Your Website Might Be Beautiful. But Is It Actually Working?

Last year, more than 5,000 ADA accessibility lawsuits were filed against businesses in the United States. Most of them targeted small businesses. Most of them ended in quiet settlements. And most of them could have been avoided with a few hours of focused work on the website.

If you have not thought about ADA accessibility for your website, this is your sign.

What ADA Compliance Actually Means (For Your Website)

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990 to make sure businesses are accessible to people with disabilities. For decades, that meant ramps, wide doorways, accessible bathrooms, Braille signage. But over the past fifteen years, US courts have consistently ruled that the ADA also applies to websites, because your website is now considered a “place of public accommodation” the same way your storefront is.

There is no single federal law that says “your website must look exactly like this.” Instead, the courts and the Department of Justice point to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is essentially a checklist of accessibility standards. Most businesses aim for WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the version most courts treat as the baseline.

Here is a good podcast about this I listened to recently.

In practical terms, an accessible website is one that can be used by people who are blind or low-vision and use screen readers, deaf or hard of hearing and rely on captions, navigating with a keyboard instead of a mouse, processing information differently, or experiencing color blindness or visual differences.

When we talk about ADA accessibility, we’re really talking about whether your website is usable by all of your potential customers. Not just the ones who can see, hear, and click the way you do.

Why This Matters For Your Business

Three reasons.

The legal one. ADA website lawsuits jumped 37% from 2024 to 2025, with 2026 on track to break that record. Plaintiffs’ attorneys actively target small businesses because the gaps tend to be wider and settlements tend to be quicker than litigating against a large corporation. “I’m too small to matter” is not the shield it feels like.

The market one. People with disabilities represent roughly 26% of US adults. That’s an enormous portion of potential customers who quietly bounce off websites that don’t work for them. You never see them in your analytics because they never made it past your homepage.

The SEO one. Accessibility work and SEO work overlap almost completely. Alt text. Heading structure. Semantic code. Color contrast. Clean navigation. These are the same signals that help your site rank well in Google. Making your site accessible is, in many ways, the same thing as making it work better in search.

Can You Make a Showit Website ADA Accessible?

Yes. With caveats.

Showit gives you incredible design flexibility, which is one of its biggest strengths. But that flexibility comes with some technical trade-offs. The underlying code structure is not as semantically clean as platforms like Squarespace or WordPress, which means a Showit site has to be approached a little more intentionally to hit accessibility standards.

Here is what an accessible Showit site looks like in practice.

The manual work, which is where the real protection lives:

Alt text on every image. Heading hierarchy that actually makes sense (one H1 per page, then H2s and H3s in logical order). Color contrast that meets WCAG standards (a free contrast checker takes 30 seconds per color combo). Form labels on every input field. Descriptive link text instead of “click here.” Readable font sizes (16px minimum for body copy). Captions or transcripts for any video content.

The tools that help:

An accessibility widget like AccessiBe, UserWay, or Active ADA can be embedded into a Showit site with a small piece of code. These add features like text resizing, contrast toggles, and reading guides. Important to know: widgets alone are not full ADA compliance. Courts have rejected widget-only defenses, and the FTC fined one major widget vendor in 2025 for marketing their product as guaranteed compliance. A widget is a helpful layer. It is not a get-out-of-court-free card.

The accessibility statement:

A simple page on your site explaining what you’ve done to make your site accessible and how someone can reach you if they hit an issue. This sounds small, but courts respond favorably to businesses that demonstrate awareness and good-faith effort. The statement is part of that paper trail.

What Happens If You Skip It

Three things, ranging from inconvenient to genuinely scary.

You lose customers you never knew existed. The 26% of US adults with disabilities are buying things, hiring services, and making decisions online every day. If your site doesn’t work for them, they go to a competitor whose site does.

You hurt your SEO. Most accessibility issues are also SEO issues. Missing alt text, broken heading hierarchy, poor contrast that makes text hard to read. Google sees these problems too, and it ranks your site accordingly.

And the big one: you open yourself up to a lawsuit. The demand-letter cycle has become a thriving business for plaintiffs’ attorneys. The pattern is almost always the same. A plaintiff visits a website. The website has accessibility violations. A demand letter goes out. The business is given a window to settle, usually for $3,000 to $25,000 plus legal fees. Most small businesses settle because litigating costs more.

The defensible position isn’t perfection. It’s reasonable effort, documented and ongoing.

The Easy Way To Get This Done

I built The SEO + ADA Refresh for exactly this. A one-time, 90-minute pass-through of your existing website that handles both SEO and accessibility basics in one focused session. Page audits, technical cleanup, image optimization, alt text, headers, color contrast, accessibility statement, the works. Plus a Loom walkthrough so you know exactly what changed and why.

It’s $997, and I’m opening up one day per quarter for these (5 sites per day). The next date is June 25, 2026. Then September 10, and December 10, 2026.

If your site has been quietly sitting there for a year or two, this is the lowest-lift way to bring it up to where it needs to be.