In 2016, a legally blind man named Guillermo Robles tried to order a pizza on the Domino's website using a screen reader. The screen reader couldn't parse the menu. He tried the mobile app. Same result. The thing most people do in ninety seconds was, for him, impossible. He sued.
Domino's argued that the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, couldn't possibly apply to a website. Congress never mentioned the internet when it wrote the law. The ADA, they said, covered physical places of public accommodation, restaurants, hotels, stores, not pixels on a screen. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. In January 2019, the court ruled that a website tied to a physical business was itself a place of public accommodation, and Domino's had to make it usable by customers with disabilities. Domino's appealed to the Supreme Court. In October 2019, the Court declined to hear the case, and the ruling stood.
That was the moment the plaintiffs' playbook changed.
In the five years since, tens of thousands of ADA website complaints have been filed in U.S. federal and state courts, most of them against small and mid-sized businesses. Plaintiffs' firms have industrialized the process. They run automated accessibility scans against a list of target sites, generate a violations report, file a complaint, and settle for five figures. The biggest targets make the press. The mid-market ones just pay and move on. The small ones, often, find out what Title III of the ADA means for the first time when a demand letter arrives in the inbox.
Most of the sites getting sued are not Domino's. They're local car dealers, regional retailers, medical practices, law firms, construction companies, the same kind of business that fills a shopping center at the edge of town. Their websites were built by a freelancer eight years ago, refreshed twice since, and have never been audited for anything beyond the homepage hero photo.
I've sat across from business owners the week they were served. The reaction is always the same: nobody told us this applied to us. And they're not wrong, nobody does. The web designer doesn't bring it up. The marketing agency doesn't bring it up. The hosting company doesn't bring it up. It sits in the blind spot between legal and IT, and neither side is incentivized to find it first.
Accessibility isn't a feature. It's a legal surface.
What the ADA actually requires on the web
The ADA itself doesn't spell out technical rules for websites. The courts, and the Department of Justice, have effectively adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at the AA level as the working standard. The guidelines cover things that sound mundane and are deceptively specific:
- Every meaningful image has alternative text that describes it to a screen reader.
- Every form field has a programmatically associated label, not just a grey placeholder that disappears when you start typing.
- Color contrast between text and background meets minimum ratios, so low-vision users can read the content.
- The entire site can be navigated with a keyboard alone, no mouse required.
- Video content has captions, and audio has transcripts.
- Dynamic elements like modals, dropdowns, and carousels announce themselves correctly to assistive technology.
None of these are glamorous. All of them are easy to miss. A site can look pristine on a designer's Retina display and be functionally unusable for the roughly one in four U.S. adults who have some form of disability that affects how they use the web.
The quiet part is that most of the fixes aren't expensive. Adding alternative text to an image is a one-afternoon job. Labeling a form field is a one-line code change. Fixing color contrast is a stylesheet tweak. The reason sites fail isn't that accessibility is hard. It's that nobody on the team is watching for it, and by the time a demand letter arrives, the fixes have to be made on a legal deadline, under pressure, often with a consultant billing by the hour.
Penalties
When the Department of Justice brings a Title III enforcement action, the civil penalties are set by federal regulation and adjusted for inflation each year. As of the most recent adjustment, a first violation can reach roughly $102,000, and each subsequent violation can reach roughly $205,000. DOJ enforcement is rare against small businesses, but the numbers set the ceiling, and they're the figures that show up in a demand letter to make the recipient's stomach drop.
The more common risk, for most businesses, isn't the DOJ. It's private litigation, and California is where that math gets ugly. The Unruh Civil Rights Act (California Civil Code §§ 51–52) treats any ADA violation as an Unruh violation automatically, and Unruh carries statutory damages of $4,000 per offense. Each separate visit by a plaintiff to an inaccessible site can be counted as a separate offense. The plaintiff doesn't have to prove they suffered actual damages. Attorneys' fees are recoverable on top. A single plaintiff documenting three visits to a non-compliant site has, on paper, a $12,000 claim before fees, and plaintiffs' firms know how to build a record that multiplies from there. California accounts for a disproportionate share of ADA web filings in the country for exactly this reason.
In practice, very few of these cases go to trial. The economics drive everything to settlement, and settlements for small and mid-sized businesses typically land in the five figures, often $10,000 to $25,000 for a first demand letter, higher if the case is filed and litigated. That number is not a judgment on the merits of the claim. It's what it costs to make the file close.
The overlay trap
In the last five years, a cottage industry has sprung up selling accessibility "overlays," JavaScript widgets you drop onto your site that claim to make it compliant on contact. You've seen them: a little accessibility icon floating in the corner, a panel that offers to change font sizes or contrast.
Courts have increasingly rejected overlays as sufficient compliance. Disability advocacy groups have publicly condemned them. Several overlay vendors have themselves been named as co-defendants in accessibility suits, because the widgets don't reliably fix the underlying markup, they just paper over it for sighted users who don't know the difference.
The honest answer is that accessibility is a property of the underlying code, not a bolt-on. If the form field isn't labeled in the HTML, no widget is going to save you. The fix has to live where a screen reader will find it.
How Lanovix handles this
We treat accessibility the way we treat security: as a baseline, not a line item. Every site we build is audited against WCAG 2.1 AA before it ships, and every site we maintain gets a scheduled re-audit on the calendar, because accessibility drift is real. A single marketing push adds an uncaptioned video and breaks compliance on a page that used to pass. A plugin update changes how a form is labeled. A new hero image goes live without alt text. These are small events that add up quickly, and they're exactly the kind of thing an automated scan catches in minutes if someone is running one.
For existing sites, we run a prioritized audit. Not every violation is equal. A missing alt tag on a decorative border graphic is not the same as a checkout form a blind user can't submit. We sort findings by severity and by user impact, and we fix the things that actually lock people out first. The long tail gets scheduled into the normal content cadence, not a panic sprint on a legal clock.
The Robles case didn't invent website accessibility law. It just put a floor under it and gave the plaintiffs' bar a template. The sites getting sued today are the sites that could have passed a modest audit six months ago, and didn't. The difference between those two outcomes is whether somebody on the team was paying attention.
If your website has never been audited, or the last audit was a scan run by the agency that built it, get in touch. We'll tell you what a plaintiffs' firm would find, before they find it.