ADA website rules for small businesses

If your business serves the public, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) covers your website too. Here's what that means, in plain English, and where to start.

Check the official rules. Rules and dates change, so check them with the official sources before you rely on them: ADA.gov (the US Department of Justice), the W3C's WCAG pages and Section508.gov. PageKiwi helps you find problems and get closer to meeting the rules. It can't promise a website meets them, it isn't legal advice, and we can't take responsibility for decisions made from it.

What the law says

The ADA says businesses open to the public must not shut out people with disabilities. The Department of Justice says that includes what you offer online: "the programs, services, and goods that they provide to the public—including those provided online—are accessible to people with disabilities."

There's no detailed technical rulebook for businesses. The Department points to two standards as "helpful guidance": the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the federal government's Section 508 standards. In practice, WCAG level AA is what courts, lawyers and accessibility experts measure websites against.

Who gets sued

3,117 website accessibility lawsuits were filed against businesses in US federal courts in 2025, up 27% from 2024, according to the law firm Seyfarth Shaw's count. Most were in New York, Florida and Illinois. More are filed in state courts, which that count doesn't include.

A lawsuit usually starts with someone who uses a screen reader or a keyboard trying to buy something, book something or find information, and being stopped.

What to fix first

These are the barriers the Department of Justice lists in its guidance for businesses. Each links to the PageKiwi tool that helps find or fix it.

  1. Text too faint to read. Pale gray on white is the usual one. Color check tells you, and suggests the nearest color that works.
  2. Color alone carrying meaning, like "items in red are sold out". Add words too. Try the color blindness view in PageKiwi for Chrome.
  3. Pictures with no description (alt text). Picture Check finds them; the Alt text writer drafts them.
  4. Videos without captions. YouTube and Vimeo can draft captions for you to correct.
  5. Forms without labels, so a screen reader can't say what to type. Accessibility Check finds them.
  6. Things you can only use with a mouse. Put the mouse away and press Tab: can you reach and use everything? The Tab order view in PageKiwi for Chrome numbers each stop.

Be wary of "one line of code" fixes

Some companies sell a widget (an "overlay") that claims to make any website accessible or compliant automatically. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission required one of the best known, accessiBe, to pay $1 million over claims its tool could make any website meet WCAG. Businesses using overlays have still been sued. Fixing the website itself is what helps people, and what holds up.

What PageKiwi can and can't do

Automated checks, ours included, find many common problems but not all of them. They can't tell whether your alt text makes sense or whether your checkout works with a keyboard. Use them to find and fix the obvious problems quickly, then try your site with the keyboard, and for a bigger site, ask an accessibility specialist to test it with real assistive technology (screen readers, voice control, switches).

It also helps to add an accessibility page: say what you've done, and give people an email address or phone number to tell you when something doesn't work for them.