ADA Website Compliance: What RI Owners Need to Know

A Lawyer in Boston Is Making a Living Off Your Website

I got a call last month from a barbershop owner on Hope Street. Not about a website redesign. He got a letter from a law firm in Massachusetts telling him his website violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. They wanted $7,500 to make it go away.

He thought it was a scam. It wasn't. The law firm had filed over 200 of these cases in the last year alone, targeting small businesses in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. His site had no alt text on images, no keyboard navigation, and his contact form couldn't be used by someone with a screen reader. Technically, they were right.

This is happening to bakeries in Cranston, salons in Pawtucket, auto shops in Warwick. If your website isn't accessible, you're a target. And the people filing these suits don't care about accessibility. They care about settlements.

What ADA Website Compliance Actually Means

The ADA was written in 1990, before most people had email. It was about wheelchair ramps and braille signs. But courts have consistently ruled that websites count as "places of public accommodation." That means your site needs to be usable by people with disabilities. Period.

The standard everyone points to is called WCAG 2.1, which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Think of it as a checklist. Can a blind person using a screen reader navigate your menu? Can someone who can't use a mouse tab through your page with a keyboard? Can a person with low vision read your text against your background color?

There are three levels: A, AA, and AAA. Most courts and the DOJ expect Level AA. That's the target. Not perfection, but a reasonable standard that covers the majority of accessibility needs.

The Lawsuits Are Real and They're Growing

In 2025, over 4,600 ADA website lawsuits were filed in federal court. That's up from about 2,300 in 2021. Almost doubled in four years. And that doesn't count the thousands of demand letters sent without ever filing, because most business owners just pay to make it stop.

Rhode Island businesses are not exempt. The First Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers RI, has ruled that websites are covered under Title III of the ADA. There's no gray area here. If you do business in Providence or anywhere in the state and your website is public, it needs to be accessible.

The typical demand letter asks for $5,000 to $15,000. If it goes to court, you're looking at $25,000 to $75,000 in legal fees alone, win or lose. For a small shop doing $300K a year, that's devastating.

The Five Things That Get You Sued

Most ADA website lawsuits target the same handful of problems. Here's what the lawyers look for first.

• Missing alt text on images. Every image on your site needs a text description that a screen reader can announce. If your hero photo just says "IMG_4392.jpg" to a blind visitor, that's a violation.
• Poor color contrast. Light gray text on a white background looks clean to you. To someone with low vision, it's invisible. WCAG requires a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text.
• No keyboard navigation. Some people can't use a mouse. They tab through your site with a keyboard. If your menu, buttons, or forms don't work that way, you fail.
• Inaccessible forms. Your contact form needs labeled fields. A screen reader user needs to know which box is for their name and which is for their email. Placeholder text alone doesn't cut it.
• Missing page structure. Screen readers use headings to navigate. If your page is just a wall of styled text with no proper H1, H2, H3 hierarchy, it's like handing someone a book with no chapters.

Those Overlay Widgets Don't Protect You

You've seen them. That little wheelchair icon in the corner of a website that opens a toolbar letting you change font sizes and colors. Companies like accessiBe, UserWay, and AudioEye charge $500 to $2,000 a year for these widgets. They promise ADA compliance with one line of code.

They don't deliver. The National Federation of the Blind has publicly opposed overlay products, calling them unreliable. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against businesses that had overlays installed. Courts have ruled that an overlay is not a defense. Over 800 accessibility professionals signed an open letter at overlayfactsheet.com calling these tools harmful.

An overlay is like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house with a cracked foundation. The problems are in the code. You can't fix code problems with a toolbar that sits on top of the code. You need the actual HTML, CSS, and structure to be built correctly from the start.

What Compliance Actually Costs

Here's where business owners get surprised. Fixing an existing website for accessibility typically runs $1,500 to $5,000 depending on the size and complexity. A full rebuild with accessibility baked in from the start costs about the same as a regular professional site, because the accessible way to build is just the correct way to build.

Compare that to a single demand letter settlement of $7,500. Or a lawsuit that eats $30,000 in legal fees. The math isn't complicated.

Every site I build includes proper heading structure, alt text, keyboard navigation, color contrast that meets WCAG AA, labeled form fields, and semantic HTML. It's not an add-on. It's not a premium feature. It's how websites should be built in 2026.

How to Check Your Site Right Now

Open your website on your phone. Now try to use it without tapping anything on the screen. You can't really do that on mobile, so switch to a laptop. Open your site and try pressing the Tab key repeatedly. Can you see where the focus is? Can you get to every link, every button, every form field? Can you hit Enter to activate them?

If you lose track of where you are, or you can't reach something, or nothing seems to happen when you press Tab, your site has keyboard accessibility problems.

For a more thorough check, run your site through WAVE at wave.webaim.org. It's free. It will flag missing alt text, contrast issues, empty links, and structural problems. You can also try Google Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, which has an accessibility score built in. Anything below 90 needs work.

Your Competitors Are Ignoring This

I ran WAVE on 20 random restaurant websites in Providence last week. Every single one had errors. The average was 47 errors per page. Missing alt text, empty buttons, missing form labels, contrast failures. A few had over 100 errors on their homepage alone.

That means two things. First, almost nobody in your market is doing this right, so there's an opportunity to stand out. Second, the lawsuit wave hasn't fully hit RI's restaurant and service industry yet. When it does, it's going to hit a lot of businesses at once. The firms that file these cases work in batches. They pick an industry, pick a city, and send 50 letters in a week.

Being ahead of that is worth something. Being behind it costs a lot more.

Accessibility Is Good for Business, Not Just Legal Cover

About 26% of adults in the United States have some form of disability. In Rhode Island, that number is closer to 29%, one of the highest rates in the country. That's not a small audience. That's roughly 300,000 people in a state of just over a million.

When your website works for everyone, your customer base gets bigger. Accessible sites also tend to perform better in search results because Google's crawlers read your site a lot like a screen reader does. Proper headings, descriptive alt text, clean HTML structure. All of those things help your SEO and your accessibility at the same time.

A site that loads fast, reads clearly, and works on every device for every person is just a better site. That's not charity. That's good business.

What to Do This Week

You don't need to rebuild your entire website tomorrow. But you should do these three things before Friday.

1. Run WAVE on your homepage. Go to wave.webaim.org, paste your URL, and look at the red error flags. Screenshot the results.
2. Check your images. Right-click any image on your site, click "Inspect," and see if there's an alt attribute with a real description. "Photo" or blank doesn't count.
3. Tab through your site. Open it on a desktop, press Tab repeatedly, and see if you can reach and use every interactive element. If you can't see where the focus is, that's a problem.

If you find issues, and you almost certainly will, now you know before a law firm does. That's the whole point. Fixing a $2,000 problem before it becomes a $15,000 problem is just common sense.