Is your website legally required to be accessible?

If you've gotten a demand letter, or just a nagging worry, about your website and the Americans with Disabilities Act, you're not alone — and the honest answer is more nuanced than most of the scary emails about it suggest.

The short version

Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination by "places of public accommodation." The ADA itself was written in 1990, before the commercial web existed, so it says nothing explicit about websites. For well over a decade, though, courts across the country have increasingly treated a business's website as an extension of its public-facing operations — particularly when that business also has a physical location, or the website is how customers access its services. The Department of Justice has repeatedly signaled the same view in guidance documents, without ever issuing a single, binding technical regulation that spells out exactly what "accessible" means for a website.

That gap is exactly why the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — a technical standard published by the W3C, not a law — became the de facto yardstick. Settlement agreements, consent decrees, and most plaintiff's attorneys reference WCAG 2.1 Level AA specifically, because it's the most widely recognized, detailed definition of "accessible" that exists, even though no statute requires it by name.

There's no certificate to earn

One of the most common misconceptions is that a business can pay for an audit and come out the other side "ADA certified." That certification doesn't exist. No government body issues one. What you can do is measure your site against WCAG, fix what it flags, and keep evidence that you made a good-faith, ongoing effort — which is a meaningfully different and more honest goal than chasing a certificate.

What this means practically

• If your business has any public-facing website, treating accessibility as a real, ongoing practice (not a one-time checkbox) is the defensible position — regardless of exactly how the legal landscape in your state continues to evolve.
• WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the standard worth aiming for, because it's what gets referenced in practice.
• Automated scanning (like AccessLens) catches a large share of common, fixable issues fast — it's a strong starting point, not a finish line. A full WCAG audit also involves some manual review that no automated tool can fully replace.
• Fixing the issues you can control is worth more than any badge or certificate you could display.

None of this is legal advice — if you're already facing a specific legal claim, talk to an attorney. But if you're trying to figure out where to start on your own, running a scan and working through what it finds is a genuinely useful first move.