Domino’s Pizza learned the hard way. A blind customer couldn’t order from their website using a screen reader. He sued. Domino’s argued websites weren’t covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The case went to the Supreme Court.
Domino’s lost.
That was 2019. Since then, web accessibility lawsuits in the US have exploded. Over 4,000 filed in 2023 alone. Companies large and small, across every industry. The legal situation shifted from “maybe you should” to “you’re liable if you don’t.”
The Rights Framework
Before getting into compliance checklists, understand what’s actually at stake.
UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes digital participation as a basic human right. Not a nice-to-have. Not a market opportunity. A right, equivalent to physical access to buildings and public spaces.
This philosophical foundation matters because it shapes how courts interpret ambiguous laws. When legislation written before the web existed gets applied to websites, judges look at underlying principles. The principle here: people with disabilities deserve equal access to participate in society. Digital spaces are now where much of society happens.
More than one billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. That’s 15% of the global population, according to WHO. The number grows as populations age. Every year, the percentage of users who need accessible interfaces increases.
Framing accessibility as charity or bonus feature misses the point. It’s baseline infrastructure for a large portion of humanity.
Where the Law Stands Now
United States: The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) doesn’t explicitly mention websites. Courts have increasingly interpreted it to cover them anyway. The Domino’s precedent opened the floodgates. Department of Justice guidance treats web accessibility as ADA requirement. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have industrialized the lawsuit process with automated scanning, templated complaints, and high-volume filings.
European Union: The European Accessibility Act takes effect in 2025 with explicit requirements for private sector websites. No interpretation needed. E-commerce, banking, transport, and other sectors face concrete mandates. Member states implement national versions with varying enforcement mechanisms.
United Kingdom: Post-Brexit, the UK maintains its own accessibility regulations derived from EU directives. Public sector requirements already in force; private sector expanding.
Canada, Australia, and others: Similar patterns. Accessibility requirements moving from public sector to private, from voluntary to mandatory, from vague to specific.
Direction is uniform across jurisdictions. Details differ. Trajectory doesn’t.
WCAG: The Technical Standard
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines emerged from W3C as the international technical reference. Most laws point to WCAG rather than inventing separate standards.
Three conformance levels exist. Level A covers basic requirements: text alternatives for images, keyboard navigation, no seizure-inducing flashing. Level AA adds more: sufficient color contrast, resizable text, consistent navigation. Level AAA pushes further into enhanced accessibility.
Most legal frameworks require AA conformance as minimum. That’s the practical target for compliance purposes.
WCAG 2.2 is current. WCAG 3.0 is in draft, promising a different scoring approach. For now, 2.2 AA is what you’re measured against.
Guidelines organize around four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Content must be perceivable through various senses and assistive technologies. Interface must be operable via different input methods. Information must be understandable to diverse cognitive abilities. Technical implementation must be robust enough to work reliably with current and future assistive technologies.
What Lawsuits Actually Look Like
Most accessibility lawsuits follow a pattern.
Plaintiff encounters barriers on a website. Can’t complete a purchase, can’t access information, can’t navigate basic functions. Plaintiff or their attorney documents the barriers, often using automated scanning tools that generate instant reports.
Complaint cites specific WCAG failures. Missing alt text on images. Insufficient color contrast. Form fields without labels. Videos without captions. Keyboard traps where users can’t navigate away from certain elements.
Defendant faces a choice: settle or fight. Fighting is expensive and risky since the Domino’s precedent established that websites fall under ADA. Most companies settle. Settlement typically includes monetary payment plus agreement to remediate and maintain accessibility.
Some plaintiffs are genuine users who hit genuine barriers. Some plaintiffs file strategically, targeting easily-documented violations at scale. The law doesn’t distinguish based on motive. If your site has barriers, you’re vulnerable regardless of who finds them.
The Overlay Trap
Faced with accessibility pressure, some companies reach for quick fixes. Accessibility overlay widgets are JavaScript tools promising one-line installation and instant compliance.
These don’t work. Not in the legal sense, and often not in the practical sense either.
Overlays can’t fix underlying markup problems. They try to patch surface symptoms while leaving structural barriers intact. Screen reader users frequently report that overlays make sites harder to use, not easier. The automated “fixes” conflict with how assistive technologies actually work.
Legally, overlays don’t provide safe harbor. Courts and regulators look at actual accessibility, not installed widgets. Multiple lawsuits have named sites using overlay products. The overlay didn’t protect them.
National Federation of the Blind and other disability advocacy organizations have publicly opposed overlays. When the people you’re supposedly helping say your solution makes things worse, that’s a credibility problem in court.
Real accessibility requires fixing actual code. There’s no shortcut that survives legal scrutiny.
Third-Party Liability Questions
Your site embeds a chat widget from one vendor, payment processing from another, video player from a third, analytics tracking from several more. One of these components has accessibility barriers. Who’s liable?
