Website accessibility lawsuits aren’t just affecting major companies. Small organizations are especially vulnerable because they’re often the least able to litigate and the most likely to settle quickly.
Recently, there has been an uptick in legal claims on behalf of individuals with visual, hearing, or other disabilities. The premise is usually that digital barriers kept the person from using the organization’s website or mobile app.
In 2024, more than 4,000 of these lawsuits reportedly were filed in federal and state courts alleging failure to comply with the ADA. Some also are brought under parallel state laws that can provide for statutory monetary damages and attorneys’ fees. And that number only scrapes the surface because many more demand letters yield settlements and never make it to the courthouse.
For nonprofits, the most likely exposure points are public-facing, mission-critical parts of the website: donation pages, event registration, volunteer applications, client intake, program applications, educational resources, and job postings.
For context, the laws at issue generally prohibit disability discrimination in the “full and equal enjoyment” of any place of public accommodation. But the ADA, for example, was passed in 1990, before the modern-day internet existed, which means it was written with physical places like stores and restaurants in mind and does not expressly address website accessibility.
This mismatch has left courts scrambling to decide how a pre-internet law applies to digital spaces. (And yes, I realize the internet technically goes back way before 1990, but most of us still were rocking AOL dial-up years after Y2K and, let’s be honest, there wasn’t a ton happening on the WWW even then.)
A few circuits have ruled that there has to be a nexus between the website and a physical place of public accommodation for the ADA to apply, but the 1st Circuit has treated digital sites offering goods or services to the public as “places of public accommodation,” and the law remains unclear in many jurisdictions. Currently, most of these cases have been filed in New York, Florida, and California, but cases in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and other states are on the rise.
Anyway, most organizations settle before the dispute gets anywhere near a courtroom because, as we all know, litigation costs can be exorbitant.
So what exactly are the accessibility issues to look out for? Unfortunately, many of them are code-level issues: incompatibility with screen-reader software, missing alternate text for images, missing captions for video, poor color contrast, and plug-ins that create keyboard navigation problems, just to name a few.
If you’re now planning to talk to your web developer about getting your accessibility spruced up, prevailing wisdom is to work toward a set of international consensus standards called WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
And, unfortunately, those tempting accessibility widgets you can add to your website are not a substitute for code-level accessibility, though they might help with some user preferences.
So, where to start? A good first step you can take this week is to test your donation page, event registration pages, and contact form without using a mouse. If that doesn’t go well, you’ve got your first project.
After all, accessibility is a legal issue, but it’s also a mission issue. If your organization’s work is important enough to put online, people should be able to reach it.
