Web Accessibility and ADA Compliance: Why Your Website Can't Afford to Ignore It
Your website is beautiful. The photography is stunning, the animations are smooth, and the design won a few internal high-fives. But can everyone use it? More importantly, does it comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act? If you're unsure, you're not alone—and you're taking a significant risk that could cost your business dearly.
Web accessibility isn't just a nice-to-have feature or a checkbox on a compliance form. It's a legal requirement, a moral imperative, and increasingly, a business necessity.
At Knight Theory, we've watched the landscape of web accessibility lawsuits explode over the past several years, and we've made it our mission to ensure every client we work with is protected from day one.
The ADA Applies to Your Website—(Yes, Really)
When the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990, the internet as we know it didn't exist. Yet courts across the United States have consistently ruled that the ADA applies to websites, particularly those of businesses that serve the public.
The legal reasoning is straightforward: if your physical location must be accessible to people with disabilities, your digital location must be too.
The landmark case Robles v. Domino's Pizza established that websites are considered places of public accommodation under Title III of the ADA. Domino's argued their website wasn't covered by the law. They lost. The Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal, effectively cementing the precedent that websites must be accessible.
This wasn't an isolated case. Thousands of businesses face ADA lawsuits every single day, over inaccessible websites, from major retailers and restaurants to small local businesses and professional service providers. The costs are staggering—not just in legal fees and settlements, but in reputation damage and lost customers.
The Explosion of Web Accessibility Lawsuits
Web accessibility lawsuits have increased dramatically year over year. In recent years, federal courts have seen thousands of ADA website accessibility lawsuits filed annually, with numbers continuing to climb. California, New York, and Florida lead the nation in filings, but no state is immune. Los Angeles businesses are particularly vulnerable given the size of the market and the presence of plaintiff law firms specifically targeting accessibility violations.
What makes these lawsuits particularly concerning is that they often come without warning. Many businesses first learn their website isn't accessible when they receive a demand letter or lawsuit. By that point, legal costs are inevitable, even if you immediately remediate the issues. Settlement amounts typically range from five thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, not including the cost of actually fixing your website and attorney fees that can easily exceed the settlement itself.
Unfortunately, many ill-willed folks make a living sending these lawsuits forward since they are often a guaranteed win—serial plaintiffs have made web accessibility litigation a business model. Some individuals and law firms systematically test websites for accessibility violations and file hundreds of lawsuits annually. While the motivations may be questionable in some cases, the legal foundation is solid: if your website isn't accessible, you're vulnerable regardless of who's filing the claim.
Understanding WCAG: The Standard for Web Accessibility
While the ADA doesn't explicitly define what makes a website accessible, courts and the Department of Justice have pointed to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG, as the technical standard. WCAG is developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and provides detailed criteria for making web content accessible to people with disabilities.
WCAG is organized around four principles, often remembered by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
Content must be perceivable to all users regardless of sensory abilities.
Interfaces must be operable through various input methods.
Information must be understandable and presented clearly.
And content must be robust enough to work with current and future assistive technologies.
WCAG has three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA. Level AA is generally considered the standard for ADA compliance and is what most courts reference in accessibility cases. Achieving WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance isn't just about avoiding lawsuits—it's about ensuring your website works for the estimated one in four American adults who live with some form of disability.
Common Accessibility Violations That Trigger Lawsuits
Certain accessibility issues appear repeatedly in ADA lawsuits because they're both common and serious barriers to users with disabilities. Understanding these common violations is the first step toward prevention.
Missing Alternative Text for Images
Screen readers can't interpret images, so they rely on alternative text descriptions. When images lack alt text or have meaningless descriptions like "image123.jpg," users who are blind or have low vision miss critical information. This is one of the most cited violations in accessibility lawsuits, yet it's also one of the easiest to fix when building a website correctly from the start.
2. Insufficient Color Contrast
Light gray text on a white background might look elegant, but it's nearly impossible to read for users with low vision or color blindness. WCAG requires specific contrast ratios between text and background colors. Professional designers know how to achieve beautiful aesthetics while maintaining accessibility standards—it's not a matter of choosing between design and compliance.
