Your funeral home website's visitors are exactly who the ADA protects

Nobody publishes a lawsuit count for funeral homes specifically — in UsableNet’s tracking of 5,114 digital-accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025, the industry sits inside “Other,” far behind e-commerce. What the docket does show: federal website suits grew 27% last year and now make up over a third of all federal ADA Title III filings, and 64% of the companies sued had revenue under $25 million. The profile isn’t the Fortune 500. It’s a small local business with a physical location, a consumer-facing website, and — this is the part that should get an owner’s attention — a visitor base the law was written for.

The law is a fog. Read it anyway — it’s short.

The Department of Justice’s standing guidance says, in writing, that “the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web” — and, in the same document, that DOJ “does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards” for private businesses. Obligation without a checklist. That gap is where the plaintiffs’ bar lives.

Three facts anchor everything else. First, the courts’ main carve-out can’t help this trade: where judges have limited the ADA online, they’ve done it for online-only businesses — the Ninth Circuit’s Domino’s ruling held that the ADA covers a website precisely because it connects to a physical place of business, and a funeral home is nothing if not a physical place. Second, the size exemption people half-remember doesn’t exist here: the 15-employee floor belongs to the ADA’s employment title; the public-accommodations title has no size floor at all. Third, there is a de facto standard even without a private-business regulation: DOJ’s April 2024 rule for government websites adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA — so when courts, settlements, and regulators say “accessible,” that’s the measuring stick they reach for. (The government rule’s own deadlines slipped to 2027–2028 this April; the private-side lawsuit exposure never depended on it.)

One more thing the venue data teaches: you don’t need a New York location to be sued in New York — courts there accept cases against any business whose website New Yorkers can reach. Every funeral home website is reachable from Brooklyn.

The widget is the trap, not the fix

The most heavily marketed answer to all this is an “accessibility overlay” — a one-line JavaScript widget promising automated compliance. In January 2025, the FTC ordered the biggest overlay vendor, accessiBe, to pay $1 million for deceptive compliance claims — the pitch that its widget makes a site “compliant with 30% of WCAG’s requirements immediately” and the rest “within 48 hours” — and barred it from claiming automated WCAG compliance at all.

The lawsuit data says the same thing without the legal language: 1,416 of 2025’s suits hit companies already running an accessibility widget. UsableNet’s plain summary: widgets “did not slow litigation,” don’t fix code-level problems, and can interfere with the screen readers they claim to serve. One New York skin-care clinic was sued by a blind plaintiff while accessiBe’s overlay was running on its site. If a vendor’s accessibility pitch is a widget plus a lawsuit guarantee, you’re buying the appearance of the work instead of the work.

Fix what your visitors actually hit

The honest good news: the real work is small, and it maps one-to-one onto who visits a funeral home website. WebAIM’s 2026 scan of the top million home pages found 95.9% fail WCAG — and six failure types make up 96% of all errors. You don’t need an audit firm to start. You need these five, in order.

Contrast. Low-contrast text is the web’s most common failure, on 83.9% of home pages — gray-on-white elegance, usually. The standard is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for body text, checkable in seconds with any free contrast tool. The reason it’s the first fix here: 27.8% of adults 71 and older have measurable vision impairment with their glasses on — one in ten specifically in contrast sensitivity. The soft gray serif that photographs beautifully is illegible to the exact eyes reading your obituaries.

Alt text on the photos that matter. Missing alternative text is failure #2, on more than half of home pages. On most sites that’s a decorative problem. On a funeral home site the images are the content — the tribute wall, the chapel, the staff page — and a screen-reader user hears silence where a face should be. Describe what the photo shows, one sentence, person’s name included where it’s an obituary portrait. The same habit feeds the machines: Google says outright that it uses alt text to understand images, and the obituary page a machine can quote is built from exactly this kind of structure.

Captions on services. If you livestream or post recorded services, WCAG requires captions on prerecorded video and, at the AA level, on live broadcasts too. The denominator makes the case better than the rule: 67.9% of adults over 70 — 22.4 million people — have at least some hearing loss. An uncaptioned funeral livestream fails the housebound aunt it was purchased for.

Forms a keyboard can finish. Missing form labels sit on half the web’s home pages, and “inaccessible forms” is on DOJ’s own list of common barriers. On your site, the forms are the condolence message, the pre-need inquiry, the flower order — every one a moment where a family is trying to give you something. Each field needs a visible label; the whole form needs to work with the Tab key alone. And design them for a brain under load: bereavement measurably dents working memory and processing speed — one Australian panel study put spousal loss at a quarter of a standard deviation off men’s processing speed. Keep the forms short and the labels plain, and never add a time-out. The person filling out your condolence form is having one of the worst weeks of her life; a page that loads fast and reads plainly is a kindness before it is anything else.

Headings that hold the page up. Screen readers navigate by heading structure — real H1s and H2s in order, not bold text pretending. This is also the cheapest AI-visibility work you can do: a page a screen reader can walk is a page ChatGPT can parse, and business websites are 58% of the sources ChatGPT’s local answers draw from. The accessibility rewrite and the AI rewrite are largely the same rewrite — which is why it belongs beside the five pages that do the work, not on a compliance to-do list you’ll never open again.

The IRS pays for half of it

The least-known fact in this whole area: Section 44 of the tax code gives small businesses a credit for 50% of accessibility spending between $250 and $10,250 — up to $5,000 a year, claimed on IRS Form 8826. It applies to businesses with $1 million or less in gross receipts or 30 or fewer full-time employees — which is to say, nearly every independent funeral home. A $4,000 accessibility pass on your website costs $2,000 after the credit, and it buys down a legal exposure that typically settles in the $5,000–$20,000 range before you count your own attorney.

The recap worth keeping is one sentence long: your website is the front door of a place of public accommodation, WCAG 2.1 AA is what “accessible” means in practice, and the five fixes above serve the 42% of your 65-plus visitors living with a disability — the same families your building was designed around. The ramp out front was never a compliance project. Neither is this.