People who are blind and use a screen reader, people who cannot use a mouse, people who zoom in to read and people who are deaf and rely on captions all research, book and buy online like everyone else. If your menu cannot be opened with a keyboard, your form fields have no labels or your video has no captions, those customers cannot finish what they came to do. Most will not call to complain; they will go to a competitor whose site works.

There is a legal side too. Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires businesses open to the public, which the law calls public accommodations, to give people with disabilities equal access to their goods and services. The Department of Justice’s guidance on web accessibility and the ADA says that obligation covers what businesses offer on the web. Florida is one of the busiest states for website accessibility claims: in 2025 it had the second-most federal website accessibility lawsuits in the country, behind only New York, according to Seyfarth Shaw’s ADA Title III blog. Many Jacksonville owners first hear about the issue when a demand letter arrives.

Accessibility work also makes the site better for everyone. Clear headings, descriptive links, readable contrast and helpful error messages help older visitors and people on a phone in bright sunshine, and the same clean structure supports your SEO.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are published by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023. Level AA is the level most organizations aim for. Working to WCAG 2.2 AA also covers WCAG 2.1 AA, the version the DOJ adopted in 2024 for state and local government websites under Title II, and adds newer checks such as large enough tap targets and keyboard focus that is not hidden behind sticky headers.

What about private businesses? As of October 2026, the DOJ’s web guidance on ada.gov says businesses must make their online goods and services accessible, but the Department does not have a regulation setting out a detailed technical standard for them. Businesses have flexibility in how they comply, and the DOJ points to WCAG as helpful technical guidance. That is why we use WCAG 2.2 AA as our practical benchmark. When Florida businesses ask us for an “ADA compliant website,” what we deliver is a WCAG 2.2 AA audit, real fixes and a dated record of the work, not a badge or a promise.

Please read this part: we are web developers, not lawyers, and nothing on this page is legal advice. No developer, tool or audit can guarantee that a business will never face an ADA claim. What we can do is find and fix the barriers on your site, document the work and help you keep it accessible. For legal questions, talk to your attorney.

Overlay widgets add a toolbar or script that promises to make a website accessible automatically. They can change things like text size or contrast for the visitor who opens them, but they do not change the underlying code. Unlabeled form fields, menus that cannot be reached by keyboard, missing captions and inaccessible PDFs usually remain. Many accessibility practitioners and disability advocates are critical of relying on them.

Regulators have taken notice as well. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalized an order against accessiBe, which had marketed its AI-powered widget as able to make any website WCAG-compliant. The FTC alleged those claims were false or unsupported, and the order bars the company from making them without evidence. If your site already runs an overlay, we will tell you plainly what it does and does not cover, and fix the issues in the site itself.

If your business has received an ADA demand letter or been served with a lawsuit about its website, involve your attorney first. Responses, deadlines and settlements are legal decisions. We can move quickly on the technical side: a prompt audit of the pages and issues named in the letter, a prioritized list of barriers, fixes to the most serious problems first, and a written record of the testing and remediation your attorney can review. We work alongside your counsel; we do not give legal advice or negotiate claims.

For more than 10 years we have designed and built 100+ websites and apps from our office at 12620 Beach Blvd in Jacksonville, and we are rated 5.0 on Google from 33 reviews. Because we are developers, an audit from us does not end with a spreadsheet of problems: the same team that finds an issue fixes it, whether it lives in WordPress, Divi, custom code or an app. Accessibility is already part of our UI/UX design and web app testing work, so if your site is due for a rebuild, our Jacksonville web design team can build WCAG 2.2 AA in from the start instead of retrofitting it later.

Want the background first? Read our plain-English ADA and WCAG guide for Florida small businesses. Curious how your site performs on speed and search as well? Start with a free website speed & SEO report.