Accessibility laws · United States

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Almost every web accessibility lawsuit filed in the United States runs on the Americans with Disabilities Act, a 1990 law that never mentions websites once. Which half of it reaches you depends on who you are. If you run a business open to the public, no federal regulation names a technical standard for your site, so courts and plaintiffs measure you against WCAG instead. If you are a state or local government, the Department of Justice has already named your standard and set your date. WCAG 2.1 Level AA, by April 26, 2027 if your population is 50,000 or more, and by April 26, 2028 if it is smaller. Population there means the Census population of the entity you are part of, which is not the number of people you serve.

Federal web suits, 2025 (Seyfarth): 3,117
Growth over 2024: +27%
Of all Title III filings: 36%
WCAG version cited: 2.1 AA

What the law is

The ADA is a 1990 civil rights law that makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, and two of its titles decide what your website owes. Title III covers businesses open to the public. Retail, restaurants, healthcare, banking, hospitality, and professional services all sit there, which is where most companies reading this page land. Title II covers state and local government instead, so a city website, a school enrollment portal, or a transit agency's trip planner answers to that one. The statute is older than the commercial web and never uses the word website. Courts and the Department of Justice, the DOJ, closed most of that gap decades ago by treating a website as one more service the law already covered. A store you cannot use with a screen reader turns a customer away for the same reason a store with steps and no ramp does. That is what the ADA was written to stop.

For businesses under Title III, there is still no regulation naming a technical standard, and the DOJ says so itself. Its guidance states the Department "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards," and that businesses can currently choose how they make what they offer online accessible. That sounds generous. In practice it means somebody else fills the vacuum. Plaintiffs and courts did. They settled on WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a long time ago. Nearly every settlement and consent decree ends up written as a WCAG conformance promise. Government is the opposite story. In April 2024 the DOJ issued a real regulation under Title II naming WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with deadlines attached and no argument left about which standard applies.

One question underneath all of this is genuinely open, and it decides cases. Does Title III reach a business that exists only online, with no physical place behind it? No federal appeals court has ever squarely said yes. The decisions cited for that view are insurance and employee benefit cases from the 1990s, and the plaintiffs lost most of them. The Third, Sixth and Ninth Circuits read Title III as needing a connection to a physical location, and the one appellate decision holding flatly that websites are not covered was vacated in December 2021, so it binds nobody. Federal judges in the Southern District of New York have answered the question both ways inside the same courthouse. In December 2025, in Fernandez v. Gainful Health, one of them dismissed both the ADA claim and the New York City claim with prejudice. The holding was that a standalone website is not a place of public accommodation under the statute. Do not build a compliance plan on winning that argument. Judges in the same building reached the opposite answer in the same year, and the disagreement is now deep enough that an appellate court will probably have to settle it. Does the ADA reach a website with no shop reads the opinions themselves, one circuit at a time.

This applies to you if…

You run a business open to the public and serve US customers through a website or an app. Retail, restaurants, healthcare, banking, hospitality, and professional services are all public accommodations under Title III, because every one of them sells straight to consumers.
You are a state or local government body, and the Title II regulation reads that phrase broadly. It reaches agencies and departments of state and local government, special purpose districts, Amtrak, and other commuter authorities, which puts school districts, transit agencies, court systems, and public utilities inside it.
You build and run digital services on behalf of a covered government body. The deadline lands on the entity, and it reaches you through your contract, because no city meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA on a portal you control without your help.
You sell into the United States from somewhere else. A foreign company faces an ADA claim on exactly the same terms as a company headquartered in Ohio, so an overseas address is not a shield.

