ADA Compliance
Definition
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990, before the web existed in any public form, and its text says nothing about HTML. Two titles do most of the work online. Title II covers state and local government, and in April 2024 the Department of Justice issued a final rule under it that sets WCAG 2.1 level AA as the technical standard for web content and mobile apps, with compliance dates staged by size: public entities serving a population of 50,000 or more by 24 April 2026, and smaller entities and special district governments by 26 April 2027. Title III covers places of public accommodation — businesses open to the public — and here there is no equivalent rule; the DOJ withdrew its proposed web rulemaking in 2017, so obligations are shaped by litigation and by the department's position that the Act applies to the websites of covered entities. Federal agencies and their suppliers sit under a separate law, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, whose Revised standards reference WCAG 2.0 level AA. This page is general information and not legal advice; whether any particular site is covered depends on facts a lawyer should look at.
Why It Matters
The practical consequence of a statute with no Title III technical standard is that courts and demand letters fill the gap, and thousands of web accessibility claims are filed in US federal and state courts each year, overwhelmingly against retail, food service and hospitality sites. Robles v. Domino's is the case most often cited: the Ninth Circuit held in 2019 that the Act applied to the pizza chain's website and app because of their connection to its physical stores, and the Supreme Court declined to take the appeal. Defending one of these is expensive whatever the merits, and the remedy sought is usually a settlement plus a remediation programme — the work you would have done anyway, at a worse price. For a public entity under the 2024 Title II rule the dates are simply fixed, which makes planning easier and excuses thinner.
How It Works
Since no version of the Act asks for a proprietary standard, the working answer for almost everyone is to build to WCAG level AA, test it, and document what you did. Title II entities have a version and a deadline handed to them; everyone else generally aims at WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 level AA because that is what settlements, procurement and the DOJ's own guidance point toward. Evidence matters as much as intent: an accessibility statement with a contact route, a dated conformance report such as a VPAT, and a remediation plan with owners and dates all show a process rather than a claim. Be wary of overlay widgets that promise compliance from one line of JavaScript — they do not fix the underlying markup, and plaintiffs have sued sites that were running them. Documents count too, so the PDFs a site offers for download fall within the same expectations as its pages.
Real-World Example
A restaurant group publishes its menus as PDFs and links them from a static site at menus.99helpers.site. The menus were design exports with no tags and no alt text, so a customer using a screen reader could open the file and hear nothing, which is exactly the pattern that ends up in a demand letter. Re-exporting from InDesign with tagging enabled, plus a plain HTML version of each menu on the same page, made the information available two ways. 99helpers serves whatever is uploaded and does not remediate files, so the change was made before upload and the old versions stayed in history.
Common Mistakes
- ✕Believing the statute names a required web standard — it does not, which is why the answer is built from the 2024 Title II rule, Section 508 and case law rather than a single citation
- ✕Installing an accessibility overlay and calling the job done — the widget sits on top of markup it cannot fix, and its presence has not prevented claims
- ✕Fixing the pages and ignoring the downloads — menus, forms and reports published as untagged PDFs are part of what the site offers the public
Related Terms
WCAG
WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the W3C standard that defines what accessible web content is. Its success criteria at Levels A, AA and AAA are what accessibility law and procurement point to.
European Accessibility Act
The European Accessibility Act is EU legislation that extends accessibility requirements from the public sector to a defined list of products and services sold to consumers in the EU. It has applied since 28 June 2025.
VPAT
A VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, is the form a vendor fills in to describe how far a product meets a named accessibility standard. The completed document is properly called an Accessibility Conformance Report.
Accessibility Audit
An accessibility audit is a structured review of a site or document against a named standard, producing a list of failures mapped to specific success criteria. It combines automated scanning with manual testing, because tools alone catch only part of the picture.
Static Site
A static site is a website made of finished files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images — that are sent to the browser exactly as they are stored. Nothing is assembled on the server when a visitor arrives.
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