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ADA compliance for small business websites

There is no small-business exemption in ADA Title III. What you owe online, where undue burden applies, and the tax credit that offsets it.

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Pavel Charkasau

ADA compliance for a small business starts with a fact that surprises most owners: there is no size exemption. The 15-employee threshold people quote is Title I, which governs employment, not the customers you serve (ADA.gov). The Justice Department's own small-business primer says it plainly: "Nearly all types of businesses that serve the public are included in the 12 categories, regardless of the size of the business or the age of their buildings" (ADA.gov).

Size does change how much work you have to do. A website obligation runs through 28 CFR § 36.303, which requires auxiliary aids and services unless providing them would fundamentally alter your service or "result in an undue burden, i.e., significant difficulty or expense" (28 CFR § 36.303(a)). That ceiling is measured against your resources, so a two-person shop and a national chain do not owe the same amount of remediation. Neither of them owes nothing.

No federal regulation tells a private business which version of WCAG to meet. DOJ "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards," and businesses "have flexibility in how they comply" (ADA.gov). WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the target worth picking anyway, and the rest of this post covers why, what it costs, and what the tax code gives back.

Is my small business exempt from the ADA?

Almost certainly not. Title III covers businesses open to the public, and the statute lists only two categories that fall outside it: private clubs already exempt under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and "religious organizations or entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship" (42 U.S.C. § 12187). Revenue is not on that list. Neither is headcount.

The confusion is understandable, because the ADA does have a size threshold, just in a different title. Title I applies to "employers that have 15 or more employees" (ADA.gov). If you employ four people and sell to the public, Title I is irrelevant to you and Title III is not.

One more distinction worth clearing up: the DOJ web rule with dated deadlines in 2027 and 2028 is a Title II rule for state and local governments. Its small entity compliance guide is written for public entities, not for private companies. No equivalent dated rule exists for your store.

What does the ADA actually require of a small business website?

Effective communication, delivered through auxiliary aids and services. The regulation names the relevant one directly. Among the aids for people who are blind or have low vision, § 36.303(b)(2) lists "screen reader software; magnification software; optical readers; secondary auditory programs (SAP); large print materials; accessible electronic and information technology" (28 CFR § 36.303). Your website is the accessible electronic and information technology in that sentence.

What the rule does not do is give you a checklist. That is why DOJ's guidance keeps using the word flexibility, and why it then points at WCAG as one of the "existing technical standards" that "provide helpful guidance" (ADA.gov).

So pick WCAG 2.2 Level AA and treat it as your specification. W3C states that "content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1" (W3C), which means one target covers the version any settlement, procurement form, or ADA demand letter is likely to name. Our WCAG checklist breaks the criteria down by level if you want to work through them.

Does being small change what I owe?

Yes, through the undue burden limit rather than through an exemption. The primer explains the logic behind the related readily achievable standard for physical barriers: "This requirement is based on the size and resources of a business. So, businesses with more resources are expected to remove more barriers than businesses with fewer resources" (ADA.gov).

Here is my opinion, and I give it to every small client who asks about this defence. Do not plan around it. Undue burden is decided case by case against your overall resources, and the fixes that actually block people are cheap. An alt attribute costs nothing. Associating a <label> with an input costs nothing. Darkening a button from #9BD1F0 to something that clears 4.5:1 costs one line of CSS and a check in the contrast checker. Arguing that any of those is a significant expense is a losing argument you never need to have.

Where the limit does bite is the expensive category: rebuilding a bespoke booking calendar, recaptioning a decade of video, replacing a vendor platform. Those are real conversations. They are also not where most small-business complaints start.

Do small businesses actually get sued over websites?

They are the majority of defendants. UsableNet's analysis of 2025 filings found that 64% of companies sued generate less than $25 million in annual revenue, and that more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed by year end (UsableNet). E-commerce accounted for roughly 70% of cases.

That is worth stating flatly rather than dramatically. A checkout is the part of a website that breaks most reliably for keyboard and screen-reader users, and a small online store runs the same off-the-shelf theme components as a large one. Being small buys you a lower profile, not better markup. Our post on accessibility lawsuit trends in 2026 has the full numbers and how the two main trackers count differently.

Is there financial help for the cost?

Two provisions in the tax code, both aimed at businesses your size.

The Disabled Access Credit under 26 U.S.C. § 44 is worth "50 percent of so much of the eligible access expenditures for the taxable year as exceed $250 but do not exceed $10,250," which caps the credit at $5,000 a year. An eligible small business is one whose gross receipts for the preceding tax year did not exceed $1,000,000, or that employed not more than 30 full-time employees in that year. Eligible access expenditures include amounts paid to remove "architectural, communication, physical, or transportation barriers" and to acquire or modify equipment for people with disabilities.

