A (0:00)

A lot of interior designers asking me about website ADA compliance. The rumor mill of interior designers getting sued because their website is not following best practices are making income off the whole idea of suing small business owners. Lawsuits are thrown around like parade candy. 2000 cases in the first half of the year alone for 5,000 to $25,000. Hello, and welcome to episode 301 of the Kate Show. Today I am talking about something that has been popping up in my inbox quite a bit. I've got a lot of interior designers asking me about website ADA compliance because there's been some stuff going through the rumor mill of interior designers getting sued because their website is not following best practices for ada. And this is kind of a new thing. We live in a very litigious. Litigious, you know the word. I'm trying to say we live in a society where people sue other people for silly reasons. Okay? That's really what it comes down to. And what you'll see today is that a lot of these plaintiffs are serial plaintiffs, and they are making income off the whole idea of suing small business owners because their websites don't meet the standard that the ADA has set forth. So let's just get into it now. Do I think that people with special needs should be able to access sites? Of course I do. But there is a line. There is a line where you can tell someone's just kind of being ridiculous. And the first step would not be a lawsuit. It would be to reach out to the business and say, hey, I'm having some trouble with your website. Could somebody please assist me? Like, that's what reasonable people would do. But we live in a society where lawsuits are thrown around like parade candy. So let's just get into it. So interior design website ADA compliance today is going to be an incomplete guide because obviously everyone's situation is a little bit different. But this is going to give you the best summary of what website ADA compliance is and how to know if your site's compliant, which items to fix first. And this is a big one. Which popular aesthetic elements on your site are putting your website at the most risk. We're also going to look at a few real court cases in which designers got in trouble for their website's lack of compliance, what those plaintiffs had in common, and the primary ways your website should be compliant, and how to know if it's not. So we'll just start at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start. What is website ADA compliance? Well, your website must give people with disabilities the same full and equal enjoyment of your services as anyone else on under Title 3 of the Americans with Disability Act. The gold standard benchmark for this compliance is something called WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 level AA. Yeah, okay, we'll talk more about that. It's based on four principles that are referred to as poor, as in pour yourself a glass of wine because this is going to be quite an episode. The P in poor stands for perceivable, then operable, understandable, and robust. So let's break each of those down. Perceivable means that you should have alt text for project photos captions on video tours, and you should have good color contrast. So if your brand is very monochromatic and there's not enough contrast between the background and the text, it does make the text harder to read. Even if you don't have any visual impairment, it can still be hard to read and also not look as nice. Operable means everything is reachable by keyword Keyboard no seizure inducing flashes. I've had my screen do that before, you know, and I am. I'm not epileptic. I've never had a seizure, thank God. But when my screen is like flash, flash, flash, flash. Oh my gosh, that's whoa, what's happening to my eyeballs right now? So obviously you don't want your website to be causing that in anybody. Your site also needs to be understandable. So clear form labels on consultation requests predictable navigation this is something I've been harping on for a long time. If your main menu of your website is super vague and you've tried to name it really fun things like our story instead of about us or reach out today instead of contact or design journal instead of blog, you might think that sounds nice and reads nice, but it's actually just a little bit unclear and you need to be very understandable. Lastly, it should be robust, meaning your site should work with screen readers and assistive technology they'll come out with in the future. So obviously ADA compliance is not really a one and done thing. As technology advances, your website will need to keep up with it. And there is one particular website platform that does this better than the other ones, and I will tell you which one that is at the end of the episode. All right, so how is compliance determined? Well, no government agency can certify that, oh, this interior designer or organizer's website is for sure compliant. The courts actually decide this on a case by case basis and they use the WCAGAA as the measuring stick, which was endorsed by the Department of Justice. So if a blind visitor is using a screen reader and they can't browse your portfolio, read about your services, or submit an inquiry in court, you lose. And an accessibility statement plus a remediation plan will help your defense. So I do have a sample accessibility statement further on in this podcast which I will read to you. You can certainly use it or some form of it. A remediation plan just means you have to spell out here's how I'm going to fix the non compliance areas of my website. So pretty straightforward. Why has this become such a big deal though? I mean, real businesses are being for real sued and having to pay