What it technically requires

If you are a Title II entity, meaning a government body, your web content and your mobile apps have to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA by the date that matches your population. A population of 50,000 or more means April 26, 2027. Under 50,000, or a special district government, means April 26, 2028. Now the part that puts entities in the wrong tier constantly, because it is not the number of people you serve. The DOJ says so in as many words. Your population is the Census population of the entity you are part of. A state university with 40,000 students sitting inside a state of six million has a population of six million and the earlier date. A branch library serving 3,000 borrowers inside a county of 70,000 has a population of 70,000 and the earlier date too. Independent school districts use their own figure from the poverty estimates instead, and special district governments get 2028 without a count at all. Both dates are a year later than the ones you will find in compliance advice written before April 2026, when the DOJ pushed the original April 24, 2026 and April 26, 2027 deadlines back. This is a regulation rather than guidance, which makes the date real. There is still a way out. It is narrow. Section 35.204 lets you stop short where compliance would fundamentally alter the service or bring undue financial and administrative burdens. You carry the burden of proving it. The head of your entity or their designee has to make that call, after weighing every resource available to fund and run the service, and write down why. Then you still take whatever other action gets disabled people the same benefits, as far as that is possible. The cost defense sets out what the paperwork has to contain. One last thing about the version, because it catches out the people trying hardest. The rule names the 2018 edition of WCAG 2.1, and that edition still contains success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing. W3C has since called 4.1.1 obsolete and WCAG 2.2 dropped it. The DOJ looked straight at that and declined it, saying conformance to 4.1.1 is still required. So a WCAG 2.2 audit leaves one criterion of your actual legal standard untested. Section 35.205 can cover the gap where the failure has so minimal an impact that nobody's ability to use the thing is affected. You have to demonstrate that. You do not get to assume it.
Take federal health money as well and a second clock runs fifteen days behind that one. The HHS Section 504 web rule wants WCAG 2.1 Level AA by May 11, 2027 from a recipient with fifteen or more employees, and a county health department, a public hospital district, a university clinic or a school district billing Medicaid is usually both things at once. The work does not double, though. Both rules name WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA, and their five content exceptions are written in nearly the same words, because HHS said it coordinated the technical standards with the DOJ so that nobody would be held to two different bars. What differs is how each rule measures you. Title II counts your entity's Census population. The health rule counts your employees. So you can sit in the later tier of one and the earlier tier of the other, which makes the date that governs you simply whichever one arrives first.
The Title II regulation exempts five kinds of content, and knowing them saves a government web team a lot of wasted work. Archived content is exempt, but only where all four conditions hold. It has to have been created before your compliance date, or reproduce paper or other physical media created before it. It has to be kept only for reference, research or record-keeping. It has to be stored in a dedicated area clearly identified as archived. And it has to be unaltered since the day it was archived. Conventional electronic documents posted before your compliance date are exempt, which covers old word processing files, presentations, PDFs, and spreadsheets. That one carries a condition worth reading twice, because the regulation withdraws the exemption for any document currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in your services, programs, or activities. Your old forms stay in scope however old the file is. Content a third party posted is exempt, unless they posted it under a contract with you. Individualized conventional electronic documents are exempt where both halves hold, meaning the document is about one specific person, their property or their account, and it is password-protected or otherwise secured. A page that is merely behind a login is not covered by this one. So are social media posts you made before your compliance date. Who is exempt, and from what puts these five next to the other regimes' lists.
If you are a Title III entity, meaning a business, no regulation names a technical standard for your website, and the DOJ has said so in its own guidance. WCAG 2.1 Level AA fills the space. It is what shows up in complaints, in settlements, and in court orders. Testing against the newer WCAG 2.2 AA buys you margin on top of that, since 2.2 covers everything 2.1 does and a bit more.
An overlay widget is not a legal defense, whatever the vendor's sales page implies. Lawsuits between 2023 and 2025 found sites running these bolt-on products still inaccessible in practice, and no court has treated installing one as satisfying the ADA. The DOJ's own view is worth knowing here. When it delayed the Title II deadlines in April 2026, one of its stated reasons was that technological solutions have arrived more slowly than expected. It named the limits of generative AI for remediation specifically. That is a federal regulator putting on the record that automatic fixing is not good enough yet.
Airlines operate under a separate set of rules entirely. The Department of Transportation enforces the Air Carrier Access Act, which has required WCAG 2.0 AA on airline websites since December 2016, and on the core booking functions of those sites since December 2015.

All roads lead to WCAG. Start with Level AA, the legal standard or the full 55-rule library. Unfamiliar term along the way? The A to Z glossary decodes it.

How it is enforced

Private lawsuits, not government enforcement, are what actually happens under Title III. Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court in 2025, a 27 percent jump on the 2,452 filed in 2024. That is 36 percent of every ADA Title III case filed that year. New York led with 1,021. Florida came second with 961, and Illinois third with 585.

Then there is California, which recorded four. Four federal filings, in the state with the loudest reputation in the country for this litigation. The cases did not stop. They moved to state court, where California's Unruh Civil Rights Act pays a plaintiff statutory damages of at least $4,000 per violation and the ADA pays nothing at all. So a federal filing count tells you where the paperwork is, not where the risk is. UsableNet counts the same year differently and reports 3,195 federal filings, and adding its New York and California state numbers takes the 2025 total past 5,000. Quote a filing number with the name of whoever produced it attached, every time.

A federal court can order you to fix the site and make you pay the plaintiff's attorney's fees, which is what injunctive relief means in practice. What a private plaintiff suing a business under Title III cannot collect is compensatory damages, the way a personal injury claim would. That does not make the exposure small. Defense costs, remediation done under deadline pressure, and a fee award routinely put five to six figures on the table before a case gets near trial. State laws stack their own damages on top of that, which is why a California or a New York case costs more than a plain ADA claim filed anywhere else.

The Department of Justice enforces both Title II and Title III directly. It has treated web accessibility as a stated enforcement priority for years now, through consent decrees with national retailers and through the Title II regulation itself.

Key dates

Apr 24, 2024DOJ Title II final rule published: WCAG 2.1 AA becomes a formal requirement for state and local governments
Apr 20, 2026DOJ extends the compliance deadlines by one year
Apr 26, 2027Deadline: public entities with a Census population of 50,000 or more
Apr 26, 2028Deadline: smaller entities and special districts

What to do about it

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Orientation only, current as of August 2026. Not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. For your specific situation, talk to your own lawyer.