ADA Compliance Is Not Optional: What Arizona Business Owners Need to Know

ADA Compliance Is Actively Enforced in Arizona

If you own a business in Arizona and your website is not accessible to people with disabilities, you are exposed to legal action right now. This is not a hypothetical scenario. Federal courts have consistently ruled that websites qualify as places of public accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and plaintiffs in Arizona are filing claims at an accelerating pace.

The consequences are tangible. Businesses across Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, and Mesa have received demand letters alleging their websites violate the ADA. Many of these letters come from law firms that specialize in high-volume accessibility claims, and the cost of settling even a single case can exceed what it would have taken to build an accessible site in the first place. The math is straightforward: compliance upfront is cheaper than remediation under legal pressure.

This guide walks you through what the ADA requires for websites, how Arizona’s legal landscape has evolved, what standards courts reference, and how to protect your business before a lawsuit forces your hand.

What the ADA Requires for Websites

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990. Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination by places of public accommodation, which originally targeted physical locations like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores. The law does not explicitly mention websites. That gap has not stopped courts from applying it to digital properties.

The Department of Justice has issued guidance on multiple occasions stating that websites operated by public accommodations must be accessible to people with disabilities. In 2022, the DOJ published a formal web accessibility guidance document reinforcing this position. While the DOJ has not mandated a specific technical standard through rulemaking, courts across the country have referenced the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the benchmark for determining compliance.

The practical effect is clear. If your business serves the public and maintains a website, courts expect that website to be usable by people who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, keyboard navigation, and voice controls. The absence of a formal technical mandate in the statute itself does not shield you from liability. Judges look at whether your site creates barriers, and they use WCAG as the yardstick for measuring those barriers.

Arizona’s Litigation Landscape

Arizona consistently ranks among the top ten states for web accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court. The state’s combination of a large service economy, a growing population, and an active plaintiff’s bar makes it a frequent venue for ADA web claims. If you operate a business anywhere in the Valley, from Gilbert to Glendale, this trend affects you directly.

The pattern is well established. A plaintiff, often represented by one of a small number of law firms that focus exclusively on ADA digital accessibility cases, visits your website using assistive technology. They document the barriers they encounter. Their attorney sends a demand letter citing specific violations: images without alternative text, forms without labels, elements that cannot be reached with a keyboard. The letter typically offers to settle for a sum between $5,000 and $75,000 or more, depending on the size of the business and the severity of the alleged violations.

Serial plaintiffs file dozens or even hundreds of these claims each year. Some file against every business in a particular industry segment across an entire metro area. The Phoenix metropolitan region, with its concentration of restaurants, retail shops, medical practices, and professional services, presents a target-rich environment for this kind of litigation. These are not isolated incidents. They represent a sustained and growing legal trend that shows no sign of slowing.

The settlement costs alone should motivate action, but the financial exposure extends further. If a case proceeds past the demand letter stage, you face attorney fees on both sides, potential injunctive relief requiring you to remediate your site under court supervision, and the distraction of active litigation pulling your attention away from running your business.

WCAG 2.1 AA: The Standard Courts Reference

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), define three levels of conformance: A, AA, and AAA. Level AA has emerged as the de facto legal standard. When courts evaluate whether a website meets its obligations under the ADA, they almost universally measure compliance against WCAG 2.1 AA criteria.

WCAG 2.1 AA covers four core principles, summarized by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Perceivable means users can identify content through their available senses, whether that means seeing it on a screen or hearing it through a screen reader. Operable means every interactive element works with a keyboard, not just a mouse. Understandable means content and navigation behave predictably, with clear labels and instructions. Robust means the site works reliably across different browsers and assistive technologies.

Meeting AA conformance involves satisfying dozens of specific success criteria across these four principles. For a deeper breakdown of each guideline, read our companion post on WCAG 2.1 AA in plain language. The essential takeaway for business owners is that AA is the level you need to reach. Anything below it leaves you exposed.

Common Violations That Trigger Lawsuits

Not every accessibility issue carries equal legal risk. Certain violations appear in lawsuit after lawsuit because they create obvious, documented barriers for users with disabilities. If your site has any of the following problems, you are a candidate for a demand letter.

Missing alt text on images - Screen readers cannot describe images that lack alternative text attributes. When a product image, hero banner, or informational graphic has no alt text, a blind user encounters a void where meaningful content should be. This is the single most frequently cited violation in ADA web accessibility complaints.
No keyboard navigation - Many websites only function with a mouse. Dropdown menus that require hover, buttons that only respond to click events, and modal dialogs that trap focus all exclude users who navigate with keyboards or switch devices. If you cannot tab through your entire site and activate every control with the Enter or Space key, you have a keyboard navigation failure.
Poor color contrast ratios - Text that blends into its background is unreadable for users with low vision or color blindness. WCAG 2.1 AA requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Light gray text on a white background, a common design choice, frequently fails this threshold.
Missing form labels - Input fields without associated labels force screen reader users to guess what information a field expects. Contact forms, search bars, and checkout flows are frequent offenders. Every input element needs a programmatically associated label that a screen reader can announce.
Auto-playing media without controls - Video or audio that plays automatically without visible pause, stop, or volume controls creates an immediate barrier. Users who rely on screen readers may find the auto-playing audio overlaps with their assistive technology output, making the entire page unusable.
Inaccessible PDFs - Many businesses post menus, brochures, or forms as PDF files scanned from paper documents. These scanned PDFs are images, not text, and screen readers cannot extract any content from them. Every PDF on your site needs to be a tagged, text-based document with proper reading order and structure.

