I've heard this reasoning more than once now, always from the same kind of business: owner-operated, local, doing fine without a strong online presence, and specifically avoiding one. The logic goes: a website is a "place of public accommodation" under the ADA, accessibility lawsuits against small business websites have become common, and the safest move is to just not have one to sue.
It's not a paranoid read. Web accessibility lawsuits against small and mid-size businesses have been rising for years, and plenty of them target sites that look completely normal to a sighted user with a mouse. The fear is real. The strategy built on top of it has a hole in it.
The platforms aren't your problem. The booking tool might be.
Not having a website doesn't take a business out of the digital public square — it just changes which corner of it they're standing in. Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram: all public-facing digital presence. The difference is that those platforms are Google's and Meta's to maintain. They run accessibility teams, they get sued directly, and that is not where demand letters against a local business go. Genuinely not your surface to defend.
What isn't covered is the surface almost nobody counts as having a website at all. The booking link in an Instagram bio. The ordering page a POS vendor spun up. The scheduling widget a customer taps straight from a Google listing. Those are web surfaces tied to one specific business, and they're the kind of thing these cases actually reach. You picked the vendor. You can't fix their markup, you can't audit it, and you won't know what's wrong with it until someone tells you in writing.
That's the part that doesn't get weighed enough. A website isn't just a legal surface — it's the main channel through which someone who's never heard of the business finds it, decides it looks legitimate, and books. Opting out of that to dodge a risk that's still present elsewhere is a bad trade even before you get to the legal question.
What actually reduces the risk
None of this is legal advice — an accessibility-focused attorney is the right call for a formal compliance review. But from a build standpoint, most of what gets a site into trouble is fixable at the code level, and it's rarely the exotic stuff.
Build with real semantic HTML — not an overlay widget bolted on top.
Accessibility overlay tools have themselves become a target in lawsuits, because they mask markup problems instead of fixing them. A screen reader still hits the same broken structure underneath.
Write real alt text for every image.
Not the filename, not left blank. A short, accurate description of what the image actually shows.
Make every interactive element usable by keyboard alone.
Navigation, the booking button, any form — all of it should be reachable and operable without a mouse.
Keep visible focus states.
They get stripped out for looking "messy" more often than you'd think. Without them, a keyboard user has no idea where they are on the page.
Build forms and booking flows with proper labels and structure.
Every field needs a label tied to it in the markup, not just placeholder text that disappears the moment someone starts typing.
Every business trading a website for the hope of avoiding this fight is giving up its best growth channel for a problem that was never fully solved in the first place. The fix isn't hiding. It's building the site right the first time.
This is part of why I build every site by hand in HTML and CSS instead of assembling one from a framework's component library. It means I'm writing the actual markup — not inheriting whatever accessibility gaps came bundled with someone else's pre-built components — and I can verify exactly what a screen reader or keyboard-only visitor is going to hit on every page.