Website Accessibility and the ADA in 2026: Who Has to Comply, and by When

Most of us never think about how we use a website. We see the page, click the button, fill in the form, and move on. For roughly one in four American adults, that sequence can break at any step: a button with no name, text too faint to read, a form a screen reader can't describe, a menu that only opens with a mouse.

The short answer: yes, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to websites. What that means depends on who runs the site:

The barrier is in the build, not the person

Sociology offers a useful way to think about this. In the mid-1970s, a British disability-rights group called the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) drew a line between impairment, a condition of the body or mind, and disability, the exclusion a society creates when it ignores that condition. In the early 1980s, the disabled scholar Mike Oliver gave the idea its lasting name: the social model of disability.

The model holds that people are disabled less by their bodies than by the environments built around them. A wheelchair user isn't kept out of a building by the wheelchair. They're kept out by the stairs.

The web makes the social model unusually concrete:

The Department of Justice uses nearly the same comparison in its own guidance, likening an inaccessible website to steps at the entrance of a store.

This framing matters for anyone who owns a website. You can't change how your visitors see, hear or move. You can completely control your code. Every barrier on a website was put there, usually by accident, by the people who built it, and the same people can remove it.

How inaccessible is the web in 2026?

Since 2019, the nonprofit WebAIM at Utah State University has scanned the home pages of the top one million websites each year. Its February 2026 scan found detectable failures of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) on 95.9% of home pages. That is worse than 2025's 94.8%, and it breaks six straight years of slow improvement.

The average home page had 56.1 detectable errors. Pages are also getting heavier. The average home page now has more than 1,400 elements, about 14% more than a year earlier. WebAIM links the decline to heavier reliance on third-party frameworks and AI-assisted "vibe coding" that produces more code without more care.

Automated tools can only catch part of what WCAG requires, so the real picture is worse. WebAIM estimates that fewer than 4.1% of these home pages fully conform.

The encouraging part is that the same six problems account for about 96% of every error detected, and they have topped the list for seven years running. Most of them are fixable in an afternoon.

Two more details from the report are worth knowing:

• Government sites did better than average. They averaged 42.4 errors per page, which suggests that clear rules change behavior.
• The platform isn't the main problem. WordPress home pages, which make up a quarter of the sample, averaged 52.8 errors, slightly better than the overall average. Pages with sliders, carousels, pop-up lightboxes and heavy ad scripts tended to have far more.

What the ADA requires of businesses (Title III)

Title III covers "public accommodations," meaning businesses open to the public, such as:

• stores, restaurants and banks
• medical offices and hotels
• theaters and other venues

The Justice Department has held since 1996 that the ADA applies to what these businesses offer online. Its 2022 guidance on web accessibility, which is still posted on ADA.gov, gives businesses flexibility in how they make their sites accessible. It points to WCAG as the practical benchmark.

What Title III does not have is a formal technical regulation for private websites. Rulemaking has stalled for years. In practice, courts and settlements treat WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA as the yardstick.

That gap is filled by private lawsuits, which are rising again:

• Federal filings: law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks every federal filing by hand, counted 3,117 website-accessibility lawsuits in 2025. That is a 27% increase over 2024, after two years of decline.
• Pennsylvania saw 137 federal suits in 2025, up from 103 the year before. New Jersey saw 22 in federal court.
• State courts: Seyfarth notes that plaintiffs are increasingly filing in New York and New Jersey state courts, which those federal counts don't capture.
• Other trackers that include state courts or demand letters report higher totals.

Under federal Title III, a successful private plaintiff gets a court order to fix the barriers plus their attorney's fees. There are no compensatory damages. That sounds limited until you add the legal bills on both sides. Some state laws do allow damages, and Title III requires no warning letter before a suit is filed.

Courts also disagree on whether businesses that exist only online are covered. Businesses with a physical location are the most clearly covered.

What the ADA requires of local governments (Title II)

In April 2024, the Justice Department issued the first specific web accessibility rule under Title II of the ADA.

• Who is covered:
  • states, counties, cities, boroughs and townships
  • school districts
  • special districts and authorities
  • public hospitals, clinics, libraries and transit agencies
• What is covered: their web content and mobile apps.
• The standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
• Vendors don't change it. The rule applies even when an outside company builds the site or runs the tool. That includes:
  • the web design firm that updates your pages
  • the payment portal for water bills
  • the parking app
  • the event calendar embedded on your homepage

On April 20, 2026, four days before the first deadline, the Department published an interim final rule pushing both deadlines back by one year. The standard and the scope did not change.

Population is based on the 2020 Census. A department or library uses the population of the government that runs it.

In our region:

• 2027: Northampton, Lehigh, Bucks and Montgomery counties, and cities like Allentown and Bethlehem.
• 2028: most boroughs and townships, and essentially all municipal authorities.