3. Keyboard Navigation Failures
Many users with motor disabilities can't use a mouse and navigate entirely with a keyboard. If your website's interactive elements can't be accessed and operated via keyboard alone, you're excluding a significant portion of potential users. Dropdown menus, forms, modal windows, and custom controls must all be fully keyboard accessible.
4. Empty Links and Buttons
Links that say "click here" or "read more" without context are frustrating for screen reader users who navigate by jumping between links. Buttons and links need descriptive text that makes their purpose clear without surrounding context.
5. Form Fields Without Proper Labels
Forms are where businesses convert visitors into customers, but inaccessible forms prevent many users from completing transactions. Every form field needs a programmatically associated label that screen readers can identify. Visual-only placeholders aren't sufficient and often disappear once users start typing, creating confusion for everyone.
6. Missing or Incorrect Heading Structure
Screen reader users navigate pages by jumping between headings. When headings are missing, improperly nested, or used purely for visual styling, the page structure becomes incomprehensible. Proper semantic HTML with logical heading hierarchies is essential for accessibility.
Beyond Legal Compliance: The Business Case for Accessibility
While avoiding lawsuits is reason enough to prioritize accessibility, the business benefits extend far beyond legal protection. Accessible websites reach more customers, perform better in search engines, and deliver superior user experiences for everyone.
The disability market represents significant purchasing power. People with disabilities and their families control over half a trillion dollars in annual disposable income in the United States alone. When your website isn't accessible, you're literally turning away customers and revenue. An accessible website doesn't just prevent lawsuits—it expands your potential market.
Search engine optimization and accessibility share many best practices. Semantic HTML, descriptive link text, proper heading structure, and fast load times benefit both SEO and accessibility. Search engines can't see your images any better than screen readers can—they both rely on alt text. When you build for accessibility, you're simultaneously improving your search rankings.
Accessible design principles improve usability for all users, not just those with disabilities. Clear navigation helps everyone find what they need faster. Good color contrast makes content easier to read in bright sunlight. Keyboard navigation shortcuts speed up workflows for power users. Video captions help people in noisy environments or who prefer reading. The curb cut effect demonstrates how designing for accessibility creates benefits that extend to everyone.
How Professional Web Design Agencies Approach Accessibility
At Knight Theory, accessibility isn't an afterthought or an add-on service. It's integrated into every phase of our design and development process because we understand that retrofitting accessibility into an existing website is exponentially more difficult and expensive than simply building it correctly from the beginning.
→ Accessibility Starts in the Design Phase
We test color contrasts during the design phase, ensuring all text meets WCAG requirements before a single line of code is written. We design clear visual hierarchies that translate to proper semantic structure. We plan keyboard navigation paths and focus states for interactive elements. We consider how screen readers will interpret page layouts and make design decisions that support logical reading order.
As designers, we understand that accessibility and aesthetics aren't opposing forces. Beautiful, modern design can and should be fully accessible. It requires knowledge, intention, and skill—which is exactly why professional web design matters.
→ Development With Accessibility Standards
When code is needed, we write clean, semantic HTML that provides meaning and structure screen readers can interpret. We use ARIA labels appropriately to enhance accessibility without overriding native HTML semantics. We ensure all interactive elements are keyboard accessible with visible focus indicators. We test with actual screen readers and keyboard-only navigation during development, not after launch.
We implement skip navigation links, ensure videos have captions, provide text alternatives for audio content, and make PDFs accessible. We test forms extensively to ensure error messages are clear and programmatically associated with the fields that triggered them. These aren't optional extras; they should be truly standard practice for professional web development.
→ Ongoing Testing and Monitoring
We use automated testing tools to catch common accessibility issues, but we know automated testing only identifies about thirty to forty percent of accessibility problems. That's why we supplement automated testing with manual testing using keyboard navigation and real user testing when possible.
