In February 2026, the Department of Justice quietly dropped a footnote that sent a ripple through the accessibility legal world: in a filing opposing a class action settlement, DOJ stated that it “does not endorse WCAG as the appropriate or necessary standard” for auxiliary aids and services under Title III of the ADA. Within days, blog posts and LinkedIn threads were declaring that WCAG was no longer the standard businesses needed to follow — some framed it as a green light to stop worrying about accessibility compliance altogether. That take is wrong, and if you run a WordPress site, believing it could cost you. Here’s what DOJ actually said, why it doesn’t change your legal exposure, and what the real story in that filing should teach you instead.
What the DOJ Actually Said
The statement came in Alcazar v. Fashion Nova Inc., a federal class action in the Northern District of California over the accessibility of Fashion Nova’s website. The plaintiffs and Fashion Nova had negotiated a proposed settlement worth $5.15 million — but DOJ intervened to argue the deal was unfair to the class it claimed to protect. Attorneys stood to collect $2.52 million while, according to DOJ, the settlement delivered little concrete accessibility relief. DOJ pointed out that even the website set up for class members to submit claims was itself inaccessible to screen reader users — a detail that undercut the entire premise of the settlement.
Buried in that filing was a footnote clarifying that DOJ’s use of WCAG in its analysis wasn’t an endorsement of WCAG as the ADA’s required standard — it was simply because the plaintiffs had chosen WCAG as their own benchmark in the settlement. DOJ was making a narrow, technical point about how it evaluates settlement terms, not announcing a new accessibility policy.
Why This Doesn’t Change Anything for You
Title III of the ADA has never named a specific technical standard — that’s true, and it’s been true since the law passed in 1990, decades before WCAG existed. DOJ’s footnote didn’t reveal a secret loophole; it restated a fact that’s been public the whole time. What has changed nothing:
- Federal courts overwhelmingly continue to use WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA as the practical benchmark when deciding whether a website is accessible, because no alternative standard exists.
- Plaintiffs’ firms still cite WCAG failures as evidence in complaints, and judges still find that persuasive.
- State laws in California (Unruh Act), New York, and elsewhere often incorporate WCAG-adjacent standards independently of federal ADA interpretation.
- Settlement agreements — including the one DOJ was criticizing — still require WCAG conformance as the remediation benchmark.
In other words: the absence of a formally codified standard has always been the reality, and it has never stopped plaintiffs from winning or settling cases using WCAG as the yardstick. If anything, DOJ’s position makes the legal landscape slightly murkier, not more permissive — a business can’t point to “DOJ doesn’t require WCAG” as a defense when the court in front of them is applying WCAG anyway.
The Real Lesson Was About Settlement Quality, Not Standards
The more important part of the Fashion Nova filing has nothing to do with WCAG’s legal status. DOJ’s actual objection was that the settlement was structured to pay lawyers well while doing little to fix the underlying accessibility problems — and that the claims process itself excluded the disabled users it was supposed to serve. That’s a pattern worth paying attention to if your business is ever named in a similar suit.
When a lawsuit or demand letter arrives, the temptation is to resolve it as cheaply and quickly as possible — often through a settlement that pays a fee and includes vague promises to “improve accessibility” without a concrete remediation plan or a way to verify the fixes actually happened. DOJ’s intervention is a signal that regulators are starting to scrutinize whether these settlements produce real change or just make the lawsuit go away. A site that settles without fixing anything is exposed again the moment a different plaintiff — or DOJ itself — takes a fresh look.
What This Means Practically for WordPress Site Owners
None of this changes what you should actually be doing. WCAG 2.2 Level AA remains the most defensible, widely recognized benchmark, because it’s what courts, state laws, and settlement agreements consistently point back to. The practical takeaways from this episode are less about legal theory and more about how to handle accessibility work with integrity:
- Don’t treat any single filing or news headline as a reason to deprioritize accessibility work — the legal standard in practice hasn’t moved.
- If you ever do settle a claim, insist on remediation you can verify, not just a monetary payment and a vague promise.
- Make sure any tool or process you use to submit accessibility-related forms — including your own site’s contact or complaint forms — is itself accessible. Fashion Nova’s claims site being inaccessible is exactly the kind of detail that turns a good-faith effort into a liability.
- Document your remediation work as you go, so you have evidence of a genuine, ongoing effort rather than a one-time fix applied only after a complaint.
How to Protect Yourself Regardless of the Legal Debate
The safest position for a WordPress site owner has never depended on parsing DOJ footnotes. It depends on building a habit of finding and fixing real accessibility issues in your code — missing alt text, poor color contrast, unlabeled form fields, broken keyboard navigation — before a demand letter forces the issue. Regulatory ambiguity at the federal level is exactly why relying on any single legal interpretation is risky; the more durable strategy is simply making your site work for the people who use assistive technology, and being able to show your work if you’re ever challenged.
Take Action
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