Have you ever tried to use a website with only a keyboard? Or listened to a screen reader attempt to navigate a page with no structure, no alt text, and unlabeled buttons? If not, it’s worth trying — because that’s the experience a significant portion of your potential customers have every time they visit a site that wasn’t built with accessibility in mind.
Web accessibility is one of those topics that sounds like a “big business” problem. Something for enterprise legal teams and Fortune 500 compliance departments. But the data tells a different story, and if you own a small business or run a local government office with a website, you should probably read on.
The Numbers Are Not on Your Side
In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 2,000 ADA website accessibility lawsuits were filed — a 37% increase over the same period in 2024. That’s not a blip. That’s a trend line pointing straight up.
And here’s the part that surprises most small business owners: 77% of ADA lawsuits in 2023 targeted companies with under $25 million in revenue. Flying under the radar is not a strategy. Settlements typically range from $5,000 to $75,000, and that’s before attorney fees, mandatory remediation costs, and the time you’ll spend distracted from actually running your business.
A lot of business owners ask me: “Can’t I just install an accessibility widget?” I get it — they’re marketed aggressively as a quick fix. But 25% of all ADA lawsuits in 2024 explicitly cited accessibility widgets as the barrier, not the solution. The FTC fined one of the leading overlay providers $1 million in early 2025 for false advertising. Widgets are not compliance. They’re a false sense of security.
What “Accessible” Actually Means
The technical standard courts and the DOJ point to is WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C. Meeting this standard means your site works for people who use screen readers, people who can’t use a mouse, people with low vision who need high contrast, and people with cognitive disabilities who benefit from clear, consistent navigation.
In practice, the most common issues I find during audits are things like: missing alternative text on images, poor color contrast ratios, form fields with no labels, keyboard traps, and page structures with no logical heading hierarchy. None of these are exotic. They’re fixable. They just need someone who knows what to look for.
Be mindful that automated scanning tools — the kind you can run yourself in a browser extension — only catch about 30% of WCAG violations. The rest require manual review by someone who understands both the code and how assistive technologies actually behave.
A Note for Local Governments and Municipal Offices
If you work for or contract with a small-town government, school district, library, or special district, there is now a hard federal deadline on this. The DOJ issued its final rule under ADA Title II requiring all state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The deadline was just extended — public entities with populations under 50,000 now have until April 26, 2028 — but the requirement itself is unchanged. That deadline will arrive, and the work to meet it takes longer than most offices expect.
This is especially relevant for small towns in upstate New York and across the country: municipal websites, online permit applications, meeting agendas, public notices — all of it needs to be accessible. And the clock is already running. Vendors and contractors who build digital services for government entities are being increasingly held to the same standard through procurement requirements and contract terms.
Whether you’re the IT contact for your town’s website or a consultant supporting a local agency, it’s worth getting ahead of this now rather than scrambling toward a deadline.
Why This Is Also Just Good Business
Legal risk aside, there’s a straightforward business case here. About 61 million adults in the United States live with a disability. Add aging Baby Boomers — a population that increasingly relies on accessible interfaces — and you’re looking at a substantial audience that inaccessible websites actively push away. These are real people who want to buy things, book appointments, find information, and engage with their community. Accessibility widens your door.
There’s also the SEO angle. Well-structured, semantic HTML — proper heading hierarchy, descriptive link text, image alt text — is exactly what search engines reward. Fixing accessibility issues and improving search visibility often go hand in hand. You’re not choosing between them.
How I Can Help
At Noma Digital, I handle accessibility the right way: a manual audit combined with automated testing, mapped against WCAG 2.1 Level AA criteria, with clear documentation of every issue and a prioritized remediation plan. No widgets. No shortcuts. Clean, semantic code that actually works with assistive technologies.
For small businesses, that typically starts with an audit so you know exactly where you stand — and then we dig into the fixes together, in a way that makes sense for your timeline and budget. For local government and public sector clients, I can work within your procurement process and help you document progress toward your Title II compliance deadline.
If you’re not sure where your site stands, that’s the right place to start. Take a look at my services, reach out and let’s take a look.
Have you run into accessibility issues on your own site, or been caught off guard by what an audit turned up? I would love to hear about it.