ADA Compliance Risk for E-Commerce SMBs: What Actually Triggers a Demand Letter

If you run a US e-commerce store, you have probably heard some version of this secondhand: an inaccessible website can get you sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), even if you have never set foot in a courtroom and never intended to exclude anyone. That’s broadly true, and it is worth understanding in plain terms — not because every small business is a target, but because the pattern behind who gets a demand letter is fairly predictable, and there’s a real, boring, achievable way to lower your risk.

Quick answer: US courts have increasingly held that Title III of the ADA applies to e-commerce websites connected to a business, even though the ADA’s text predates the web and Congress has never passed a law that says “websites” explicitly. The Department of Justice has stated the same position since at least 2022. There is no official legal certification for an “ADA compliant” website, but building your site to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA is the closest thing to an accepted benchmark, and it’s the standard the DOJ itself requires of state and local government websites.

This article is educational content, not legal advice. If you’ve received a demand letter or a lawsuit, talk to an attorney who handles ADA Title III matters before you do anything else.

Does the ADA actually apply to your website?

Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in “places of public accommodation” — historically understood as physical spaces like stores, restaurants, and hotels. The statute doesn’t mention websites at all, because it was written in 1990. For years this left a real legal gray area, and courts around the country still don’t fully agree on the details.

The case most often cited on this point is Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, LLC, decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in January 2019. A blind customer sued Domino’s after he couldn’t complete an order on its website and app using screen-reading software. The Ninth Circuit ruled that because the website and app connected customers to the goods and services of Domino’s physical restaurants, the ADA applied to them — and that Domino’s had received fair notice of that obligation even without a specific website accessibility regulation. The Supreme Court declined to review the case later that year, letting the ruling stand. On remand, a federal district court ordered Domino’s to bring its website into conformance with WCAG 2.0.

The Department of Justice has taken a consistent public position on this question. In March 2022, it published formal guidance stating that it has “consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.” That guidance points businesses toward WCAG and the federal government’s own Section 508 standards as useful reference points, but it stops short of naming a single mandatory technical standard for private businesses. In April 2024, DOJ went further for one category of website — it issued a final rule requiring state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA specifically. That rule doesn’t bind private e-commerce businesses, but it’s a strong signal of which standard regulators consider the accepted baseline.

Practically, for a US-based online store: if your site is how customers browse products, add items to a cart, and check out, it is functioning as a place of public accommodation in the eyes of most courts that have ruled on this, regardless of your revenue or headcount. Being small does not put you outside the law’s reach — it just changes the odds of being targeted, and how much a dispute costs you if you are.

What actually triggers a demand letter

A demand letter is a formal letter from a plaintiff’s attorney, sent before any lawsuit is filed, asserting that your website violates the ADA and proposing a settlement to resolve the claim without going to court. It is not a lawsuit and not a judgment — it’s an opening move, usually followed by a real federal lawsuit if it’s ignored.

According to Seyfarth Shaw’s annual tracker of ADA Title III litigation (one of the most widely cited sources for this data), plaintiffs filed 8,667 ADA Title III lawsuits in or removed to federal court in 2025 — down slightly from 2024, but roughly three times the number filed in 2013. Website-specific accessibility lawsuits made up a meaningful and growing share of that total: 3,117 website cases in 2025, a 27% increase over 2024, accounting for around 36% of all Title III federal filings that year. California, Florida, New York, and Illinois consistently account for the large majority of filings.

What actually draws attention to a specific site is less about size and more about a handful of concrete, easy-to-spot barriers: images with no alternative text, form fields (especially checkout and account forms) with no visible or programmatic labels, color contrast too low to read comfortably, a checkout flow that can’t be completed using a keyboard alone, and video with no captions. These are exactly the kinds of things automated scanning tools and screen-reader testers can find in minutes on any public page, which is part of why the volume of these claims has stayed high — the barrier to identifying a target is low.

What a reasonable business can actually do

There is no way to make a website immune from a demand letter — plaintiffs’ firms sometimes send letters to businesses whose sites are already reasonably accessible. But there is a real difference, in both risk and negotiating position, between a business that has done nothing and one that can point to genuine, documented effort.

A few concrete things worth doing before anything shows up in your inbox:

• Get an independent accessibility review against WCAG 2.1 AA, not just an automated scan. Automated tools (including free browser extensions) reliably catch some issues — missing alt text, contrast failures — and reliably miss others, like whether a screen reader user can actually complete checkout or whether keyboard focus gets trapped in a modal. A scan plus manual testing catches both categories.
• Fix what you find and keep records. Documentation matters: the audit, the fix log, developer invoices, and any ongoing monitoring you put in place. If a claim ever does arrive, being able to show real, dated remediation work is a materially different position than showing nothing.
• Avoid the “quick fix” trap of accessibility overlay widgets (small JavaScript snippets that claim to auto-remediate a site). They don’t rewrite your underlying code, and several recent legal disputes specifically involve overlays failing to fix the barriers a plaintiff actually encountered. A widget layered on top of an inaccessible checkout does not make the checkout accessible.
• Ask a tax professional about the Disabled Access Credit (IRS Form 8826). Under Internal Revenue Code Section 44, a small business — defined as one with $1 million or less in prior-year gross receipts, or 30 or fewer full-time employees — can claim a nonrefundable credit equal to 50% of eligible access expenditures between $250 and $10,250 in a tax year (the first $250 isn’t creditable), for a maximum credit of $5,000. The IRS doesn’t spell out whether a given website remediation project qualifies as an “eligible access expenditure,” so this is a question for your accountant on your specific costs, not something to assume.

If you’ve already received a letter

Don’t ignore it, and don’t panic into a rushed fix either. Get it in front of an attorney who specifically handles ADA Title III matters before responding to the sender or making public changes to your site. Preserve a copy of your site as it existed when the letter arrived. From there, the legal and technical response is genuinely case-specific — which is exactly the kind of judgment call that belongs to a lawyer looking at your actual site and your actual letter, not a general article.

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This article is provided for general educational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Every business’s situation is different, and ADA Title III case law continues to develop; consult a qualified attorney for guidance specific to your website and circumstances.