Each of these issues creates a concrete, provable barrier that a plaintiff can document in minutes using free browser tools. The strength of ADA web claims rests on how easy it is to identify and prove these violations.

The Cost of Non-Compliance

The financial impact of ignoring web accessibility goes beyond settlement checks. When you receive a demand letter, you face several overlapping costs that compound quickly.

Legal Fees and Settlements

Retaining an attorney to respond to an ADA demand letter typically costs between $3,000 and $10,000 even if the case settles quickly. If it proceeds to litigation, defense costs can reach $50,000 or more. Settlement amounts in Arizona web accessibility cases commonly fall between $5,000 and $75,000, with larger businesses facing higher demands. These figures do not include the cost of remediation, which the settlement agreement almost always requires.

Remediation Under Pressure

Fixing accessibility problems after receiving a demand letter is significantly more expensive than building accessibility in from the start. You are working against a deadline, often with an opposing attorney monitoring your progress. The remediation scope balloons because you must audit the entire site, prioritize critical fixes, and document your compliance efforts for legal review. What would have cost a few thousand dollars during initial development can easily cost ten to twenty thousand under litigation pressure.

Lost Customers

Roughly one in four adults in the United States lives with some form of disability. In Arizona, that represents over 1.4 million potential customers. When your website is inaccessible, you are turning away revenue. These are not edge cases. They are people who want to buy your products, book your services, or visit your location but physically cannot use your website to do so.

Reputation Damage

ADA lawsuits are public record. When a potential customer searches your business name and finds an accessibility complaint in the results, the perception of your brand shifts immediately. In a market as competitive as the Phoenix metro area, where consumers have dozens of alternatives for virtually any service, that kind of negative visibility can drive customers to your competitors.

How to Audit Your Site

You do not need to be a developer to conduct a preliminary accessibility assessment of your website. Several free tools can identify the most common violations, and basic manual testing covers issues that automated tools miss.

Free Automated Tools

Start with WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool from WebAIM. Paste your URL into their site and the tool highlights errors, alerts, and structural issues directly on your page. For a more detailed technical audit, install axe DevTools as a browser extension. It scans your page against WCAG criteria and categorizes findings by severity. Both tools are free and produce results in seconds.

Manual Keyboard Testing

Put your mouse aside and try to navigate your entire website using only the Tab key, Enter, Space, and arrow keys. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you see where the keyboard focus is at all times? Can you open and close menus and modal dialogs without a mouse? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have a keyboard accessibility problem that needs attention.

Screen Reader Basics

Every major operating system includes a built-in screen reader. macOS has VoiceOver (activated with Command-F5), Windows has Narrator (Windows key plus Ctrl plus Enter), and most Linux distributions include Orca. Turn on the screen reader, close your eyes, and try to complete a core task on your site: find your phone number, submit a contact form, or read your services page. If the experience is confusing or incomplete, your site has accessibility gaps that affect real users.

When to Hire a Professional

Automated tools catch roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG violations. The remaining issues require human judgment: evaluating whether alt text is meaningful, verifying that focus order is logical, testing complex interactive components, and assessing whether content is genuinely understandable. If your automated scan reveals more than a handful of errors, or if your site includes forms, e-commerce features, or embedded media, a professional audit is the prudent step.

Building Compliance from Day One

At Carbowitz Consulting, accessibility is not an afterthought or an add-on service. Every website we build meets WCAG 2.1 AA standards before it launches. This is a foundational requirement, not a premium feature. Our approach treats accessibility as a design and engineering constraint that shapes every decision from layout to code.

The results speak through measurable data. Every site in our portfolio scores 100 on the Lighthouse accessibility audit. That metric covers automated checks for alt text, color contrast, ARIA attributes, form labels, heading hierarchy, and landmark structure. We pair those automated scores with manual testing: keyboard navigation walkthroughs, screen reader verification, and focus management validation on every interactive component.

Building accessibility in from day one costs a fraction of what remediation demands after a lawsuit. When a developer considers accessibility during the initial build, it influences markup structure, color palette selection, interactive component design, and content hierarchy naturally. Retrofitting those same considerations into an existing site means reworking templates, rewriting components, and retesting every page. The technical debt accumulates fast.

For Arizona businesses operating in a state where ADA web litigation is accelerating year over year, building your site correctly the first time is not cautious. It is practical. You avoid legal exposure, you serve a broader customer base, and you demonstrate to your market that your business takes its obligations seriously.

Concerned about your website’s accessibility? Schedule a compliance audit and we will deliver a full WCAG 2.1 AA assessment with actionable next steps.