ADA web accessibility lawsuits against small and mid-size businesses have climbed steadily for years, and Texas is one of the more active states for them. Most business owners find out their website has a problem the same way (a demand letter arrives citing specific accessibility failures, often before they’ve ever heard the term “WCAG.” Here’s what the law actually requires, what a lawsuit typically targets, and how to fix the real risk rather than just the appearance of one.
What the ADA Actually Says About Websites
The ADA itself, written in 1990, never mentions websites) there’s no federal statute or regulation that spells out a specific technical standard a website must meet. What’s happened instead is that courts have increasingly treated a business’s website as a “place of public accommodation” under Title III, the same category as a physical storefront, and applied the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the practical benchmark for compliance in settlements and rulings. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the standard most attorneys, auditors, and courts reference today, and the official DOJ guidance on web accessibility confirms this is the benchmark regulators point to as well.
This ambiguity is exactly why demand letters are so common: there’s no government certification that makes you provably “compliant,” which means there’s also no bulletproof defense (only a documented, good-faith effort toward the WCAG standard, which is the strongest position you can actually take.
What Lawsuits and Demand Letters Actually Target
The overwhelming majority of accessibility demand letters cite the same handful of issues, usually found by an automated scanner rather than a human tester:
- Missing alt text on images, which means a screen reader user gets no information about what an image shows or what a linked image does.
- Poor color contrast between text and its background, which affects low-vision users specifically.
- Forms without proper labels, so a screen reader can’t tell a user what a given input field is asking for.
- No keyboard navigation, meaning a user who can’t operate a mouse (due to a motor disability, or simply using assistive tech) can’t reach or activate key elements like menus, buttons, or a checkout flow.
- Missing or improper heading structure, which screen reader users rely on to navigate a page’s sections the way sighted users rely on visual scanning.
Notice that every one of these is also just… bad web design. Fixing them makes the site more usable for every visitor, not only the subset with a documented disability.
What “Compliance” Actually Looks Like in Practice
There’s no finish line where a site becomes permanently compliant) every new page, image, and form is a new opportunity to introduce an accessibility gap. What courts and settlements tend to look favorably on is an ongoing, documented process: a real audit against WCAG 2.1 AA (not just an automated scanner report, which misses context-dependent issues like whether alt text is actually descriptive), a remediation plan with dates, and periodic re-checks as the site changes. A business that can show this kind of process is in a materially stronger position than one that’s never looked at the issue, even if neither is “perfectly” compliant.
The Restaurant-Specific Angle
Restaurant websites see a disproportionate share of this activity because menus are so often published as an image or PDF with no accessible text version underneath (completely invisible to a screen reader, and also unreadable to Google for SEO purposes. We build every restaurant site with a genuinely accessible, text-based menu system as standard, which solves the accessibility issue and the SEO issue with the same fix) see our restaurant menu design approach for how that works in practice.
How Mindshare Consulting Helps
Every site we build starts from a WCAG 2.1 AA baseline (proper alt text, sufficient color contrast, labeled forms, full keyboard navigation, and a clean heading structure) rather than treating accessibility as a fix applied after a complaint arrives. Our Web Design Austin Texas page covers our full build standard, and for existing sites, we run an accessibility audit to identify and prioritize the specific gaps that carry the most legal and usability risk.
Conclusion
ADA web accessibility isn’t a box you check once, it’s an ongoing standard that happens to also make your site better for every visitor and every search engine crawler. The businesses that get sued are almost always the ones that never looked at the issue at all, not the ones with an imperfect but documented, active effort toward WCAG 2.1 AA. Start with an honest audit, fix the highest-risk items first, and build the check into how you publish new content going forward.
