What Plaintiffs Need to Know
Websites have become essential infrastructure for daily life – banking, healthcare, shopping, applying for jobs. For the roughly 61 million Americans living with a disability, an inaccessible website isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a barrier to participation.
The law recognizes this. Federal courts have consistently held that businesses can be sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for operating websites that exclude people with disabilities. If you or someone you represent has been denied access to a business’s website because of a disability, you may have a viable legal claim.
Here’s what plaintiffs need to know.
The Legal Basis: Title III of the ADA
Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in “places of public accommodation.” The statute was written in 1990 – before the commercial internet existed – but courts have broadly applied it to websites operated by businesses that serve the public.
The core legal question has been whether a website qualifies as a “place of public accommodation.” Circuit courts have approached this differently, but the majority trend favors plaintiffs:
- The Ninth Circuit (covering California, Washington, Oregon, and others) held in Robles v. Domino’s Pizza (2019) that the ADA applies to Domino’s website and app because they connect customers to the company’s physical restaurants.
- The Eleventh Circuit (Florida, Georgia, Alabama) found in Gil v. Winn-Dixie that a grocery chain’s website was covered by the ADA due to its nexus to physical store locations.
- The First Circuit and several district courts have extended coverage even further, finding ADA liability for purely online businesses with no physical storefront.
The “nexus to a physical location” requirement has weakened over time. If a business has a website open to the public, it faces meaningful legal exposure regardless of whether it operates physical locations.
Who Has Standing to Sue
To bring an ADA Title III claim, a plaintiff must have a disability that is substantially limited by the inaccessible website, and must have actually encountered the barrier.
Common plaintiffs include:
- People who are blind or have low vision – who rely on screen readers (like NVDA or JAWS) and encounter websites with no alt text, unlabeled buttons, or image-only content that screen readers cannot parse.
- People who are deaf or hard of hearing – who encounter videos without captions.
- People with motor disabilities – who navigate by keyboard only and encounter websites that trap focus, have no skip navigation, or require mouse interactions.
- People with cognitive disabilities – who encounter confusing navigation, auto-playing content, or no error descriptions on forms.
The plaintiff must be able to show they attempted to use the website, encountered a specific barrier, and were denied access to goods, services, or information as a result. Serial plaintiffs (individuals who file large numbers of ADA website cases) are common and legally valid, though some courts scrutinize standing more carefully in high-volume filing scenarios.
What “Inaccessible” Means in Practice
Courts and the Department of Justice have pointed to the WCAG 2.1 compliance audit standards as the applicable technical baseline for liability. A website that fails these specific criteria is likely legally inaccessible under the ADA, providing a clear foundation for a claim.
Common violations that form the basis of lawsuits include:
- Missing alt text on images, charts, and buttons – screen readers read nothing.
- No keyboard navigation – users who cannot use a mouse are locked out.
- Poor color contrast – text invisible to users with low vision.
- Unlabeled form fields – screen readers cannot announce what to type.
- Videos without captions – deaf users cannot access audio content.
- PDFs that are image-only scans – entirely unreadable by assistive technology.
- Pop-ups and modals that trap focus – keyboard users cannot escape or dismiss them.
A business does not need to have intentionally discriminated. ADA Title III is a strict liability statute with respect to access barriers – intent is irrelevant to liability.
The Rise of ADA Website Litigation
ADA website lawsuits are not rare. They have become one of the most active areas of ADA litigation in the country. According to ADA lawsuit statistics, over 9,100 federal ADA website cases were filed in 2024 alone – a number that has grown substantially every year since 2018.
The cases span virtually every industry: retail, healthcare, hospitality, financial services, education, and professional services. No business with a public-facing website is categorically exempt.
Plaintiffs’ firms have developed efficient intake pipelines for these cases. Demand letters – which threaten litigation and demand remediation – often precede formal complaints and frequently settle out of court. For plaintiffs, this means the process can move relatively quickly compared to other civil rights litigation.
What Relief Is Available
Under Title III of the ADA, plaintiffs can seek:
- Injunctive relief – a court order requiring the business to bring its website into compliance.
- Attorneys’ fees and costs – the prevailing plaintiff’s legal fees are recoverable, which makes these cases economically viable for plaintiffs’ counsel.
- In some states, monetary damages – California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, for example, provides statutory damages of $4,000 per violation per visit, stacked on top of ADA claims. Florida, New York, and other states have their own parallel statutes with varying damage provisions.
Title III itself does not provide compensatory or punitive damages in federal court. However, state law claims filed alongside the federal ADA claim often do – and savvy plaintiffs’ attorneys routinely plead both.
How to Build a Strong Claim
If you are advising a plaintiff or building a case:
- Document the barriers encountered. Screenshots, screen recordings with assistive technology running, and written logs of what was attempted and what failed are valuable evidence.
- Identify the specific WCAG failures. Technical specificity strengthens the claim. Vague allegations of “inaccessibility” are harder to prosecute than identified violations with WCAG criterion citations.
- Establish the nexus to harm. Articulate what goods, services, or information the plaintiff was denied. A blind user who could not complete checkout on a retail site has a cleaner claim than one who merely found the experience frustrating.
- Consider the jurisdiction. Circuit court precedent, state law claims, and the specific judge’s history with ADA cases all affect strategy.
- Use available tools to document violations. An ADA website violation report can identify and catalog specific WCAG violations with severity ratings – useful as supporting documentation when building the evidentiary record.
What Defendants Typically Argue (and How Courts Have Responded)
Defendants commonly raise:
- “Our website doesn’t qualify as a place of public accommodation” – courts have increasingly rejected this, particularly in circuits that do not require a physical nexus.
- “We were not on notice” – not a defense under Title III; there is no notice requirement before a claim accrues.
- “We installed an accessibility overlay” – overlays have not been found to cure ADA violations; several lawsuits have been filed specifically against overlay-using websites.
- “We are now remediated” – mootness arguments sometimes succeed at the injunctive relief level but do not extinguish fee-shifting or state law damages claims filed before remediation.
Conclusion
ADA website litigation is legally established, procedurally mature, and growing. Businesses operating inaccessible websites face real legal risk, and plaintiffs – particularly those with documented encounters with specific barriers – have viable paths to relief under federal and state law.
If you or your client has been denied access to a business’s online services because of a disability, the legal framework supports your claim. Consulting with an attorney experienced in ADA Title III litigation is the right first step.