Website accessibility gets treated as a big-company concern until a small business gets a demand letter. It’s a more common problem than most owners realize: accessibility lawsuits targeting small business websites have been rising for years, often filed by the same small number of law firms and plaintiffs finding the same handful of common, fixable violations.
What “ADA-compliant” means for a website
There’s no single legal website accessibility standard written into the ADA itself, but courts and settlements have converged on WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1 Level AA as the practical benchmark. That’s the standard worth building to, whether or not a lawsuit is the concern. It’s also good practice for anyone using a screen reader, navigating by keyboard, or dealing with low vision or color blindness.
The issues that come up most
Images without alt text. A screen reader announces nothing useful for an image with no alt attribute, or worse, a filename like “IMG_4021.jpg.” This is one of the most commonly cited issues in accessibility complaints and one of the cheapest to fix.
Poor color contrast. Light gray text on a white background looks clean in a design mockup and is genuinely hard to read for a large percentage of users, not just those with diagnosed vision impairment. WCAG AA has specific contrast ratio minimums, and a lot of “modern minimalist” design trends violate them without anyone noticing until it’s tested.
Forms without labels. A contact form where the field just shows placeholder text that disappears on click, with no actual associated label, is unusable for screen reader users navigating field by field.
Keyboard navigation gaps. Not everyone uses a mouse. A site where dropdown menus, modals, or interactive elements only respond to a mouse hover or click, with no keyboard equivalent, locks out anyone navigating by keyboard alone.
Missing heading structure. Screen reader users often navigate a page by jumping between headings. A site that uses styled text instead of actual heading tags (H1, H2, H3) in a logical order breaks that navigation entirely, even if it looks identical visually.
Why this matters beyond avoiding a lawsuit
Universal design, building for the widest range of users from the start rather than retrofitting for compliance, tends to produce better sites generally. Good contrast helps everyone reading on a phone in sunlight. Clean heading structure helps SEO, since search engines parse page structure the same way screen readers do. Keyboard-navigable interfaces are also just more robust interfaces.
What an audit looks like
A real accessibility review isn’t just running an automated scanner. Those catch maybe a third of real issues and miss things like whether a keyboard user can complete a checkout flow. It combines automated tooling with a manual pass: navigating the site with a keyboard only, checking contrast ratios against WCAG thresholds, and reviewing actual page structure, not just visual appearance.
For a Central NJ small business that’s never had this looked at, the realistic first step is a focused audit against the handful of issues above. That alone typically surfaces most of what a demand letter would cite, at a fraction of the cost of dealing with one after the fact.