out real money to plaintiffs. Well, ADA website lawsuits exploded in 2025 with over 2,000 cases in the first half of the year alone, which was a 37% increase year over year. Not great, right? Small service businesses like designers were hit pretty hard and plaintiffs were using automated tools to scan thousands of sites every day. Like not even fair, right? Clearly there's an agenda behind that. Most cases settled quickly for 5,000 to $25,000 plus whatever it costs to fix the site. Your website can be a prime target for this because you offer goods and services. So you know, you're viewing, you're letting people view your work, you're letting them book services or you're just talking about services you offer. Some of you are selling products, whether digital or physical. Let's actually look at some real lawsuits that were filed against interior designers because of their websites. The first one that comes to mind was Justin Bullock versus Pure Salt Interiors. I know a lot of you know of Pure Salt. I think their website is gorgeous. A lot of people have brought it up to me when they're asking us to design a website for them. And this lawsuit against them was filed in December of 2022. So it's been a few years. And the plaintiff who was visually impaired said the site wasn't screen reader friendly. They that lawsuit did settle quickly with another example. There was Sophia Faldoni vs Boston Interiors Home Furnishings. And that was in July of 2025. So much more recent. Boston Interiors provides full service interior design across New England. And same story, inaccessible website, allegedly. And they had a settlement filed shortly after. So it looks like neither of these cases even made it to court. They did settle out of court, which is often best. My experience with lawsuits at being a plaintiff is that you always prefer to settle out of court and not get into court because then things get a lot more expensive. But let's talk about the plaintiffs. So when I was looking into this, I had a suspicion there were going to be a lot of commonalities. And I was right. I'm not an investigative reporter, but today I'm kind of feeling like one. So about 50% of all 2025 filings came from just 31 serial plaintiffs. These people were almost always legally blind and they would visit a website solely to run a screen reader such as NVDA or JAWS and document the failures. So the plaintiff against Pure Salt actually filed dozens of lawsuits from 2022 to 2025 for, for always the same reason. The plaintiff against Boston Interiors filed at least 26 lawsuits from July to December 2025 alone. So these people are busy. Now the similarities that you're going to see with most ADA non compliance lawsuits is that the plaintiffs will file templated complaints because they're doing it in mass, and they will list the same 10 to 15 non compliance issues that they will file in plaintiff friendly districts. And they will be represented by the same small group of law firms. And over 95% of these cases settle without trial. So puts small business owners in a difficult situation. Nobody wants to be involved in a lawsuit. Obviously it's a bit disgusting to me that these commonalities were there. I mean, what happened to the time when we would just call a business and say, I'm having some trouble with your website. Just wanted you to know, can you help? Like I don't get it. Like anyway, you guys know how I feel about this. I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way. But that doesn't change the reality that we have to address this. So how do you know if your interior design, staging, organizing, window treatment website is ADA compliant? Well, there are some free tools out there that will give you a good idea, but. But if you are unsure even after that, then it would be worth it to use a paid tool. Way cheaper to use a paid tool than to get involved in a lawsuit. Right? But the three best free tools would be Wave, which is wave.webaim.org or it's also a Chrome extension. It shows errors overlaid on live pages. So that's a nice visual since most of us are very visual people. The second one would be dev tools and that's a deep audit with fix suggestions. So it will say here's what's wrong, here's how you could fix it. The third one you're probably a little more familiar with, it's Google Lighthouse. It will give you a score of 0 to 100 for accessibility so you can just Google Google Lighthouse and just or type in Google Lighthouse Accessibility, hit search and you'll be able to find it that way. I do prefer using Google tools. And then you'll need to run these scans on your home page, services page, portfolio page, contact page. You can certainly do other pages if you wanted to as well. And then what happens if you run one of these scans and you find out that you have a low ADA compliance score? Well, there are a few things that you should fix first. They're higher priority and then of course fix anything else that you're told to fix. But the issues that cause the most ADA non compliant lawsuits are are missing or useless alt text on project photos. So if your project photos just say room or they have the street name of the project or just a bunch of numbers, that's useless. It needs to actually describe the photo in several words or even a short sentence at this point. Alt text is not the same as the file name, although file names should also contain appropriate keywords. I and I know all of that because this is what we've been doing with websites for years. And it's one of those things where I think that God has given me a little bit of foreknowledge into this because when I was reading through what's required of ADA compliant sites, we were already doing so many of those things, not