It’s not just dentists. The internet wasn’t exaggerating. And this is kind of a big deal.

A client reached out recently after seeing a wave of social media videos warning that dental office websites might not be ADA compliant. She wanted to know if it was real or just the internet being dramatic again.

(Name withheld to protect the curious. Not because of HIPAA. Probably not HIPAA. But it felt responsible.)

It’s real. And it’s not just dentists.

Your Website Is Hemorrhaging Customers and You Feel Totally Fine

Before we get into legal exposure and compliance standards and all the words that make people’s eyes glaze over — let’s talk about something more immediate. Specifically: money leaving your business quietly through a door you didn’t know existed.

About 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. lives with some form of disability. These are people with money to spend and problems you can solve. They are trying to find your phone number, read your services page, figure out if you take their insurance, or decide whether to book an appointment.

And if your website won’t cooperate with their assistive technology, they leave. Quietly. No complaint. No feedback form. No angry Yelp review you could at least argue with. They just go find someone whose website works — which, if your competitor bothered to fix theirs, is your competitor.

If you’re lucky.

The unlucky version doesn’t end with a quiet exit. It ends with a demand letter.

You never knew they were there. You never knew they left. You just wonder why the phone isn’t ringing quite like you expected, and you blame the economy, or the season, or Mercury retrograde, or whatever else is currently taking the fall.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Not the legal risk. Not the compliance language. Just the fact that real people are quietly leaving, and you will never, ever know.

We’re talking about:

• People with age-related vision changes — or anyone reading your site on a phone in bright sunlight — who need sufficient contrast to read anything at all
• People with color blindness (about 1 in 12 men) who can’t distinguish your carefully chosen color combinations
• People who are blind or have low vision and use screen readers to navigate the web
• People who are deaf or hard of hearing and need captions on your videos
• People with motor impairments who navigate entirely by keyboard, no mouse
• People with cognitive disabilities who need clear structure to make sense of a page

These aren’t edge cases. This is a quarter of the adult population. And every one of them who hits a wall on your website is a customer your competitor gets for free, without even trying.

Okay, Now the Legal Part

Most business owners hear “ADA compliance” and picture ramps, parking spaces, and the little blue signs. Physical stuff. Stuff with contractors and permits.

But the Americans with Disabilities Act also applies to your website. Has for a while. The courts have been getting increasingly specific about this, and a very motivated group of people — we’ll get to them — have absolutely noticed.

Here’s what trips most people up: you don’t have to be negligent or malicious for your website to fail. You just have to have a website that wasn’t built with accessibility in mind. Which describes most websites. Because most people building them weren’t thinking about it.

This is not a character flaw. It’s a knowledge gap. A fixable one.

About Those Motivated People

There is a whole lawsuit industry built around ADA website non-compliance. And “industry” is the right word — this is organized, intentional, and not going away.

Here’s the model: Someone — let’s call him a “plaintiff,” though “professional grievance entrepreneur” also fits — sends demand letters to businesses with inaccessible websites. Sometimes it goes to actual litigation. The businesses, staring at legal fees that dwarf the cost of just fixing the website, often settle. Then he does it again. And again. And again.

Are these people crusading for disability rights out of the goodness of their hearts? I’ll let you work that one out.

Are the websites still non-compliant? Also yes. That part is still true no matter how pungent the messenger.

I know this firsthand. A business owner contacted me in a panic after getting hit with one of these lawsuits. She sent me the paperwork. And the paperwork was a masterpiece of audacity.

The plaintiff had a long history of these suits. The lawyer had a long history of these suits. And buried in the legal documents was a tidy little detail: the lawsuit would be dropped if the business agreed to hire a specific web developer to fix the accessibility issues.

A specific one. Named. In the legal documents.

The plaintiff, the lawyer, and the developer were running a three-way kickback scheme dressed up in legal paperwork. Was it breathtakingly gross? Yes. Are all three of them probably going to hell? Yes. Was the business still liable for having an inaccessible website? Also yes.

That’s the infuriating part. The predators are real and the underlying problem is real. You don’t get to be off the hook just because the person who caught you is a grifter. The speed trap is still a speed trap even if the cop is writing tickets for his cousin’s towing company.

Fix the website anyway.

This Is Not a Dental-Only Problem

The videos making the rounds tend to target specific industries — dental offices, medical spas, law firms, restaurants. The industries change. The underlying issue doesn’t.

If you have a website and customers, this applies to you. The candle shop. The personal trainer. The boutique hotel. The guy who does custom woodworking and has exactly seven pages online. All of you.

Healthcare businesses get extra attention because people are making decisions about their bodies and their care, and the expectation that your website works for everyone is reasonable. But the legal exposure isn’t medical-specific. It’s just: does your site work for people who experience the web differently than you do?

For most websites, built by most developers, at most points in the recent past? The honest answer is: not really, no.

And every day that’s true is another day you’re handing customers to whoever fixed theirs first.

What You Can Actually Do

The good news — and there genuinely is good news — is that this is fixable. It involves things like alt text, color contrast ratios, and making sure your forms have proper labels. Not glamorous. Not complicated. Just requires someone deciding it matters.

I’ve written a whole pile of articles on this, all linked throughout the site:

• A Practical Website Accessibility Checklist for Real-World Use — start here if you want to roll up your sleeves
• Accessibility Defined. What do all these terms mean?— start here if you keep running into jargon
• Getting sued for trying to be responsible with your website, made easy! — start here if the lawsuit angle has your full attention
• How to use the Colour Contrast Analyser to Check your Website and Screen Documents for Accessibility Color Usage — a specific, practical tool you can use today
• Accessibility: How to Stop Leaving Potential Customers’ Money on the Floor… and Not Be an Ass at the Same Time! — start here if you need to make the business case to yourself or someone else

The internet is full of people waiting to tell you this is complicated and scary. Some of it is. Most of it just requires someone deciding it matters.

The internet, for once, was not being dramatic.