Website Accessibility Claims Against B2B Companies

What an Accessibility Claim Actually Alleges

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in the "full and equal enjoyment" of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation (42 U.S.C. 12182(a)). The definitional provision, 42 U.S.C. 12181(7), lists twelve categories of private entity treated as public accommodations, every one framed in terms of a place. The statute does not mention websites; it was enacted in 1990.

A private plaintiff can obtain injunctive relief and attorney's fees: 42 U.S.C. 12188(a) incorporates the remedies of 42 U.S.C. 2000a-3(a), with fees under 42 U.S.C. 12205. Damages are available only in an action brought by the Attorney General. A federal claim alone therefore produces a court order and a fee award, not a payment to the plaintiff, which is why claims seeking money are pleaded alongside a state statute.

The Disagreement Over Whether a Website Is a Place

There is a documented, long-standing division among the federal Courts of Appeals over whether a website standing alone can be a place of public accommodation, or whether a plaintiff must show a nexus between the website and a physical place. As the split is generally characterised in legal commentary, the First, Second and Seventh Circuits are identified with the view that a public accommodation is not limited to physical structures; the Third, Sixth, Ninth and Eleventh with the view that a physical place is required and a website is reached only through its connection to one.

This is a map of a disagreement, not controlling law: the scope of each circuit's rule varies, no Court of Appeals is a court of last resort, and the Supreme Court has not resolved it.

A pure-play B2B company with no storefront sits on the fault line. In a nexus jurisdiction it has a threshold argument a retailer does not; where no physical place is required, that argument is weaker or unavailable. Forum drives exposure more than site design does.

The DOJ Rule Covers Government, Not Private Business

On 24 April 2024 the Department of Justice published a final rule on the accessibility of web information and services of state and local government entities, 89 FR 31320, adding Subpart H to 28 CFR Part 35, effective 24 June 2024. Part 35 is the Title II regulation. The rule applies to public entities, adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA, does not amend 28 CFR Part 36 — the Title III regulation covering private businesses — and sets no deadline for them. An interim final rule published on 20 April 2026, effective immediately, then extended its compliance dates by a year each, to 26 April 2027 and 26 April 2028.

For private business there is no binding technical standard at all. DOJ withdrew its Title III web rulemaking on 26 December 2017, 82 FR 60932, and its March 2022 guidance states that the Department does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards and that businesses can currently choose how they ensure accessibility, describing WCAG as helpful guidance. Title III obligations are understood to reach websites; no rule specifies how. WCAG 2.1 AA is nonetheless the benchmark used in demand letters, settlements and procurement — a de facto benchmark, not a legal standard.

What WCAG AA Asks of a Corporate Site

WCAG is a W3C Recommendation, not law, except where a government incorporates it. Version 2.0 dates from December 2008, 2.1 from June 2018 and 2.2 from October 2023; 2.2 is current, while WCAG 3.0 remains a draft. Conformance runs at levels A, AA and AAA, and AA is the level used in essentially every regulatory and litigation context.

In plain terms, AA asks that everything can be operated without a mouse, that content is announced correctly to a screen reader, that text and interface elements meet contrast requirements, that pages reflow and stay usable when zoomed, that form fields carry programmatic labels and errors are explained in text, and that video carries captions. Version 2.1 added seventeen criteria, mostly mobile, low-vision and cognitive ones. Version 2.2 added nine and removed the old parsing criterion; its AA additions are focus not obscured, dragging movements, a minimum target size, and accessible authentication — the last constraining puzzle CAPTCHAs and transcription login steps, so it lands hardest on sites with gated portals. Specifying 2.2 AA in a published accessibility statement sets a bar above what any US federal regulation currently requires of anyone, which is defensible, but that statement is itself a claim about the site.

Where the Money Comes From, and Why B2B Companies Are Surprised

Because Title III gives private plaintiffs no damages, monetary exposure generally comes from state law. California's Unruh Civil Rights Act provides at Cal. Civ. Code 51(f) that an ADA violation also constitutes a violation of that section, so an ADA-predicate theory does not require separately proving intentional discrimination; Cal. Civ. Code 52(a) then allows up to three times actual damages "but in no case less than four thousand dollars", plus fees. That floor converts a no-damages federal claim into a monetised one, though how many violations a set of visits or barriers amounts to is contested. New York's State Human Rights Law reaches public accommodations at N.Y. Exec. Law 296(2), and the New York City Human Rights Law provides a private right of action at N.Y.C. Admin. Code 8-502, where punitive damages and fees are available.

The claim usually arrives as a pre-suit demand letter, often produced by an automated scan rather than by a person who needed the site, proposing a remediation commitment plus a payment covering fees. B2B companies assume none of this concerns them because the reported examples are retailers and hotels, but a corporate site has a careers section, a customer portal and gated content, used by applicants, buyers and employees of customers.

Overlays, Widgets, and the Second Claim They Create

Accessibility overlays are third-party scripts, usually one line of JavaScript, that claim to detect and repair barriers at runtime and are frequently marketed as producing WCAG or ADA "compliance".

Regulators have addressed the category directly. The FTC brought an enforcement action against accessiBe Inc., maker of the accessWidget product, and approved a final order in April 2025; the Commission alleged the company made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims that the product could make any website WCAG-compliant, and separately that it misrepresented third-party reviews and articles as independent opinions while failing to disclose material connections. The practitioner community has been critical for longer: the Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by several hundred accessibility professionals, asserts that overlays do not achieve conformance and can interfere with a user's own assistive technology, and WebAIM's screen reader user surveys have reported low confidence in them. Those are practitioner positions rather than regulatory findings.

The compounding exposure gets underrated. Installing a widget does not establish conformance or moot a claim, and publishing that the site is "ADA compliant" because the widget is installed is an advertising claim needing substantiation of its own.

Testing Properly and Fixing in the Right Order

Automated testing is the least informative part of an audit. Scanners — axe, WAVE, Lighthouse — are fast, repeatable and cheap, and catch only a fraction of what matters. A scanner can report that an image has no alt attribute; it cannot tell you whether the alt text describes the image, whether the focus order makes sense, whether an error message is understandable, or whether a custom component behaves the way its ARIA role promises.

So the audit adds manual keyboard testing — reaching every control with Tab, operating it with Enter and Space, knowing where focus is, escaping every modal — and manual screen-reader testing with NVDA or JAWS on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS, run against real tasks rather than page by page: request a demo, download a gated paper, sign into the portal.

Remediation is prioritised by journey rather than defect count: barriers that stop a task outright, then the navigation and forms on every page, then the long tail. Fixes in templates and design-system components repair hundreds of pages at once. The durable answer is process: accessibility criteria in the design brief, acceptance tests at component level, and no new template shipping without a keyboard and screen-reader pass.

If It Becomes a Dispute

When one of these claims becomes litigation, the questions counsel needs answered are technical and historical rather than legal. What did the page actually render on the date pleaded? Did the alleged barrier exist then, and on which templates? When was the code changed, by whom, and does the deployment history support the remediation timeline the company wants to assert? Was an overlay running, and what did the accessibility statement say at the time? Those are questions about page states, revision histories, deployment logs and archived captures, and they are what an expert witness is engaged to examine and explain.

Most of that evidence has a short life by default. CMS revision histories are pruned, deployment and server logs rotate on a schedule nobody in the legal department set, and a redesign can remove the version at issue entirely. Capturing the site as it stands when a demand letter arrives, before anything is remediated, is close to impossible to do afterwards.

Frequently Asked Questions