Website Accessibility and the ADA for Florida Businesses

What the ADA says about business websites

The Department of Justice's web guidance says Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination by businesses open to the public and that an inaccessible website can limit access to a business's goods and services. The Department has no regulation setting detailed standards for businesses, but says its longstanding interpretation applies to web accessibility.

The same guidance says businesses have flexibility in how they comply with the ADA's general requirements of nondiscrimination and effective communication, and that they must comply. It points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the federal Section 508 standards as existing technical guidance.

It also lists the barriers it sees most often: poor color contrast, information conveyed by color alone, images without text alternatives, videos without captions, online forms that cannot be used with assistive technology and navigation that only works with a mouse.

What WCAG is and why everyone points to it

WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, developed through the World Wide Web Consortium as a single shared standard for web content accessibility. It is organized under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Each requirement is graded at Level A, AA or AAA. Level AA is the common target.

The W3C published WCAG 2.0 in 2008, WCAG 2.1 in 2018 and WCAG 2.2 in 2023, each adding requirements without removing the earlier ones. The W3C notes that WCAG 2.2 is also an approved ISO standard. Because the Department of Justice names WCAG in its guidance and adopted it in its government rule, it has become the reference point for private businesses too.

What the 2024 Title II rule does and does not cover

The Department of Justice's 2024 rule applies to state and local governments under Title II of the ADA. It makes WCAG 2.1 Level AA the technical standard for their web content and mobile apps. It does not apply to private businesses, though it shows which standard the Department considers the measure.

The rule covers agencies and departments of state and local governments, special purpose districts and commuter authorities. Compliance dates are staggered by the size of the government, and ADA.gov notes that an interim final rule in April 2026 extended them. It includes narrow exceptions, such as archived content and certain preexisting documents.

For a private company in Palm Beach County, the practical effects are indirect. The county, its cities, the school district and other public bodies are all Title II entities. Vendors who build or supply web content and apps for them should expect accessibility requirements in contracts. Ask an attorney how the rule touches your own agreements.

Why Florida businesses receive demand letters and lawsuits

Florida is one of the most active states for this litigation. The law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks filings each year, counted 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits nationally in 2025. New York had 1,021 and Florida had 961, almost double Florida's 470 the year before.

Seyfarth's count covers lawsuits filed in federal court only. It does not include state court cases or demand letters that never become lawsuits, so the real volume of claims is higher. The firm also reports that Florida ranked second in the country for all ADA Title III federal filings in 2025, with 1,823 cases.

The pattern in these cases is consistent: a plaintiff alleges that a business open to the public has a website that a person using a screen reader or keyboard cannot use. Restaurants, retailers, hotels, medical offices and other consumer-facing businesses are frequent targets, and this county has a great many of them. Whether a specific claim has merit is a legal question for your attorney.

Why an overlay widget is not a fix

No widget makes a website compliant by itself. The Federal Trade Commission approved a final order requiring the overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million and barring it from claiming its automated products can make any website WCAG compliant unless it has evidence to support the claim.

The FTC alleged the company's claims that its plug-in could make any website compliant were false, misleading or unsubstantiated. The Department of Justice's own guidance is more measured about automated tools in general: it says automated checkers and overlays can be helpful but need to be used carefully, and that pairing a manual check with automated checkers gives a better sense of a site's accessibility.

The takeaway for a business owner is simple. Scanners find some problems. A toolbar bolted onto a broken site does not repair the underlying code or content. Real fixes happen in the design, the markup and the words.

A practical accessibility checklist

Start with the checks the W3C publishes as easy first steps: page titles, image text alternatives, headings, color contrast, visible keyboard focus, form labels and captions. The W3C warns that a page can pass these and still have significant barriers, so treat them as a starting point and not a certification.

The last item catches many businesses. A restaurant's menu posted as an image, a reservation widget or an embedded scheduling tool is part of the experience even though someone else built it. Test the whole path a customer takes, not just your own pages.

• Every page has a unique, descriptive title
• Images that carry meaning have text alternatives; decorative ones are marked as decorative
• Headings are real headings, in a logical order
• Text has enough contrast against its background, including text over photos
• Everything works with a keyboard alone, and you can always see where the focus is
• Form fields have labels, required fields are identified and errors are explained in text
• Videos have captions and audio has a transcript
• Nothing relies on color alone to convey meaning
• Pages still work when text is zoomed
• PDFs, menus and booking or checkout tools from third parties are checked too

When to call an attorney

Call an attorney as soon as you receive a demand letter or a complaint, and before you reply, pay or publish an accessibility statement that makes promises. A web team can audit and repair a site. Only a lawyer can advise on liability, settlement and what to say in writing.

The two jobs work together. Counsel handles the claim while the web team documents the site's current state, fixes the barriers in priority order and keeps a record of what changed and when. A business with no claim against it can do the same work on its own schedule, which is always cheaper than doing it under a deadline. Nothing in this guide is legal advice.