If you've had a scary "demand letter," seen a headline about accessibility lawsuits, or just have a nagging feeling your store might not be usable for everyone — this is the plain-English answer to "is my store ADA compliant, and how would I even know?"
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a US civil-rights law requiring "places of public accommodation" to be accessible to people with disabilities. For years it was about physical premises — ramps, doorways — but US courts have increasingly applied it to websites, especially for businesses that sell to the public. The US Department of Justice has also stated that the ADA applies to web content.
Here's the catch that confuses everyone: there is no official ADA checklist for websites. In practice, courts, lawyers, and the people sending demand letters all use the same yardstick — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), level AA (currently version 2.2). So "ADA compliant" effectively means "meets WCAG 2.2 AA."
This isn't theoretical. Thousands of web-accessibility lawsuits and far more pre-lawsuit demand letters are filed each year in the US, and e-commerce stores are the single most targeted category. Many come from "serial" filers who scan large numbers of sites for the same common issues. Settling a claim typically costs thousands, plus the work to fix the site anyway.
And beyond the legal risk, there's a simpler business cost: roughly one in five people has a disability. If they can't read your product descriptions, use your filters, or complete checkout, they buy elsewhere — quietly, without ever telling you.
There are genuine legal grey areas — courts in different US regions have ruled differently on exactly when a website counts as a "public accommodation." But two practical truths cut through it: if you sell to customers in the US, the risk is real; and demand letters don't wait for legal certainty — they target sites with visible, automatically-detectable problems, regardless of the finer points. So the sensible question isn't "am I definitely covered?" but "would my store fail the checks these claims are based on?"
A few things you can eyeball yourself in a couple of minutes:
That gives you a feel, but it won't catch most issues. The fast, thorough way is an automated scan against WCAG 2.2 AA, which checks the things that are machine-detectable — missing alt text, unlabelled buttons, colour contrast, and more — in seconds. Automated testing reliably catches around 57% of common issues; the rest need a human to judge, so a clean scan is a great start but never a guarantee of full compliance.
Claresto scans your store against WCAG 2.2 AA and gives you a plain-English report — what's wrong, why it matters, and how to fix it — in under a minute. Scan your store →
You'll be offered tools promising instant ADA compliance from a single line of code. Be careful: accessibility experts and disability advocates have widely criticised these overlays, and — far from preventing lawsuits — overlay-using sites have featured in them. There's no magic switch; real compliance comes from fixing the underlying issues.
The honest bottom line: you can't make "ADA risk" disappear with a widget, but you can know exactly where you stand in a few minutes, fix the issues that matter, and demonstrate genuine effort — which is the realistic, defensible goal.