for compliance reasons, but for SEO reasons. So when I read through it and I was like, oh, we're already doing so many of these things. Oh thank God. Because obviously as a website designer I'm like, oh, this is huge. I need to pay attention to this for the sake of the sites that we are creating. Because ultimately, who, who has to be responsible for the ADA compliance of your site? You do. You, the business owner. But me as a website designer would also love to help you out and get you as close as possible to ADA compliance. So, so missing or useless alt text on photos, keyboard navigation failures. So using the tab, for example, tab button and helping move through the site that way. And then it should go from like link to link and button to button. And then if you want to click a button or a link, you should be able to hit the enter button and then it will take you there. Low color contrast. As I said earlier, that's a problem even for people who are not visually impaired. Unlabeled contact or booking forms. So if you've just got random forms and if you read through what the form is asking, you can figure out what it's for, but it's missing an actual header or title or a name. That's a problem because people who can't really see aren't going to understand that having no captions on video tours. So a caption could be, you know, text beneath it, it could be a paragraph next to it. There needs to be some sort of explanation about the video. Okay, so if you wanted to do a manual test of your website, you could use a free screen reader like NVDA and have fun with that. That's all I can say. Guys, this is not a fun episode for me to create because it just feels very legalistic. It feels so not fun. But sometimes in business we do things that are not fun because we have to. Now, let's say that you've checked your site and hopefully you've got a really good score. Well, how often should you be rechecking it? Every time you do a major update. So upload new photos, redesign a page, add new pages, add a booking calendar. That's when you should do it. Plus, you should just be doing an automated scan monthly and maybe a full manual audit every four to six months. The best practice for you to consider is conducting a quarterly compliance review and posting an accessibility statement on your site with an email that they can use to send you feedback. Now, obviously I'm not an attorney. This is not legal advice. This is just best practice information that I found through my research. So take it with a grain of salt. But let's now talk about some really beautiful but risky website esthetics that often violate ADA rules. So let's say you just got a gorgeous new website, you're very happy with it. What if it's actually putting you at risk? Well, a lot of the design choices that designers want on their sites are the ones that create real barriers for people with disabilities and will get flagged in lawsuits. So here are seven of the most common ones. Low color contrast. And usually that's with text. So let's just say you love having light gray text on your site. Subtle earth tones, thin, elegant font fonts on white backgrounds that will fail a compliance test because the text needs to be high contrast and not thin. Otherwise it's just hard to see. These issues, apparently, according to my research, are found on almost 80% of the top 1 million homepages. So, very common issue. The second most common issue is text overlay directly on banner images. And now if you have an overlay on the image, that will help, especially if the overlay is darker. But if the contrast is not high enough, then it will get flagged, it'll be a problem. The next thing is portfolio images and galleries with missing or generic alt text. So we talked about that earlier, and that missing alt text appears on over 55% of the top homepages. And the fourth thing is auto advancing carousels or sliders, So a slideshow that moves automatically. I've been against these for a long time. If you guys have been listening to the podcast over the past eight years, you know, I can't stand those slideshows that change by themselves. I can't stand testimonial sliders that change by themselves. Because the problem is even with non visually impaired people, they don't have a chance to appreciate your image or to read the testimonial before it changes. Changes. That bothers the heck out of me. And when my clients ask for that, I always tell them, here's why you shouldn't do it now, if they insist on it, obviously. Okay, here you go. But I gave you my disclaimer, and your website is your responsibility and your liability. Okay, so the next big thing would be little micro animations that happen when you hover. So it could mean like project cards that reveal details of the project only when someone zooms over it. With a mouse, that's a problem because people who can't use a mouse will miss that content. It's also going to create screen reader problems. The next thing is invisible or removed keyboard focus indicators. So typically you would have to manually disable this. It just means that when someone is tabbing through your site, whatever part they're tabbing on should be highlighted in some clear fashion. Sometimes it's blue, sometimes it's black. You know, it needs to be really obvious. So if you go to your go open your laptop or your desktop, go to your homepage and start hitting the tab button on your keyboard and just see what happens. So that's kind of an easy check there. And then very thin or decorative typography. So script fonts that are used a lot, that that's a problem. Fonts that are too thin, that's a problem. So when I have a client who has a script font as part of their brand, I will use that so minimally and