The ADA and the European Accessibility Act: what online stores need to know

01Why this affects online stores

An online store is not just a marketing channel — it is, in the eyes of a growing number of courts, regulators, and lawmakers, something that has to work for disabled customers in much the same way a physical shop does. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been applied to commercial websites through litigation for over a decade, without a specific federal regulation ever having been written for it. In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a harmonising directive that member states have transposed into binding national law, with a compliance date that has now passed. Both, in practice, point back to the same technical standard: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), currently at version 2.2, Level AA. The rest of this guide takes each in turn.

02The ADA and Title III

Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in "places of public accommodation" — a term Congress wrote in 1990 to describe hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and similar physical spaces, years before commercial websites existed at any scale. Since the mid-2010s, a large and growing body of case law has applied that language to websites. Some federal circuits have held that a website can itself be a place of public accommodation, regardless of any connection to a physical location. Others have generally required some "nexus" between the website and a physical place of business before Title III applies — though in practice, almost any DTC ecommerce brand whose site facilitates a purchase tends to satisfy that nexus test one way or another, and the circuit split matters more to litigators than it changes the practical calculus for most online retailers.

The Department of Justice has repeatedly stated, including in formal guidance issued in March 2022, that the ADA's requirements apply to the websites of public accommodations. What the DOJ has not done, as of this writing, is issue a specific regulation for private businesses spelling out an exact technical standard, the way it has for state and local government websites under Title II. That regulatory gap is precisely why this area is driven by litigation and settlement practice rather than a published rulebook: without an official technical standard for private-sector sites, WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA has become the de facto benchmark referenced in the overwhelming majority of demand letters, consent decrees, and settlement agreements, even though no statute names it explicitly.

ADA lawsuit volume also gives a sense of scale: UsableNet's ADA Lawsuit Tracker recorded 4,605 federal ADA website lawsuits filed in 2024, and its 2024 Year-End Report found that around 77% of ADA website lawsuits target ecommerce sites specifically. If you sell online, you are inside the group these figures describe.

03Section 508 — a narrower federal rule

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act is frequently confused with the ADA, but it is a narrower and different rule. It requires federal agencies, and organisations that sell information and communications technology to the federal government, to make that technology accessible. If your store's customers are members of the public and you are not selling to a US federal agency or operating a federally funded program, Section 508 does not directly apply to you. It is worth knowing about mainly because it has, for years, referenced WCAG-aligned technical standards, reinforcing WCAG as the common reference point across US accessibility law generally — even in the many private-sector contexts where Section 508 itself has no jurisdiction.

04The European Accessibility Act

The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) works differently from the ADA. It is a harmonising directive: the EU set the requirements, and each member state was required to transpose it into national law, with the substantive obligations on businesses applying from 28 June 2025 — a date that has now passed. Unlike the ADA's decade of case-by-case litigation, the EAA specifically names the categories of products and services in scope, and e-commerce services are one of them. For an online store, that means the accessibility of the ordering process, product and pricing information, identification, security and payment methods, and related customer communication all fall within scope.

Critically for a US-based or otherwise non-EU DTC brand: the EAA applies based on where your customers are, not where your business is incorporated. If you sell products or services to consumers located in the EU, your e-commerce service is in scope, even if your company has no EU office, warehouse, or subsidiary.

05Who has to comply, and who is exempt

The EAA includes a specific exemption for microenterprises — businesses with fewer than 10 employees and either annual turnover or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding €2 million — in their capacity as providers of services, which is the category e-commerce falls into. Microenterprises that manufacture or import physical products covered by the Act do not receive the same blanket exemption. Beyond the microenterprise carve-out, larger economic operators can, in narrow and specific circumstances, invoke a "disproportionate burden" or "fundamental alteration" exception, but this requires a documented, case-by-case assessment — it is not a general opt-out, and the exact procedural requirements vary by the member state whose national transposition applies to you.

On the US side, the ADA has no equivalent employee-count or revenue-based exemption for Title III public accommodations. Business size can affect what a court considers a reasonable accommodation in a specific dispute, but there is no bright-line small-business exemption comparable to the EAA's microenterprise carve-out.

06What a demand letter typically looks like

For US ecommerce brands, ADA compliance risk usually arrives as a demand letter, not a government enforcement action. A typical letter is sent by a law firm on behalf of an individual plaintiff, often after an automated or manual accessibility scan of the site. It will usually cite specific pages and specific WCAG success criteria the site is said to fail — missing alt text, insufficient colour contrast, keyboard traps, unlabelled form fields — and assert that these barriers prevented the plaintiff, who may use a screen reader or navigate by keyboard, from completing a purchase. It will typically invoke Title III of the ADA and, where there is a California connection, the state's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which — unlike the ADA itself — allows for statutory damages per violation, a major reason a large share of US digital accessibility litigation is filed in California specifically. The letter usually sets a short deadline for a response, asks for prompt remediation, and often proposes a settlement payment to avoid formal litigation.

None of this constitutes a court ruling that a site actually violated the ADA — it is a claim, and businesses regularly negotiate, remediate, or contest these letters — but ignoring one rarely makes it go away.

07What "conformance" actually means

WCAG defines "conformance" precisely, and it is stricter than most people assume. To conform at a given level (A, AA, or AAA), a page must satisfy every applicable success criterion at that level and all levels below it — there is no partial credit, and no criterion is optional because it is inconvenient. A site that meets 95% of AA success criteria has not achieved "AA conformance"; it has made significant progress toward it. Because most real sites change constantly — new products, new pages, new app installs, theme updates — conformance is also a snapshot, not a permanent state: a conformance report or VPAT describes the pages actually assessed, at the time they were assessed, which is why ongoing monitoring matters as much as the initial fix. See our scoring methodology for how we measure progress toward conformance in practice, including why automated testing alone cannot certify it.

08Where this leaves you

Neither the ADA nor the EAA hands you a single certificate to obtain and file away. What both consistently reward is the same underlying thing: a website built and maintained to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, with evidence — audit history, remediation records, and monitoring — that you took it seriously and kept at it as the site changed. That is a technical and operational undertaking, not a legal one, and it is where our work sits: fixing the underlying code, and helping you document that you did.