Generally, you are.
User relationships are with your site. Their experience happens on your pages. If a third-party component creates barriers, those barriers exist in your user’s experience of your site.
This doesn’t mean vendors have no responsibility. You may have contractual recourse against them. But the user suing you doesn’t care about your vendor relationships. They care about whether they could use your site.
Practical implication: accessibility requirements extend to procurement decisions. Before integrating third-party tools, evaluate their accessibility. Build accessibility requirements into vendor contracts. Make it their problem contractually, even though it remains your problem legally.
The Business Case Beyond Compliance
Legal requirements create floor, not ceiling.
Accessible sites work better for everyone. High contrast helps in bright sunlight. Keyboard navigation helps when mouse breaks. Captions help in noisy environments. Clear hierarchy helps anyone scanning quickly. These aren’t disability accommodations. They’re usability improvements that happen to emerge from accessibility work.
One billion people with disabilities represents market size. Aging populations grow that number yearly. Inaccessible sites forfeit this revenue. Not through explicit exclusion but through friction that pushes users elsewhere.
SEO correlates with accessibility. Search crawlers share characteristics with screen readers. Both need clear structure, meaningful text, logical navigation. Technical accessibility improvements often produce search ranking improvements as side effect.
None of these business arguments should be necessary. Rights don’t require ROI (Return on Investment) justification. But if your organization needs business case to fund accessibility work, the case exists.
Starting Points for Compliance
Automated scanning catches roughly 30-40% of WCAG issues. Tools like WAVE, axe, and Lighthouse identify missing alt text, contrast failures, missing form labels. The easily-detected violations.
Other 60-70% requires human evaluation. Does the alt text actually describe the image meaningfully? Does the heading structure make logical sense? Can a keyboard user complete all workflows? Automated tools can’t answer these questions.
Manual testing with actual assistive technologies reveals what automated scans miss. Screen readers like NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver. Keyboard-only navigation. Voice control software. These show how real users with real tools experience your site.
User testing with people who have disabilities provides insight no simulation captures. Watching someone navigate your site with the tools they use daily reveals barriers you’d never spot otherwise.
Prioritization matters when resources are limited. Focus first on critical user journeys: homepage, navigation, key conversion paths. A fully accessible checkout flow matters more than a fully accessible archived blog post from 2015.
Ongoing Obligation
Accessibility isn’t a project with an end date. Sites change. Content updates. New features ship. Each change can introduce new barriers.
Building accessibility into development process prevents regression. Automated accessibility checks in CI/CD pipelines catch obvious violations before deployment. Design system components built accessible by default reduce per-feature overhead. Training for developers and content creators spreads capability across the organization.
Documentation helps demonstrate good faith. If lawsuit comes, showing systematic accessibility program, regular audits, and documented remediation efforts strengthens defense. It doesn’t guarantee immunity, but it shows different posture than willful neglect.
FAQ
We’re a small business with limited budget. Where do we start?
Run a free automated scan first. WAVE or Lighthouse give immediate feedback. Fix the obvious stuff: add alt text to images, ensure form fields have labels, check color contrast. These cover the most commonly-cited violations in lawsuits and cost nothing but time. As budget allows, expand to manual testing and professional audit.
Do accessibility overlays provide any legal protection?
No. Multiple companies using overlays have been sued successfully. Courts look at actual accessibility, not installed tools. Disability advocacy organizations actively oppose overlays. If your legal strategy relies on an overlay, you need a new strategy.
Our site uses lots of complex data visualizations. How do we make those accessible?
Text alternatives that convey the key insight, not just “chart showing data.” Data tables as alternative to visual charts. Described trends and patterns for users who can’t see the visual relationships. Some complexity genuinely can’t be fully conveyed non-visually, but effort toward meaningful alternatives matters for both users and legal posture.
How often should we audit for accessibility?
After major redesigns or feature launches, definitely. Otherwise, annual full audit plus automated scanning integrated into regular deployment process. Content-heavy sites need more frequent checks since content updates can introduce issues. Catch problems before users or plaintiffs find them.
What’s the risk if we do nothing?
Lawsuit risk increases yearly as legal precedent solidifies and plaintiff attorney infrastructure grows. Beyond lawsuits: reputational damage, lost customers with disabilities and their networks, SEO disadvantages. Doing nothing is a decision with compounding consequences.
Sources
United States Courts. Robles v. Domino’s Pizza LLC. Case documentation and ruling, 2019.
UsableNet. 2023 Year End Web Accessibility Lawsuit Report. usablenet.com
World Health Organization. Disability and health fact sheet. who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health
W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2. w3.org/TR/WCAG22
European Commission. European Accessibility Act overview. ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202
National Federation of the Blind. Statement on accessibility overlays. nfb.org