Websites & ADA Compliance

A website that a blind or low-vision customer cannot navigate with a screen reader is, in Florida’s federal courts, a lawsuit waiting to be filed. Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act was written in 1990 for physical storefronts, but a generation of serial plaintiffs, a handful of high-volume law firms, and a line of Eleventh Circuit and district court decisions have turned it into the most active category of federal litigation a Florida e-commerce business is likely to face. Florida federal courts saw 961 website-accessibility suits in 2025 — more than double the prior year and second in the nation — and the Southern District of Florida alone now handles more ADA public-accommodation filings than most entire states.

Our Miami attorneys work both sides of the problem: bringing websites and mobile apps into conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA before a demand letter arrives, and defending businesses — from single-location restaurants and boutiques to national e-commerce brands — when one does.

The ADA and the Regulatory Gap

A 1990 statute, twelve physical categories, and no Title III web rule — 36 years later

Title III of the ADA, 42 U.S.C. § 12181 et seq., prohibits discrimination “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” (§ 12182(a)). The statute lists twelve categories of public accommodation — restaurants, hotels, retail stores, banks, and the like — every one of them described as a physical, tangible facility (§ 12181(7)). Congress enacted the ADA before the commercial internet existed and has never amended Title III to address websites, mobile apps, or other digital platforms.

The Department of Justice has repeatedly signaled that it views websites of public accommodations as covered, and has said so in guidance, amicus briefs, and settlement agreements, but it has never finalized a Title III web-accessibility rule for private businesses. The only binding federal web rule is DOJ’s April 2024 rule under Title II — which applies to state and local governments, not private businesses — adopting WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the required standard; on April 20, 2026, DOJ pushed that rule’s compliance dates back a year, to April 26, 2027 for large public entities and April 26, 2028 for small ones. For private businesses, the regulatory vacuum has left the question of whether, and when, Title III reaches an inaccessible website to the courts — and produced a body of inconsistent case law, a circuit split, and a litigation industry built on that uncertainty.

The Numbers: Filings in the Middle and Southern Districts of Florida

Florida is the second-busiest venue in the country, and South Florida is its epicenter

Florida’s website-accessibility docket has followed a distinctive arc. Federal filings in the state climbed to 576 in 2018 on the strength of the Gil v. Winn-Dixie trial verdict, fell to a low of 185 in 2021 while the Eleventh Circuit’s since-vacated Gil panel opinion cast doubt on the claim, and then rebuilt year over year once that opinion was wiped off the books — reaching 470 in 2024 and 961 in 2025. Counting state-court filings as well, Florida recorded 950 website suits in 2025, up 51 percent from 629 in 2024, and had already logged 393 by the end of June 2026, keeping it among the three most active states in the country alongside New York and Illinois.

Within Florida, the two districts that matter are the Southern District (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and the Keys) and the Middle District (Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Fort Myers, and Ocala). Published reports do not break the website cases out by district, so the chart below uses the broader measure the courts themselves track — civil filings coded as “Americans with Disabilities – Other” (nature-of-suit 446), which captures every Title III public-accommodation case, web and physical alike. On that measure the Southern District has run at roughly three times the Middle District’s volume, climbing from about 980 filings in 2022 to more than 1,300 in each of 2024 and 2025, while the Middle District rose from roughly 390 filings in 2024 to about 465 in 2025 — a 19 percent increase in a single year — as the serial-plaintiff model that began in Miami spread to Orlando, Tampa, and Gainesville.

Two features of the Florida docket explain the volume. The first is concentration: a 2025 analysis identified four Miami-area firms and a small roster of repeat plaintiffs — several with well over a hundred filings each — behind most South Florida website cases, using substantially identical complaints against restaurants, apparel retailers, hospitality businesses, and medical practices. The second is economics: Title III authorizes injunctive relief and attorney’s fees but no damages, so the cases are priced to settle, typically in the $5,000-to-$20,000 range plus remediation, before a defendant has spent enough on counsel to test the complaint. Nationally, roughly one in four 2025 suits targeted a website that was already running an accessibility “widget” or overlay — a reminder that the plaintiffs’ bar treats those tools as a marker of non-compliance rather than a defense.

How the Eleventh Circuit Got Here: Rendon, Gil, and Haynes

Why there is still no binding answer to whether a website is a “place of public accommodation”

Federal courts have split into roughly three camps. “Nexus” jurisdictions — the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits, and in practice the Eleventh — hold that a website is covered only if it has a sufficient connection to a physical place of public accommodation. The First and Seventh Circuits treat a public accommodation’s website as independently covered, regardless of any tie to a physical location. The Second Circuit and others remain unsettled, with district courts divided. The Eleventh Circuit occupies an unusually unsettled position within the nexus camp, because its one precedential decision on the merits was vacated on procedural grounds and the decision district courts now rely on is unpublished.

