Short answer: probably yes — and the fact that the law is genuinely unsettled does not protect you. Business owners in the New York area get demand letters over their websites regularly, and most of them are small: a grocery, a caterer, a therapist's office, a travel agency. Here is what the law actually says, what it does not, and what is worth doing about it.
What the ADA actually covers
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a 1990 federal civil rights law, divided into parts called Titles. Title III is the one that matters for a private business. It bars discrimination "in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation."
That phrase — place of public accommodation — is the whole fight. The statute defines it with a list of twelve categories, and the list is specific. It names a "bakery, grocery store," a "restaurant, bar, or other establishment serving food or drink," a "travel service," the "office of an accountant or lawyer," a "pharmacy," and the "professional office of a health care provider." If your business fits one of those categories and customers can walk in, you are a public accommodation. That much is rarely disputed. Whether your website is part of it — that is.
One exemption matters a great deal in our community: Title III does not apply to religious organizations or to entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship, nor to genuinely private clubs. A shul, and often a mosad it controls, sits outside Title III entirely. That is a narrower shelter than it sounds — the exemption turns on control, not on who the customers are, so a business owned by observant people is not exempt, and a religious organization can still face obligations under state or city law, under other federal statutes, or as a condition of grant funding. If you think you might be inside this exemption, it is worth an actual legal opinion rather than an assumption.
What a plaintiff can actually get
Title III awards no money damages to a private plaintiff in federal court. A plaintiff wins an injunction — a court order to fix the site — plus attorneys' fees and costs. The fees are the engine.
Two things change that math. The Department of Justice, when it brings its own enforcement action, can seek civil penalties and can also seek damages for the people affected; the statute set the penalties at up to $50,000 for a first violation and $100,000 for later ones, figures that have since been adjusted upward for inflation. A DOJ action against a neighborhood store is rare. Far more relevant: most complaints are filed under the ADA and a state law that does allow damages. California's Unruh Civil Rights Act sets a statutory minimum of $4,000 per violation and treats a proven ADA violation as an Unruh violation as well — that is California law, and it does not apply to a New York business. In New York, the State and City Human Rights Laws both permit compensatory damages, and the City law permits punitive damages too. Practitioners generally credit that difference for much of why New York's federal courts are among the busiest venues in the country for these cases.
Do the courts agree that a website counts? No.
Federal appeals courts have genuinely split, and have for years. Two camps:
- The website must be tied to a physical place. Several circuits read "place of public accommodation" to mean an actual location, so a website is covered only where it has a "nexus" to one — it is how you see the menu, check hours, order for pickup. The Ninth Circuit took this route in Robles v. Domino's Pizza (2019); the Supreme Court declined the appeal.
- A public accommodation need not be a building at all. The First Circuit said so in 1994 in Carparts Distribution Center v. Automotive Wholesaler's Association of New England, and the Seventh Circuit has read the statute the same way. On that view, a business existing only online can still be covered.
The Eleventh Circuit held in Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores in April 2021 that a website is not itself a place of public accommodation — then, in December 2021, vacated its own opinion and dismissed the appeal as moot, because the injunction at issue had already expired. The holding is therefore not binding precedent. That is a fair snapshot of how stable this area is. The Supreme Court took a related standing case, Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, in 2023, but held it moot and sent it back without deciding the standing question, let alone the coverage question.
The Second Circuit, covering New York, still has not squarely decided whether a standalone website with no storefront is covered — and the district courts underneath it are openly split, which is the part that matters if you are here. For years most New York judges let these cases proceed. But the Eastern District held the other way in Winegard v. Newsday and Martinez v. MyLife.com (both 2021), and in September 2024 the Southern District's chief judge dismissed Mejia v. High Brew Coffee on the ground that an online-only website is not a place of public accommodation. Other judges in the same courthouse continue to disagree. So the honest statement for a New York business is that the outcome of a standalone-website case may turn on which judge draws it, and that could change the day the Second Circuit finally rules.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA: the standard nobody passed into law
The ADA names no technical standard for websites. No statute says your buttons need a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1. Yet there is a de facto standard everyone uses: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international body that maintains the web's technical standards. WCAG comes in versions — 2.0 (2008), 2.1 (2018), 2.2 (2023) — and three conformance levels: A, AA, AAA. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is what settlement agreements and consent decrees point to, over and over. AAA is stricter than most sites can meet, and the W3C itself does not recommend it as a blanket policy for whole sites.
Where the Department of Justice stands
The DOJ has said consistently for well over a decade that Title III applies to public accommodations' websites — in a 2018 letter to members of Congress, and in nonbinding Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA published in March 2022. Its position: the obligation exists, businesses have flexibility in how to meet it, and the absence of a regulation does not mean you are off the hook. It never wrote that regulation for private business; rulemaking begun in 2010 was withdrawn in December 2017.
