Does my small business website need to be ADA compliant?

In practice, yes. US courts have often treated business websites as places of public accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, thousands of website accessibility lawsuits and demand letters are filed against businesses every year, and small businesses are a large share of the targets because they are the least likely to have done anything about it. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice; it is what a web studio sees, and what we would do if it were our business.

What the standard is

The ADA itself does not spell out technical rules for websites. The standard courts, settlements and the Department of Justice point to is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, level AA, usually written WCAG 2.1 AA. It is a published set of testable criteria: text has enough contrast against its background, every image that carries meaning has a text alternative, everything can be operated with a keyboard alone, form fields have labels, videos have captions, the page has a sensible heading structure, and so on. Roughly fifty criteria at level AA, most of them straightforward once someone is looking.

Who is most exposed

Any business that sells or takes bookings online, and any business in healthcare, education, finance, legal services, hospitality or property, where accessibility is expected. Restaurants with online menus and ordering are a frequent target. So are e-commerce stores of any size. But the honest answer is that the letters go to whoever is found, and the finding is automated: firms run scanners across thousands of sites and write to the ones that fail.

What does not work

The “accessibility overlay” widget. These are one-line scripts that add a floating toolbar offering bigger text and colour changes. They are marketed as instant compliance and they are not: they do not fix the underlying code, screen-reader users widely report that they make sites harder to use, and businesses running them have still been sued. If your current site has one, it is not protecting you, and some plaintiffs’ firms treat it as a sign that you knew there was a problem.

What a sensible small business does

Three things, in order.

Get an audit. Not just an automated scan, which catches perhaps a third of real barriers, but a person going through your key pages with a keyboard and a screen reader as well. You want a plain-English list of what fails, why it matters to a real visitor, and what the fix is, ranked by how much each one blocks someone.

Fix the site, not the symptoms. Contrast, alt text, labels, keyboard access, focus visibility, heading structure, captions. On a WordPress or Shopify site most of this is bounded work, and a lot of it also improves the site for everyone, including Google.

Publish an accessibility statement. A page that says what standard you aim for, what you have done, what is still in progress, and how someone can contact you if they hit a barrier. It shows good faith, it gives a real visitor a route to help, and it is one of the first things an attorney looks for.

What it costs

Our accessibility audit is $450 for up to ten key pages and takes about a week; it includes the prioritised report and a draft statement. Audit plus the fixes on your existing site, retested with before-and-after evidence and the statement published, starts at $1,200. Ongoing monitoring, so new pages do not undo the work, is $49 a month added to any care plan. If you have already received a letter, speak to an attorney first; we can fix the site quickly and hand your attorney the evidence, and we will work alongside them.