Rendon v. Valleycrest Productions, Ltd., 294 F.3d 1279 (11th Cir. 2002) — the “intangible barrier” doctrine

Rendon was not a website case. Hearing- and mobility-impaired contestants challenged the telephone screening process used to select contestants for a television game show, arguing it screened them out before they ever reached the physical studio. The Eleventh Circuit held that Title III’s prohibition on discrimination “is not limited to tangible barriers,” and that an intangible barrier that denies disabled individuals the full and equal enjoyment of a physical place’s goods and services can violate the ADA even though the barrier itself exists off-site. That principle became the analytical hook every Florida website plaintiff has used since: an inaccessible website is an intangible barrier to the brick-and-mortar store, restaurant, or clinic behind it.

Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. — the landmark trial, the reversal, and the vacatur

Juan Carlos Gil, who is legally blind, sued Winn-Dixie in the Southern District of Florida after he could not use the grocery chain’s website to refill prescriptions or link digital coupons to his loyalty card. Following a bench trial — one of the first website-accessibility cases in the country to reach trial rather than settle — Judge Scola found Winn-Dixie liable, entered a permanent injunction requiring conformance with WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and awarded fees. 257 F. Supp. 3d 1340 (S.D. Fla. 2017). On appeal, a divided panel reversed, holding that public accommodations are limited to actual physical places, that websites are not themselves places of public accommodation, and that Winn-Dixie’s limited-function site did not exclude Gil from the physical stores’ goods and services. 993 F.3d 1266 (11th Cir. Apr. 7, 2021). Judge Jill Pryor dissented at length. Then, on rehearing, the court held that the appeal had become moot because the three-year injunction had expired while the appeal was pending; it vacated both its own panel opinion and the district court judgment and directed dismissal. 2021 WL 6129128 (11th Cir. Dec. 28, 2021). The widely reported holding that websites are not places of public accommodation therefore binds no one. It survives only as persuasive commentary, and the Eleventh Circuit has still not issued a controlling decision on the question.

Haynes v. Dunkin’ Donuts LLC, 741 F. App’x 752 (11th Cir. 2018) — the decision Florida courts actually apply

Dennis Haynes, who is blind, sued Dunkin’ Donuts after its website — incompatible with his screen reader — prevented him from locating nearby stores or buying gift cards online. The district court dismissed for failure to allege a nexus between the website barriers and the physical shops. The Eleventh Circuit reversed, reasoning that the ADA’s prohibition extends to intangible barriers and that because the website “is a service that facilitates the use of” Dunkin’ Donuts’ physical shops, Haynes had stated a plausible claim. Haynes did not require a showing that the website completely denied access to the physical store; facilitation was enough. Although unpublished and therefore non-binding under Eleventh Circuit rules, Haynes is the only circuit-level word on the merits still standing, and the Southern and Middle Districts lean on it heavily.

The Current Florida Test: A Nexus to a Physical Location

What the 2023–2026 decisions in the Southern and Middle Districts require — and where they diverge

With Gil’s merits holding vacated and Haynes left standing, the Southern and Middle Districts have converged on a functional nexus test: a blind or low-vision plaintiff states a Title III claim if the complaint plausibly alleges that the website’s inaccessibility creates an intangible barrier to the goods, services, or privileges of an associated physical place of public accommodation. The decisions are not binding on one another, but read together they show both how easily the nexus is satisfied and where the courts are starting to push back.

• Fernandez v. Flanigan’s Enterprises, Inc., No. 23-80073-CIV (S.D. Fla. June 29, 2023). The court allowed a blind plaintiff’s claim to proceed against a restaurant chain because the website let customers order food for delivery or in-store pickup — a direct, functional tie to the physical restaurants that satisfied the intangible-barrier requirement without the court ever needing to use the word “nexus.”
• Proveyer v. Prince St. Pizza LLC, No. 1:26-cv-20075 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 27, 2026) (Moore, J.). The court dismissed a blind plaintiff’s claim against a pizzeria’s website where the allegations that he intended to order food and visit the restaurant “in the near future” were conclusory and devoid of detail about any genuine effort to patronize the location. The decision shows that Florida courts are scrutinizing standing and the plausibility of a plaintiff’s stated intent to use the physical location — not merely the existence of a website-to-store tie.
• Espinal v. Gabriella Growers, Inc., No. 6:25-cv-2319 (M.D. Fla. Apr. 2, 2026). Applying Haynes, the Middle District held that because the defendant sold plants both online and at its physical nursery, the website’s incompatibility with screen-reading software prevented the plaintiff from accessing goods offered at the physical location and therefore “facilitated the use of” the store — illustrating how readily the test is met whenever a business operates both an e-commerce site and a brick-and-mortar location.
• Herrera v. PB Retail, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-20632 (S.D. Fla. June 11, 2026). The Southern District characterized a retailer’s website as a “critical point of sale” for products also sold at its Miami Design District store, and identified “additional nexuses” in features that let customers arrange in-store pickup, book appointments for in-store services, and check in-store availability of merchandise. Notably, the court found the plaintiff’s stated intent to visit the store in the near future sufficient for standing without a concrete plan or date — a more forgiving reading than Proveyer, decided in the same district four months earlier.