For clients who maintain their own content after launch, we provide training on accessibility best practices. In our exclusive past-client help portal, we provide resources about how to write effective alt text, maintain proper heading structure, and ensure new content meets the same standards we built into their website.
The Cost of Accessibility Versus the Cost of Lawsuits
Some businesses hesitate when they learn that building an accessible website requires additional consideration and expertise.
But the math is simple and stark: incorporating accessibility from the beginning costs a fraction of what you'll pay if you're sued.
Building accessibility into a new website typically adds ten to fifteen percent to the project cost when working with experienced professionals who understand accessibility standards. Retrofitting accessibility into an existing site can cost twice as much as building it correctly initially because problems are interconnected and fixing one often reveals others.
Now consider the cost of an ADA lawsuit. Settlements typically start around fifteen thousand dollars and escalate from there. Attorney fees on both sides can easily double that amount. Add the cost of emergency remediation, potential damage to your reputation, and the distraction from running your business, and the total cost of a lawsuit can reach fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars or more.
The question isn't whether you can afford to build an accessible website. It's whether you can afford not to.
Accessibility Overlays Are Not a Solution
You've probably encountered accessibility overlay widgets that promise to make any website ADA compliant with a single line of code. They're heavily marketed, relatively inexpensive, and completely inadequate as a sole accessibility solution.
These overlays claim to automatically fix accessibility issues using artificial intelligence and JavaScript. The reality is that they often create as many problems as they solve, can't address fundamental structural issues, and have been rejected by disability advocacy groups who argue they provide a poor user experience compared to properly built websites.
More importantly, accessibility overlays don't provide legal protection. Businesses using popular overlay products have still been sued for ADA violations. Courts recognize that these tools don't actually make websites compliant with WCAG standards—they just add a superficial layer that attempts to work around underlying problems.
There's no shortcut to accessibility. It requires proper design, development, and testing by professionals who understand both the technical requirements and the user needs behind them.
What to Do If Your Current Website Isn't Accessible
If you're reading this and realizing your current website likely has accessibility issues, you're not alone. Most websites launched more than a few years ago weren't built with accessibility in mind, and many recent websites still fall short despite increased awareness.
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Have your website professionally audited for accessibility compliance. This will identify specific violations and prioritize them by severity.
Some issues can be fixed quickly, while others may require more extensive updates to your site's structure or codebase.
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For websites with significant accessibility barriers, a complete redesign and rebuild may be more cost-effective than attempting to patch numerous issues. This is especially true for older websites that are due for updates anyway.
A redesign provides an opportunity to not only achieve accessibility compliance but also modernize your design, improve performance, enhance SEO, and implement current best practices across the board.
“Don’t wait for a lawsuit to force action. Being proactive demonstrates good faith, protects your business, and ensures you’re serving all potential customers rather than excluding a significant portion of the market.”
Accessibility Is Everyone's Responsibility
Web accessibility shouldn't be controversial. The internet has become essential infrastructure for modern life—from banking and shopping to healthcare and education. When websites are inaccessible, people with disabilities are excluded from full participation in society and the economy. That's neither acceptable (nor legal.)
The rise in accessibility lawsuits has been a wake-up call for businesses that overlooked or ignored their obligations under the ADA. While the legal risk is real and growing, the underlying issue is more fundamental: everyone deserves equal access to digital content and services.
At Knight Theory, we build accessibility into every website we create because it's the right thing to do professionally, legally, and morally. We stay current on WCAG standards, we test rigorously, and we educate our clients on why accessibility matters and how to maintain it.
Your website represents your business to the world. Make sure it represents you well by being welcoming, functional, and accessible to everyone who visits. The cost of doing it right is minimal compared to the cost of getting it wrong—and the benefit to your business and your community is immeasurable.
If you're concerned about your website's accessibility or planning a new website that needs to meet ADA compliance standards from day one, Knight Theory can help.
We bring the expertise, experience, and commitment to quality that ensures your digital presence is both beautiful and accessible to all users.
Let’s work together! Learn how we can protect your business while expanding your reach.
