California accessibility law

Federal law — the ADA

Both Title II (state and local government) and Title III (public accommodations) of the ADA apply in California. Web accessibility is enforced under both, with conformance benchmarked against the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — currently version 2.2 Level AA in most contexts, version 2.1 AA in the DOJ Title II final rule. Read the ADA explainer →

California state law — Unruh Civil Rights Act

$4,000 statutory damages per violation; incorporates ADA. California is the highest-litigation state for web accessibility.

Statute citation: California Civil Code § 51

ADA web lawsuit activity in California

Approximately 2,000+ ADA Title III web accessibility lawsuits are filed in California courts each year (Seyfarth Shaw tracker). California is one of the highest-volume filing jurisdictions in the United States.

Notable cases

• Robles v. Domino's (9th Cir., 2019) — established website coverage under ADA in 9th Circuit

Steps to comply in California

1. Adopt WCAG 2.2 Level AA as your conformance target.
2. Audit every public-facing property, including subdomains and PDFs.
3. Publish an accessibility statement with a contact channel for accessibility feedback.
4. Maintain a current VPAT/ACR for public-sector procurement.
5. Re-audit annually; regression-test on every release.