90 against the plaintiff. Remediation is a separate cost from either, and you still have to do it.
What Complidar checks for ADA
- Runs axe-core (the standard WCAG engine) in a real browser on up to 120 pages
- Missing or empty image alt text, unlabeled form fields, and buttons without accessible names
- Color-contrast failures against WCAG AA thresholds
- Keyboard traps, missing focus indicators, and broken focus order signals
- Heading-structure and landmark problems that break screen-reader navigation
- ARIA misuse: roles and attributes that contradict the element they sit on
Honest limits: Automated testing catches a substantial share of WCAG failures (the mechanical ones plaintiffs' scanners also catch), but it cannot verify everything (logical reading order, caption quality, whether alt text is meaningful). Full conformance needs human review. A Complidar report tells you which finding type is which, and never claims a clean automated pass equals compliance.
ADA questions
Is WCAG legally required by the ADA?
The ADA's text never mentions WCAG, but courts and DOJ consent decrees consistently use WCAG (currently 2.1 AA in most settlements) as the benchmark for what an accessible site means. Treating WCAG 2.1 AA as the practical requirement is what defense counsel does. Complidar's accessibility findings map to those criteria.
Can a small business really get sued over its website?
Yes. Small businesses are heavily represented in web-accessibility filings precisely because they rarely test. Serial plaintiffs' firms scan at scale and price demand letters below the cost of a defense. A free Complidar scan shows you the same barriers those scans find, before the letter.
Will an accessibility overlay widget make me ADA compliant?
No tool makes a site compliant by itself, and sites running overlays continue to be named in suits. Overlays adjust presentation; the suits cite the underlying code. See our honest comparison with accessiBe for where overlays do and don't help.
ADA is 1 of the 22 checks in every scan · up to 120 pages · no card
Last updated 2026-08-19 · Informational, not legal advice: how to read this