Separately, the Section 190 deduction for barrier removal has a "maximum deduction is $15,000 per year" (ADA.gov). Whether a given remediation invoice qualifies under either provision is a question for your accountant, not for me. The point is that the money exists and most owners have never heard of it.

Where do small business sites fail most often?

The same handful of places, in my experience reading scan output:

  • Icon-only buttons with no accessible name. A <button> containing nothing but an SVG announces as "button" and nothing else. A cart or a menu toggle built this way is a dead end.
  • Placeholder text used as the label. The grey word inside the field disappears on focus and is not a reliable accessible name.
  • Brand colours below 4.5:1. Pale blue or light grey text on white shows up in our scan output more than anything else.
  • Third-party embeds. A booking iframe or an ordering widget from your point-of-sale vendor is often the least accessible thing on the page, and you did not write a line of it. Your customer still cannot book.
  • Keyboard traps in date pickers. Tab in, and there is no way out without a mouse.

Four of those five are things a scan finds in seconds. The fifth needs a person with a keyboard.

What does a realistic first month look like?

Scan the whole site, not the homepage. Triage by whether an issue blocks a task rather than by severity label. Fix the blocking findings, then publish an accessibility statement that says what you have done and how someone reports a problem, which our statement generator will draft for you.

Be honest with yourself about coverage while you do it. Automated testing catches roughly 30 to 57% of issues depending on the study, and Deque's analysis of its own rule set put full automated coverage at 57% (Deque). Our scanner will not tell you whether your error messages make sense read aloud, or whether your custom dropdown behaves the way a keyboard user expects. Full conformance needs human review.

Which is also why an overlay widget is not the shortcut it looks like. The FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million in 2025 over claims that its product could make a website WCAG compliant automatically (FTC). We cover the detail in are accessibility overlays ADA-compliant.

What if I also sell to customers in Europe?

Then you get the exemption the ADA never gave you, but only if you are genuinely tiny. Under Article 4(5) of the European Accessibility Act, microenterprises providing services are exempt from the accessibility requirements, and a microenterprise employs fewer than 10 people with annual turnover or a balance sheet total of no more than €2 million (Directive (EU) 2019/882). The carve-out covers services only. Sell a covered product and it still has to comply.

The comparison is useful because it shows the drafters made a choice. The EU wrote a size threshold into the law; US Title III did not, and put the flexibility in the undue burden test instead. If you cross either the 10-staff or the €2 million line, read our microenterprise exemption post before you assume you are still covered.

FAQ

Are small businesses exempt from ADA website compliance?

No. ADA Title III covers businesses open to the public regardless of size, and DOJ's small-business primer states that nearly all types of businesses serving the public are included "regardless of the size of the business" (ADA.gov). The only statutory exemptions are private clubs and religious organizations (42 U.S.C. § 12187).

Does the ADA's 15-employee rule apply to my website?

No. The 15-employee threshold is in Title I, which covers employment (ADA.gov). Your public-facing website falls under Title III, which has no employee or revenue threshold.

Which WCAG level does a small business need?

Level AA is the practical target, and WCAG 2.2 is the version to build toward. No federal regulation names a version for private businesses (ADA.gov), but W3C confirms that content conforming to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to 2.0 and 2.1 (W3C), so one target covers whichever version someone asks about.

Can a small business claim undue burden instead of fixing its site?

Undue burden is a real limit, defined as "significant difficulty or expense" and judged against your resources (28 CFR § 36.303(a)). It is a poor plan for the common failures, because adding alt text, labelling form fields, and fixing contrast are not significant expenses by any reading.

Is there a tax credit for making my website accessible?

The Disabled Access Credit gives eligible small businesses 50% of eligible access expenditures between $250 and $10,250, for a maximum credit of $5,000 per year, and eligibility means gross receipts of $1,000,000 or less in the prior year or no more than 30 full-time employees (26 U.S.C. § 44). Ask your accountant whether your specific remediation costs qualify.

Find out where your site stands

There is no ADA certificate to earn and no rule that tells you when you are done, so the useful question is narrower: which WCAG 2.2 AA failures exist on your pages right now, and which of them stop someone completing a purchase. A scan gives you that list with the exact selector for each finding, which is enough to start fixing this week. Run a free accessibility scan and see what comes back.

Written by Pavel Charkasau, founder of wcagc.com. I work from the rule text and the agency guidance, so what you read here matches what DOJ actually published rather than the marketing around it.

Last updated: August 27, 2026

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