Two practical trends define current Florida practice. First, the nexus standard remains the operative test and is satisfied fairly easily whenever a business has both a functional e-commerce or ordering website and a physical Florida location. Second, courts are increasingly demanding well-pleaded, non-conclusory allegations of the plaintiff’s own intent and effort to patronize that location — an emerging check on serial, form-complaint filings that a well-prepared motion to dismiss can exploit. Because the same district has read the standing requirement differently within a single year, the outcome of a motion depends as much on the judge, the pleading, and the plaintiff’s litigation history as on the law.

WCAG 2.0, 2.1 & 2.2 Level AA: The Benchmark Courts and Settlements Use

Not codified for Title III — but written into every injunction, consent decree, and DOJ rule

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium, are the international technical standard for making digital content usable by people with disabilities. They organize dozens of testable success criteria under four principles — content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust — at three conformance levels, A, AA, and AAA. WCAG 2.0 (2008) established the groundwork: text alternatives for images, keyboard navigability, compatibility with assistive technologies such as screen readers, sufficient color contrast, and properly labeled forms and controls. WCAG 2.1 (2018) added criteria for mobile devices and low-vision and cognitive disabilities, including reflow, orientation, and touch-target requirements. WCAG 2.2 (2023) added nine further criteria, largely around focus visibility, dragging movements, and accessible authentication.

No statute or regulation makes WCAG the legal standard for a private business’s website under Title III. But it is the standard in practice: the Gil injunction required WCAG 2.0 AA; DOJ’s Title II rule adopts WCAG 2.1 AA; DOJ’s settlement agreements with private businesses specify WCAG 2.1 AA; and virtually every consent decree and private settlement in a Florida website case requires conformance to WCAG 2.1 AA within a defined period, with periodic audits. A business that can document WCAG 2.1 AA conformance — through a professional audit, not an overlay widget — has both the strongest defense on the merits and the best chance of mooting a claim early, and the growing number of suits filed against widget-equipped sites confirms that the plaintiffs’ bar does not treat overlays as compliance.

Defending an ADA Website Suit

The first move looks different from a trademark or copyright case — but the first days still matter most

Because an ADA website complaint carries no damages exposure, defendants sometimes treat it as a nuisance to be paid off at the first number in the demand. That is usually a mistake in both directions: paying quickly invites the next serial plaintiff, while ignoring the case risks a default judgment, an injunction on the plaintiff’s terms, and a fee award that dwarfs the settlement value. The right response depends on the plaintiff, the website, and the judge, and it is built in the first days after service.

• Test standing. Under Proveyer and the Supreme Court’s guidance in Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, a plaintiff must plausibly allege a concrete intent to use the physical location, not a generalized “near future” desire. A tester’s filing history is discoverable and relevant to that inquiry.
• Test the nexus. A business with no Florida physical location, or whose website does not facilitate use of one, has a structural defense under Haynes and the vacated Gil panel’s reasoning. Where a nexus exists, the question becomes which features create it and whether the alleged barriers actually affect them.
• Test the barrier allegations. Form complaints often recite generic WCAG failures without identifying what the plaintiff tried to do. A rapid technical audit tells us within days whether the alleged barriers exist, whether they have already been fixed, and whether the plaintiff could have completed the transaction by other accessible means.
• Weigh mootness carefully. Remediation completed before judgment can moot a claim for injunctive relief, but the voluntary-cessation doctrine requires showing the conduct cannot reasonably be expected to recur — which is why a documented WCAG 2.1 AA audit and monitoring program, not a quick patch, is what persuades a court.
• Manage the fee exposure. Attorney’s fees are the plaintiff’s real recovery. An early, credible remediation plan and a Rule 68 offer of judgment can cap that exposure; a defended motion to dismiss on standing can end it.
• Coordinate with insurance and vendors. Some general-liability and cyber policies respond to ADA website claims; e-commerce platform and web-developer contracts may carry indemnity obligations. Both should be tendered promptly.

Our full litigation defense practice — patent, trademark (including Schedule A asset-freeze cases), copyright, trade secret, CADRA, and FDUTPA claims — is described in our Litigation Defense Services materials, where the same first-10-days discipline applies.

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