We build and maintain compliance-first sites for boroughs, townships and authorities; our government and municipal services page explains how. Accessibility is also only part of a municipal site's job: many residents reach it on a phone alone, which we cover in the digital divide in 2026.

Three things the extension did not change:

1. The obligation exists now. The Department says plainly that governments already must communicate effectively with people with disabilities under Title II. The dates set when the specific WCAG benchmark becomes mandatory, not when accessibility starts to matter.

2. The rules may still shift. The comment period closed June 22, 2026, and the Department has said it may propose further changes aimed at small governments. Building to WCAG 2.1 AA, or the newer WCAG 2.2, remains the safe course either way.

3. The exceptions are narrow. The rule exempts:

   • properly archived content
   • documents posted before the deadline
   • content posted by members of the public
   • individual password-protected files like a single resident's bill
   • social media posts made before the deadline

   An old PDF form that residents still use to apply for a permit does not qualify. Neither does anything posted after the deadline, archived or not.

Hospitals and health care: a parallel rule

A county-run hospital or clinic is a public entity, so Title II covers it directly. But most hospitals in our region are private, and Title III has no technical standard. That doesn't mean they're off the hook.

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act bars disability discrimination by any organization that receives federal financial assistance. For health care, that means funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), such as Medicaid. That reaches most hospitals, health systems, community health centers, nursing homes and many primary care practices.

In May 2024, HHS issued its own rule adopting WCAG 2.1 Level AA for the websites, mobile apps and kiosks of those providers, the same standard as Title II. On May 11, 2026, HHS extended its deadlines by one year:

In practice, that covers more than the hospital's home page:

• online scheduling and check-in
• patient portals and bill pay
• forms, intake paperwork and downloadable PDFs
• telehealth platforms and mobile apps

As with Title II, vendor tools count. If a third-party portal fails WCAG, it's the provider's problem.

For a large health system, this is a 2027 project. For a small practice that takes Medicaid, it's 2028, but the same habits apply: fix the common errors now, and ask every vendor for proof their tools meet WCAG 2.1 AA.

Why this is good business, not just compliance

It's a large audience. More than one in four U.S. adults has a disability, and the share rises sharply with age. A site that excludes them turns away customers, residents, patients and voters who were ready to act. (We look at that older audience in designing websites for older adults.)

It overlaps with how search and AI read your site. Google doesn't score accessibility directly. But the things accessibility requires are the same structure that search engines and AI answer tools rely on to understand a page:

• descriptive alt text
• real headings in a logical order
• link text that says where it goes
• labeled forms
• captions and a declared page language

It helps everyone. Captions help people watching with the sound off. Strong contrast helps anyone reading outdoors. Clear forms reduce abandoned inquiries for every visitor.

Where to start

1. Scan your most-used pages. A free tool like WebAIM's WAVE will flag most of the six common errors above.
2. Fix the common six first. Contrast, alt text, form labels, link and button names, and page language are usually quick wins.
3. Put the mouse away. Try to use your site with only the Tab, Enter and arrow keys. If you can't open the menu, submit the contact form, or see where you are on the page, neither can many of your visitors.
4. Check the parts you didn't build. Payment portals, booking tools, patient portals, calendars, embedded maps and PDFs are common blind spots, and under Title II and Section 504 they're still your responsibility.
5. Publish an accessibility statement with a way to report problems. The Justice Department recommends it, and it turns a frustrated visitor into a fixable ticket instead of a complaint. Here's our accessibility statement as an example.
6. Make it part of maintenance. Every new page, plugin and image can reintroduce errors. Accessibility is a habit, not a one-time project, which is why accessibility checks are part of our website development and hosting care plans.

Sources

• WebAIM, The WebAIM Million: 2026 report (updated March 30, 2026)
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Disability Impacts All of Us
• Seyfarth Shaw, Federal Court Website Accessibility Lawsuit Filings Bounce Back in 2025 (March 2026)
• U.S. Department of Justice, Fact Sheet: Title II rule on web content and mobile apps
• Federal Register, Extension of Compliance Dates (DOJ interim final rule) (April 20, 2026)
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HHS Extends Mobile and Web Accessibility Deadline (May 2026)
• Federal Register, Extension of Compliance Dates (HHS interim final rule) (May 11, 2026)
• U.S. Department of Justice, Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA (March 2022)
• Federal Trade Commission, FTC Approves Final Order Requiring accessiBe to Pay $1 Million (April 2025)
• Institute on Community Integration, University of Minnesota, The Social Model of Disability
• W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

This article began as a college sociology paper by Nathaniel Kober in 2022 and was expanded and updated in October 2026. It is general information, not legal advice. For questions about your specific obligations, consult an attorney.