only in the header. Maybe for one word in the header. But even after learning all this, I'm starting to wonder if we should be using script fonts in the headers at all. They do look pretty, but it's not worth a lawsuit. So. All right, so these elements that I just listed, they're not banned. You can still keep the same luxurious look on on your website as long as you make it compliant. So slightly darker hero banner image overlays Descriptive alt text that actually helps your SEO. Pause buttons on videos, on slideshows or just don't make them move by themselves at all. Visible focus for tabbing and it's important because these are the main things that a plaintiff who intends to sue you will look at first, so be one step ahead of them. All right, so let's talk about some example website compliance statements for your website. I'm just going to read one off to you. It's pretty short. You could say something like this. The header would be Accessibility Statement and it would say at your business name we are committed to ensuring our website is accessible to all individuals, including those with disabilities. Our website has been designed and reviewed in accordance with the Web Content Accessibility guidelines, or WCAG 2.1 level AA. We've taken the following steps to ensure accessibility and user experience across all devices and then you list the steps that you've taken. If you've not taken these steps, do not list them. Structured clear heading hierarchies throughout the site Descriptive alt text for all meaningful images Logical consistent content order for screen reader navigation Defined site language to support assistive tools Accessible color contrast for readability Minimal use of motion and animation Compatibility with major screen readers and keyboard navigation Video and downloadable content with accessibility compliance Regular accessibility audits using industry standard tools we are continually improving this accessibility of our site. If you encounter barriers, we welcome your feedback. Please contact us at. Put your email address and we will reply promptly. Now, again, I am not saying you should use this. I'm saying you could consider using this. I am not a lawyer. You have to figure this out for yourself or speak to a lawyer if you are concerned. This is not legal advice, but let's just pull back for a second. Are there website platforms out there that help you naturally get closer to ADA compliance without having to worry about all these little things? Fortunately for you, there is. Okay, I've been designing websites for a long time. My team and I have designed over 200 at this point, custom websites. You guys know we adore Squarespace. When I was researching which website platforms help their users become the most ADA compliant, naturally Squarespace was listed as number one. Now, Squarespace does give you a solid head start with accessibility compared to other builders, but it doesn't automatically make your site compliant. What it really comes down to is your final website design choices and whether you're violating the rules or not. So here is exactly How Squarespace will help you get closer to that ADA compliance. It does give you dedicated places to put alt text on every image. They also have an AI tool in Squarespace that will let you know which images are lacking alt text and then it will generate text for you based on the content of the image. That's pretty cool. And then it has automatic keyboard navigation support. So every Squarespace site gets a visible focus outline, so a blue ring or black ring when they're tabbing through the site. So people always know where they're at on the site. It also gives proper semantic HM HTML structure. I know that just sounds like a bunch of blah, blah, blah, but it's important for screen readers. And then color contrast controls are super easy because you can put your entire color palette in the styling section of the editor and then adjust the contrast if it's not enough. It also has accessible media options, so there are fields to add captions and transcripts and you can add pause controls. There's also labeled forms and a labeled checkout. So these are all really little nuanced things that actually make a big difference. And I think it's pretty cool that Squarespace includes them now. If you're curious about how some other website platforms line up, Squarespace is number one. The second best option is Wix. The third best option is WordPress, and the worst option is Weebly Sorry. So this might be the year that you get a new website. If you've been putting it off, I would suggest switching to Squarespace to make compliance easier. It does not guarantee compliance, but it makes it easier. And isn't that what we want at the end of the day? All right, guys, that was a lot. If you find yourself in need of a more compliant website, and if you're like, what the heck? While we're making it more compliant, we. Why don't we also address the AIO and the SEO aspects of it? You know what? That is actually what we do, the social aid agency. So you can head over to Kate the Socialite.com and check out our services regarding SEO, AIO and custom website design on Squarespace. Okay, well, we're going to just wrap this up with a pretty bow on it, guys. We do live in a society that thinks lawsuits are just the way to go. It's sad. Will this happen to everyone? I don't think so. Will it happen to you? I hope not. But it does pay to check your site, be aware of how compliant you are or are not, and perhaps add the accessibility statement of some kind to your site. Just do your due diligence to be compliant. All right, guys, until next time, keep your marketing simple, your message clear, and your website compliant. Bye.