Guide
Restaurant websites and ADA accessibility claims
Restaurants show up in ADA website filings out of all proportion to their size, and the reason is structural: the menu is the product, the menu is usually a PDF or an image, and a PDF of a menu is invisible to a screen reader. In the twelve months through June 2026, at least 251 distinct restaurant and food businesses were named in federal ADA filings, and that count only sees the ones whose business name says what they are.
What actually gets claimed against restaurant sites
- The menu as a PDF or an image. A scanned menu, or a designed PDF without tags, carries no text a screen reader can read. This is the single most common restaurant claim, and it is also the easiest to fix: publish the menu as HTML text.
- Online ordering. Third-party ordering widgets embedded in your page bring their own accessibility, or their own barriers, and the complaint lands on you, not the vendor.
- Reservation widgets. Date pickers that cannot be operated by keyboard, and booking dialogs that trap focus.
- Images of text. Daily specials posted as pictures, with no alt text and no HTML alternative.
- Contact and location. Unlabeled form fields, and maps with no text address beside them.
Why the case law points at restaurants
The landmark US web accessibility case is a restaurant case: a blind customer sued Domino's Pizza after being unable to order from the website and app, the Ninth Circuit held in 2019 that the ADA applied to a website with that kind of connection to a physical place, and the Supreme Court declined to take the appeal. That ruling is why "my website is not a place of public accommodation" is a weak position for a restaurant with physical locations, and it is public record any plaintiff's attorney can cite.
Checking your own site, in order of what gets claimed
- Menu first. If the menu is a PDF or an image, that is where to start, and HTML text is the fix. Keep the PDF if you like the design; the accessible version must exist alongside it.
- Then the ordering and booking path, with the keyboard only. If you cannot complete an order with Tab, Enter, and arrow keys, neither can a screen reader user.
- Then the rest of the site, mechanically. The free one-page check covers the machine-decidable layer in a minute; the automated audit ($149, 24 hours) covers every page with evidence and fix instructions.
- If someone else will read the result, an attorney, an insurer, a franchisor, the signed audit ($490, 48-72 hours) is the version with a certified specialist's name on it.
Common questions
We are a single location with ten employees. Are we too small to be sued?
No. ADA Title III has no revenue or headcount floor, and small businesses settle fastest, which is why they are targeted; the economics are laid out in why small businesses get ADA lawsuits.
The ordering system is not ours, it is a third-party platform.
The complaint still names the restaurant. In practice you have two levers: press the vendor with specifics from an audit, and fix what is yours. Platform-hosted storefronts have the same dynamic, covered in the platform store guide.
Does a PDF menu ever pass?
A properly tagged, text-based PDF can be read by assistive technology, but most restaurant menus are exported as design files or scans, and testing that is more work than publishing HTML. HTML is also better for search visibility, which is the reason most restaurants end up doing it anyway.