ADA Title III and websites: does it cover your online store?

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 has five parts, called titles. Title I covers employers. Title II covers state and local governments. Title III covers private businesses that serve the public, which the law calls public accommodations, plus some private transport and testing services.

The core rule is in 42 U.S.C. section 12182(a): no person shall be discriminated against “on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation”. The Justice Department writes the detailed rules (28 CFR part 36) and enforces them.

Section 12181(7) lists 12 kinds of private business. A business counts if its operations affect commerce, which nearly every business does. There is no minimum number of staff or sales.

A Shopify store that sells goods fits category E, “other sales or rental establishment”. The open question is not whether a store is the right kind of business. It is whether a website on its own is a “place”, which is where the courts split.

Section 12182(b) spells out what discrimination means. These four duties matter most for a store:

• Full and equal enjoyment. People with disabilities must be able to get the same goods and services as everyone else.
• Effective communication. A business must give auxiliary aids and services so that its communication with disabled customers is as effective as with others (28 CFR 36.303). On a website that means things like alt text (a short description of an image for people who cannot see it), captions and labelled form fields.
• Reasonable changes to policies. For example, taking an order by phone or email when a shopper cannot finish checkout.
• Removing physical barriers where that is “readily achievable”, meaning “easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense” (section 12181(9)). This duty is about buildings.

There is a limit. A business does not have to provide an aid that would be an “undue burden”, which the Justice Department describes as significant difficulty or expense, judged against the business's overall resources. It must still offer another way that works, if one exists.

The text of Title III does not mention websites. It was written in 1990. The Justice Department's position is that it applies to them anyway. Its web guidance of March 18, 2022 says “the ADA's requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations”, including those offered on the web.

That guidance makes four points a store owner should know:

• Businesses have flexibility in how they make their sites accessible.
• Existing technical standards, namely WCAG and the federal Section 508 standards, “provide helpful guidance”. The guidance does not make either one a legal requirement for businesses.
• It names common barriers: poor colour contrast, colour alone used to show meaning, missing alt text, videos without captions, forms without labels and pages that only work with a mouse.
• It is guidance, not a regulation. It has no binding legal effect and can be changed. It was still on ADA.gov when we checked on October 17, 2026.

Federal courts are divided into 12 regional circuits. They read “place of public accommodation” in different ways. The Congressional Research Service, which writes legal research for Congress, sorted them into two camps in 2018. Within the second camp, the test most courts use is a “nexus” (a close link) between the website and a physical place.

Cases worth knowing

• Robles v. Domino's Pizza (9th Cir., January 15, 2019). Customers use the site and app to find a restaurant and order for delivery or pickup. The court called this “nexus” between the website and the physical restaurants “critical to our analysis”.
• Gil v. Winn-Dixie (11th Cir., April 7, 2021). The panel held that a grocery chain's website was not itself a public accommodation. The court vacated that opinion as moot in December 2021, so it is no longer binding, and the question stayed open in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
• Mejia v. High Brew Coffee (S.D.N.Y., September 30, 2024). The chief judge of the federal court in Manhattan held that a website with no physical store is not a public accommodation. Many other judges in that court had ruled the other way, so the question is still open in New York.
• Martinez v. Cot'n Wash (Cal. Ct. App., 2022). A California state court reached the same result for an online-only retailer. Our page on the California Unruh Act and online stores explains why that matters for damages.

The split does not stop suits being filed. More than half of 2025 website suits were filed in New York (28%) and Florida (24%), according to EcomBack, and until Mejia many New York judges had let claims against online-only stores go ahead.

Many articles mix these up. The Title II web rule is real and has dates, but it is for public bodies. It does not apply to private businesses.

The original Title II dates were April 24, 2026 and April 26, 2027. The Justice Department moved them by one year with an interim final rule published on April 20, 2026. Even so, the rule is useful for stores as a signal: it is the clearest statement of the standard the government treats as accessible. That is WCAG 2.1 AA, and WCAG 2.2 AA in plain words includes all of it.

Start by working out where you sit in the split. In your Shopify admin, check these places:

• Settings, then Locations. A retail shop, showroom or studio listed here is a physical place.
• Settings, then Shipping and delivery, then Pickup in store. Pickup at a location is the same kind of link the court relied on in Robles.
• Sales channels. If you use Shopify POS at markets, pop-ups or a shop, the website and the place sell the same goods.
• Your pages. A store locator, event pages or “visit our studio” content also tie the site to a place.

If any of these apply, plan as if Title III covers your site everywhere. If none apply, you have an argument in some courts, not a shield. Either way, the fixes are the same, and they help you sell to more people.

Shopify looks after its own checkout. Your theme, apps, images, videos and text are yours. Our guide to Shopify ADA compliance and what your theme breaks covers that split in detail.

Two groups can bring a Title III case (42 U.S.C. section 12188):

• A private person. They can get a court order to fix the barrier, and the court can award their attorney's fees (section 12205). Federal Title III gives them no money damages. State laws, such as California's, can add damages.
• The Justice Department. It can ask for damages for the people harmed and a civil penalty. The law sets the penalty at up to $50,000 for a first violation and $100,000 for later ones. Those amounts are raised for inflation. For penalties assessed after July 3, 2025 they are $118,225 and $236,451 (28 CFR 85.5).

The law also tells the court to “give consideration to any good faith effort or attempt to comply” when it sets a penalty. Fixing problems and keeping dated records is the plain way to show that effort. For lawsuit numbers, costs and the WCAG version courts use, see our guide to ADA website compliance for online stores.