ADA and Website Accessibility: What California Businesses Should Know

California sees more website accessibility claims than almost anywhere in the United States, and small businesses are often on the receiving end. Behind the legal risk is a simpler point: a meaningful share of your customers have a disability that affects how they use the web, and a site they cannot use is a sale you do not make.

This is a plain-language overview, not legal advice. If you have received a demand letter, speak to a lawyer before doing anything else.

What the law says

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses open to the public to provide equal access to their goods and services. The US Department of Justice has stated in its published guidance that this includes websites. For private businesses, the ADA does not name a single technical standard, which is why the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C, have become the practical benchmark that courts, settlements and agencies refer to.

California adds its own layer. The Unruh Civil Rights Act treats a violation of the ADA as a violation of state law and allows statutory damages per violation, which is one reason so many claims are filed in the state.

What WCAG asks for

WCAG is organised around four principles. Content should be perceivable (for example, images have text alternatives and videos have captions), operable (everything works with a keyboard), understandable (labels, instructions and error messages are clear) and robust (it works with assistive technology such as screen readers). Level AA of WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 is the level most organisations aim for.

The most common problems

• Text with too little contrast against its background.
• Images without alt text, or with alt text that says nothing useful.
• Forms whose fields have no labels, so a screen reader cannot say what to type.
• Menus, pop-ups and sliders that cannot be reached or closed with a keyboard.
• Videos without captions.
• PDFs, menus and booking widgets that are images of text.
• Headings used for looks rather than structure.

A sensible first month

1. Try your own site with only a keyboard: Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and Escape. Can you reach and use everything, and can you always see where you are?
2. Run the W3C’s Easy Checks and a free automated scanner. Automated tools find only a portion of issues, but they find the obvious ones fast.
3. Fix the templates first: header, navigation, footer, forms. One fix there repairs every page.
4. Add an accessibility statement with a contact method, and respond when someone reports a barrier.
5. Make accessibility part of how new pages are built, so the problems do not return.

A word on overlays

Widgets that promise instant compliance by adding a toolbar to your site are heavily marketed to small businesses. They do not repair the underlying code, many users of assistive technology find they get in the way, and businesses using them have still received claims. Fixing the site itself is slower and more reliable.

Accessibility helps everyone

Clear contrast helps people reading a phone in sunlight. Captions help people watching without sound. Good headings and labels help search engines understand a page. Our website accessibility basics article goes through the fundamentals in more depth.

Where Cloud9 fits

Cloud9 Web Developments builds accessibility into design and development rather than bolting it on afterwards, and our own site includes accessibility controls. From our office in Hawthorne we serve businesses across Los Angeles and the rest of California. Read about our UI/UX design and website redesign services, or request a quote for an accessibility review.