Every year, thousands of small businesses get a letter they never expected: a website accessibility demand, threatening a lawsuit over things like missing alt text, a form a screen reader can't fill out, or text too faint to read against its background. Most owners have never heard that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to a website at all. It does.
Here's the part that surprises people: there's no single detailed rulebook to check against. The Department of Justice's own guidance says it "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards" for website accessibility, while also stating that ADA protections extend to the goods and services a business offers online. Businesses get to choose how they meet that bar, which is exactly why a lot of them just skip it, until a letter shows up.
The DOJ's guidance does point to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the standard most courts and lawyers actually reference, and it calls out the same handful of practical things over and over: color contrast in your text, alt text on images, captions on video, forms people can actually fill out, and a site that works with a keyboard, not just a mouse. None of that is exotic. Most of it is writing better descriptions and picking colors that aren't the same shade of gray on gray.
Honest opinion: skip the accessibility widget. You've probably seen these, a little icon in the corner of a site promising to fix your whole site's compliance in one click. Over a thousand accessibility practitioners have put their name on something called the Overlay Fact Sheet, arguing flatly that no overlay product can make a site fully compliant with any real accessibility standard. In 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe, one of the biggest overlay vendors, to pay a million dollars for falsely claiming its widget could make any website fully WCAG compliant. The widget scans your page and bolts some JavaScript on top. It doesn't touch your actual content, and the lawyers sending these demand letters know exactly what an overlay looks like.
The real fix is boring and mostly free. Write a real caption for every photo you upload, not "IMG_4021." Tab through your own site with your mouse unplugged and see if you can reach every link and button. Look at your body text against its background with tired eyes and ask if you'd actually read it. None of that needs a developer.
Where Cantrip helps, and where it doesn't: our themes are built with real HTML, actual headers, nav elements, and buttons instead of divs pretending to be buttons, so keyboard navigation mostly works out of the box on the structural stuff. What we don't have yet is a separate alt text field. Right now, whatever caption you write on a photo becomes its alt text automatically. Good news if you already write real captions, less good if you've been leaving them blank.
Nobody builds a website planning to get sued over it. But the real reason to care isn't the lawsuit. It's whether someone using a screen reader or a keyboard can actually find your phone number. Fix that, and the legal risk mostly takes care of itself.