In April 2024 it did issue a real rule — but only under Title II, covering state and local government. That rule adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the binding standard for public entities, phased in by population size. The original deadlines were April 2026 for entities serving 50,000 or more people and April 2027 for smaller entities and special district governments; in April 2026 the DOJ pushed both back a year by interim final rule, to April 2027 and April 2028, leaving WCAG 2.1 Level AA itself untouched. The Department has also said it intends to re-examine its ADA Title II and Title III regulations generally, so this timeline is not finished moving. None of it applies to your store. What it does is put WCAG 2.1 Level AA into black-letter federal regulation, which makes the standard much harder to call arbitrary when a plaintiff points at it.
What a demand letter looks like
It arrives by certified mail or email on a law firm's letterhead. It names a client with a disability — usually blindness or low vision — who says they tried to use your site on a particular date and could not. It lists specific failures: images without text alternatives, unlabeled form fields, a checkout that cannot be completed with a keyboard. Those items are frequently copied straight out of a free automated scan. It demands remediation plus a payment, on a short deadline.
The number is priced deliberately: low enough that paying costs less than fighting, high enough to be worth the sender's time. Small stores get picked because they have no in-house counsel and settle fast, and because a transactional site makes the claim concrete — "I could not buy the item" beats "the hours page confused me." Note also that nobody browsed your store and got frustrated. A script crawled it.
If one arrives
- Do not ignore it. That is how a letter becomes a filed complaint.
- Do not reply yourself. Anything you write is a statement by the business.
- Call your insurance broker. Some general liability, employment practices, and cyber policies cover ADA defense costs.
- Preserve the site as it is today with full-page screenshots. The complaint describes your site on a date; keep your own record of it.
- Then fix it for real. Any settlement binds only that one plaintiff, so remediation is the only thing that lowers the next filer's odds.
The failures that actually show up
| Problem | Who it locks out | Typical example |
|---|---|---|
| Images with no text alternative | Screen reader users | Product photos named IMG_4471.jpg |
| Unlabeled form fields | Screen reader users | Checkout fields labeled only by gray placeholder text |
| Low color contrast | Low vision, older customers | Light gray on white; AA wants 4.5:1 body, 3:1 large text and controls |
| Keyboard traps | Anyone who cannot use a mouse | A popup you can Tab into but not out of |
| No visible focus indicator | Keyboard users | A theme that removed the outline "because it looked ugly" |
| Mouse-only menus | Keyboard and touch users | Category drop-downs that open on hover only |
| Inaccessible modals | Screen reader and keyboard users | A "closed for Yom Tov" overlay that Escape does not close |
| Scanned PDFs | Screen reader users | A caterer's menu that is a photo of paper inside a PDF |
| Video without captions | Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers | A recorded class or shiur |
| No language declaration | Screen reader users | A Yiddish page read aloud in English phonetics |
That last one matters here. A screen reader picks its pronunciation voice from the page's declared language, so an unmarked Hebrew or Yiddish page comes out as gibberish. And text set as an image — a beautifully typeset flyer exported as a JPG — is invisible to a screen reader and to Google alike. Details in our guide on Yiddish and Hebrew right-to-left websites.
Why the free scanner gave you a good score anyway
Automated checkers test what a machine can test: is there an alt attribute, does the contrast math pass, is the field programmatically tied to a label. Run them — but they catch only a minority of real WCAG failures. A scanner cannot tell you whether alt text is accurate; it is perfectly happy with a photo of a challah described as "image." Nor whether the reading order makes sense, whether a keyboard user can finish checkout, or whether an error message tells a blind customer which field is wrong. Each of those is a Level A or AA failure, and each needs a person.
The realistic test is free: unplug your mouse. Using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Space, and the arrow keys, reach every menu, open and close every popup, and complete one full order. Then turn on the screen reader you already own — VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, Narrator on Windows, or the free NVDA — and try again with your eyes closed. Ten minutes teaches you more than any scan.
Overlays are not a safe harbor
You will be sold one. An overlay is a line of JavaScript you paste into your site; it adds a floating accessibility button offering bigger text, higher contrast, a "screen reader mode." Vendors market them as making a site ADA compliant for a monthly fee.
