ADA Website Compliance: What Texas Business Owners Need to Know

If you run a business in Texas with a public-facing website, web accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a legal exposure point. Demand letters and federal lawsuits targeting business websites under the Americans with Disabilities Act have been increasing steadily. The good news: the fixes aren’t as expensive or complicated as the legal risk makes them sound, and the same improvements that protect you legally also improve your SEO and user experience.

This isn’t legal advice — talk to a Texas attorney for that. What follows is a practical overview of what’s on the table and where to start.

What ADA Title III Means for Websites

ADA Title III covers places of public accommodation — businesses open to the general public. Courts have increasingly ruled that this includes websites. The legal standard most often cited in these cases is WCAG 2.1 AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA), published by the W3C. It covers four principles: websites must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

Industries that face the most litigation include retail, hospitality, healthcare, financial services, and food service. But demand letters have targeted businesses of all sizes, including small local businesses.

The Most Common Violations

Most websites fail on the same handful of issues:

• Missing alt text on images. Screen readers read alt text aloud for visually impaired users. An image with no alt tag is invisible — or worse, read as the file name.
• Insufficient color contrast. Light gray text on a white background looks clean in design but fails the contrast ratio standards that make text readable for low-vision users.
• Forms without labels. A form field that says “enter your name” as placeholder text may look fine visually, but if it has no associated HTML label, assistive technology can’t identify it.
• Videos without captions. Any video with meaningful audio needs synchronized captions.
• Keyboard navigation failures. Users who can’t use a mouse need to navigate your site entirely via keyboard. Menus or modals that only work with a cursor are barriers.
• PDFs without accessibility tags. A menu or brochure posted as a scanned PDF is completely inaccessible to screen readers.

Quick Wins You Can Check Today

Before you hire anyone, run Google’s Lighthouse audit on your site (it’s free, built into Chrome DevTools). It won’t catch everything, but it surfaces the most obvious issues. Then walk through this short list:

1. Open your site and unplug your mouse. Can you tab through the navigation and reach every page?
2. Check your images in the CMS. Do they all have descriptive alt text?
3. Look at your forms. Every field should have a visible label above it, not just placeholder text inside.
4. Run your key pages through the WebAIM Contrast Checker. Body text should pass AA standards.

Why Accessibility Also Improves SEO

Here’s the part most business owners don’t realize: accessibility and SEO are deeply aligned. Alt text helps Google understand your images. Proper heading structure helps crawlers understand your page hierarchy. Fast, semantic HTML benefits both screen readers and search bots. Fixing accessibility issues is rarely wasted effort — it usually improves your website’s overall quality across the board.

Ongoing Accessibility Maintenance

Compliance isn’t a one-time checkbox. New content, new plugins, and site updates can introduce new violations. A website care plan that includes periodic accessibility audits keeps you protected as your site evolves. At minimum, run an automated audit every quarter and manually test any new major features.

If your site hasn’t been built with accessibility in mind — or if it was built more than three or four years ago — it’s worth having a professional review it. Get in touch and we can assess where your site stands and what remediation makes the most sense for your business.

Frequently asked questions