The ADA is the main US disability rights law, signed in 1990 and broadened by amendments in 2008. It never mentions websites, which has slowed nothing down, because the Department of Justice has long treated what a business offers online as covered. The courts are less settled than that sounds. Where a site is the online face of a business with premises, claims generally proceed. Where the business exists only online, the answer changes with the circuit, and no federal appeals court has yet held that a website on its own is a place of public accommodation. Which part of the Act applies to you decides almost everything after that. Title III covers businesses open to the public, and no regulation there sets a technical standard, so you choose how you make your online services usable and WCAG is what everybody reaches for. Title II covers state and local government, and there WCAG 2.1 Level AA is now written into a federal rule with dates attached.
In practice
Title II is the half with dates on it, and the dates moved. Entities whose population is 50,000 or more have until April 26, 2027. Smaller entities and special districts have until April 26, 2028, after a one-year extension published in April 2026. The standard named in that rule is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is worth noticing if you have been building to 2.2, because 2.2 contains 2.1 and clears that bar with room to spare.
Title III is the one most businesses are in, and it has a different shape entirely. No regulation sets a technical standard there, so the question in a case is not whether you met 2.1 AA. It is whether people with disabilities can use what you offer. In practice everybody argues from WCAG anyway, because there is nothing else to argue from. Plaintiffs plead it, experts test against it, and settlements name it. Which court you are in still decides whether that argument ever gets heard, because the circuits have not agreed on whether a business with no premises is covered at all.
The remedy is the fact that explains the whole litigation pattern, and almost nobody knows it. A private Title III claim wins injunctive relief and attorney's fees, not damages. That is why state law gets stacked on top, and why California barely appears in federal filing counts while generating an enormous share of the actual claims. Its own civil rights act carries a $4,000 statutory minimum per violation, so the case gets filed in state court instead.
Why it matters
Plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal court in 2025, up 27% on the year before, and New York alone accounted for 1,021 of them. Filing volumes on that scale have no counterpart in any other country we researched. What catches business owners out is the shape of it rather than the size. The ADA sets no deadline for a private business and no number to hit, so nothing tells you that you have failed until somebody files. An audit is how you find out first.
Which title covers you
Five titles, and only two of them are about your website. Title II is state and local government, where WCAG 2.1 AA is now the binding standard. Title III is any business open to the public, where nothing is codified and WCAG is the yardstick everyone uses regardless. Title I is employment and starts at 15 employees, which is a different obligation with a different test.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- WCAGWCAG is the international standard for web accessibility, published by the W3C.
- Level A, AA, AAALevel A, AA and AAA are WCAG's three conformance levels, and they stack.
- Section 508Section 508 is the US law requiring federal departments and agencies, plus the Postal Service, to make their digital products accessible.
- ConformanceConformance means satisfying all the requirements of a standard, and WCAG has five of them rather than one.
- Disabled Access CreditThe Disabled Access Credit is a US federal tax credit that takes half of what an eligible small business spends removing barriers for people with disabilities off its tax bill.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
Find out where your own site stands. The free scan checks 10 pages in a real browser against all 90 supported automated rules, separates 27 best-practice checks from its WCAG findings, and names the rule behind every result.