Be careful. Overlays are widely criticized by the accessibility field — a long-running open letter known as the Overlay Fact Sheet has been signed by hundreds of practitioners, including people who build assistive technology and blind users themselves, and the National Federation of the Blind, the largest organization of blind Americans, passed a resolution in 2021 condemning the business practices of accessiBe, one of the largest overlay vendors, and revoked that company's sponsorship of its national convention. Businesses using overlays have themselves received demand letters and been sued; a widget can suggest the owner knows there is a problem and has not fixed the site underneath. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission announced an enforcement action against accessiBe over claims that its product could make any website WCAG compliant and over reviews that did not disclose the company's connection to the reviewers. The order, finalized in April 2025, requires a $1 million payment and bars the company from repeating those compliance claims.
The technical problem is simpler than the legal one: a blind customer already has a screen reader, configured over years, and an overlay injecting competing behavior can make things worse. Nothing pasted on top fixes an unlabeled checkout field underneath. Same for badges — there is no such thing as ADA certification. A compliance seal is a graphic.
What to actually do, in order
- Fix the money path first. Homepage, category and product pages, cart, checkout, contact form. That is what gets crawled and what gets pleaded.
- Do the keyboard walk-through and fix what it exposes. Focus outlines back on. Escape closes the modal. Menus open on click, not hover alone.
- Write real alt text for content images, and mark decorative ones with an empty
alt=""so screen readers skip them. "Israeli couscous, 400g bag" beats "product photo." - Label every form field visibly. Placeholder text is not a label; keep the label on screen while the customer types.
- Kill image-only PDFs and JPG flyers. Put the menu, price list, and weekly specials on a real page. Search visibility improves at the same time.
- Fix contrast to 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and controls. A design decision, not a code fix, and one of the easiest wins.
- Caption your videos. Auto-captions are a starting point — correct them, especially for Yiddish and Hebrew terms no machine gets right.
- Publish an accessibility statement with a phone number and email a real person answers, saying you aim to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Do not claim you are "fully ADA compliant" — overclaiming creates its own exposure.
- Push it onto your vendors. Booking widgets, chat bubbles, and embedded payment forms are often the worst part of a site, and you own the experience on your page no matter who wrote the code. Ask for their Accessibility Conformance Report (the filled-in version of a form called a VPAT).
The awkward questions
What does this cost?
Built in from the start, very little — accessible markup is mostly just correct markup: real headings, real buttons, real labels, adequate contrast. Retrofitting is where it gets expensive, and the cost tracks how much of your site is generated by a heavy theme or page builder you do not control. A formal audit by a specialist firm, including testing with assistive-technology users, is a real budget line, usually reserved for larger sites or a business that already has a letter. See what a website should cost, and online store legal requirements for the obligations that stack on top.
I'm on Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify. Aren't they handling it?
No. A platform gives you accessible building blocks; it cannot stop you picking a low-contrast theme, uploading a JPG menu, or installing a broken plugin. And we are not aware of any mainstream platform that indemnifies you against an ADA claim; their terms generally disclaim responsibility for it. Read your own agreement rather than taking a salesperson's word.
My site is just a brochure. No online ordering.
Still covered if you are a public accommodation with a physical location. A brochure site is a smaller target, but hours, location, and the contact form are exactly the goods and services the nexus argument is about. Less risk, not zero.
What about my Shabbos and Yom Tov closure notice?
If you disable ordering with a popup, that popup has to be reachable by keyboard, announced by a screen reader, and closable with Escape. A "we resume motzei Shabbos" overlay a screen reader cannot see is not a friendly notice — it is a wall a blind customer hits with no explanation. Same for cart countdown timers: WCAG requires, with narrow exceptions for things like live events and limits that are genuinely essential, that users be able to turn off, adjust, or extend a time limit.
If I fix it now, does the letter go away?
Not automatically — voluntarily fixing a problem after being sued does not always end a case. Fix it anyway: it improves your settlement position, and essentially every settlement requires it.
The short version
- If customers can walk into your business, assume your website is covered by ADA Title III. Courts genuinely disagree about online-only businesses, including judges within New York — but being right eventually is expensive.
- The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, though no statute or regulation names it for private business. The DOJ made it binding for state and local government in its April 2024 Title II rule, whose compliance deadlines now fall in 2027 and 2028.
- Demand letters are a volume business. Sites are found by crawling, not shopping, and a settlement binds only one plaintiff.
- Overlays and compliance badges are not a defense. There is no ADA certification, and the FTC has already acted against a major overlay vendor over compliance claims.
- Start with the keyboard test and your checkout. Unplug the mouse and try to place one order. That finds more than any scanner.
- Compliance reduces risk; it does not eliminate it. Anyone promising otherwise is selling something.
If you want your site checked properly — a real keyboard and screen reader pass, not a scanner printout — or you are planning a rebuild and want this handled from the start, tell us about the project or call 845-587-0531.