Your winery website isn’t accessible or privacy-first (and you’re at risk). Here’s how to fix it.

Your website looks fine. People compliment the design. It more or less does what you need. But underneath, there’s a slow, uncomfortable feeling: you’re not sure it’s accessible and you’re increasingly aware that “we didn’t know” isn’t going to protect you if someone decides to make an example of your winery.

Accessibility and privacy expectations are rising fast. The wineries staying ahead of this aren’t bolting on an overlay widget and a cookie banner and hoping for the best. They’re treating accessibility and data privacy as part of good hospitality and good UX, which also happens to reduce risk and improve conversion.

TL;DR: Website accessibility lawsuits are rising, and food and beverage businesses are among the most targeted. An overlay widget won’t protect you, because the problems live in your site’s code, content and design. The fix is a site built and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA from the start, and a team trained to keep it that way.

Can a winery be sued over an inaccessible website?

Yes, and it happens more every year. Plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal courts in 2025, up 27% on 2024 (Seyfarth Shaw, 2026). That count leaves out lawsuits filed in state courts and the demand letters that never reach a court. UsableNet, which also tracks the litigation, says “e-commerce and food and beverage services continue to dominate filings” (UsableNet, 2026).

Nobody publishes the figures for wine. But a winery with an online shop, a booking calendar and a club sign-up is exactly the kind of business those filings describe, whatever its size.

One thing to know before you look at your own site: there is no such thing as “ADA compliance” for a website. The ADA sets no technical standard for websites, so what a site can do is conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is what the demand letters measure it against. Be careful with any badge or line on your site that claims “ADA compliant.” It promises something no website can prove.

Why do winery websites fall short on accessibility and privacy?

Accessibility and privacy laws vary by state and country, but most risk comes down to a few consistent decisions.

Accessibility and privacy were treated as “later” items

Most winery sites were designed around aesthetics and content first, with accessibility and privacy parked as something to “get to eventually” or “sort out before launch.” Eventually never really came.

If inclusive design and responsible data practices aren’t baked in from the start, they’re hard to retrofit. You end up patching symptoms instead of fixing causes.

Build accessibility and privacy in from day one

Accessibility and privacy aren’t features to bolt on—they belong in how the site is built. Structure, navigation, forms, and data handling need to work for real people in real situations from launch.

For accessibility, that means logical heading structures, keyboard-friendly navigation, readable typography, proper contrast, and patterns your team can use safely over time.

For privacy, that means clear consent flows, minimal tracking, and intentional data collection that respects what guests expect.

You’re relying on widgets and templates instead of fixing the issues

An overlay that claims to “make your site accessible,” a generic cookie banner, a privacy policy template someone found online—these don’t address the underlying issues in code, content, or data collection.

Guests using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or zoom still struggle. Tracking scripts still behave the same way they did before. You’ve added visible noise without reducing actual risk.

Audits that unearth your exposure

You can’t fix what you can’t see. A focused audit examines your site the way real users and regulators might:

• For accessibility: where users are blocked, where contrast fails, where forms break, and where navigation becomes impossible for people using assistive technology.
• For privacy: what tracking scripts fire, when consent is captured (or ignored), how forms handle data, and whether your tools respect user choices.

The output is a clear, prioritized plan: what to fix now, what to schedule, and what to build differently next time. No alarmism, no hundred-page PDF. Just a practical map from risk to resolution.

No one really “owns” accessibility or privacy

Marketing assumes IT is handling it. IT assumes whoever built the site handled it. Leadership assumes “we’re fine, we’re small.”

Meanwhile, content gets updated, new tools get added, and no one is checking whether changes keep you compliant and usable. Without clear ownership, small missteps accumulate until they become a significant problem.

Hosting, maintenance, and training that keep you on track

Accessibility and privacy aren’t one-and-done projects. Every content update, new integration, or team change is a chance to drift away from your standards unless someone is watching.

Hosting and care plans need to include ongoing monitoring, regular checks for regressions, and a sensible process for fixing issues when they appear. And your team needs to build the capacity and alignment so everyone understands their role in keeping the site welcoming and compliant.

That includes organizational assessments, design thinking sessions with accessibility in the room from the start, and team training that makes inclusive, privacy-aware practices part of how you work.

The site doesn’t work for real people in real situations

Accessibility isn’t just about screen readers, and privacy isn’t just about consent banners. It’s about the lived experience of people using your site on older devices, slower connections, small screens, assistive tech, or with limited patience for being tracked and profiled.

If your site has poor text contrast, tiny tap targets, confusing forms, heavy tracking, and obscure consent choices, you’re quietly excluding people and eroding trust. That’s bad hospitality and bad business.

Design for real people, not just compliance

Your site needs to work well for people in messy, real-world conditions. That means simplifying consent experiences, reducing unnecessary tracking, aligning forms with what guests expect, improving performance on older devices, and making navigation intuitive whether someone is using a mouse, keyboard, or screen reader.

The result is a site that respects your visitors and still does its job: selling wine, filling your tasting room, and supporting your club. Privacy and accessibility become part of good UX, not obstacles to it.

Does an accessible website sell more wine?

It should, because almost everything that makes a site accessible also makes it easier to buy from. Most of the fixes help every visitor, whether or not they use assistive technology.

• Mobile. In our experience, a large share of DTC wine sales comes from people on their phones. Bigger tap targets, buttons placed where a thumb can reach them, and larger type make a site easier for someone with limited motor control, and for everyone else buying on the go. WCAG 2.2 added a minimum size for tap targets for exactly this reason (W3C).
• Navigation. A familiar menu, logo on the left and links in one row across the top, works with a keyboard and gets people to the wines faster. Fewer choices mean more clicks on the ones that matter, so give the deeper links a home in the footer instead of a drop-down.
• Color. High contrast between your buttons and the page helps visitors with low vision or color blindness, and it also makes “Add to cart” and “Book a tasting” the first thing everyone sees. Never let color carry meaning on its own: an underlined link or a labeled error message works for everybody.
• Motion. Sliders, animations and autoplaying background video often fail accessibility tests, and they rarely help sales. They also have to download on the patchy mobile signal most of us get out in the vineyards. Keep small interactions, like a button that lifts on hover, and put your videos where people choose to watch them, on a visit page or a blog post.

What can a winery fix on its website today?

Some of this needs a developer, but a lot of it your team can start on this week:

1. Write meaningful alt text. Describe each image for someone who can’t see it. If the image is a link, describe where it goes.
2. Check your color contrast, and save your strongest brand color for the buttons that make money, such as “Add to cart” and “Book a tasting”.
3. Use descriptive link and button text. “View our Cabernets” tells everyone where they’re going; “Click here” tells nobody.
4. Put your headings in order, H1, then H2, then H3. It helps screen reader users, search engines and anyone skimming the page.
5. Use readable type on every device, and make sure the page still works when someone zooms to 200%.
6. Remove autoplaying video, sliders and animations that move without anyone asking them to.
7. Caption every video, on the website, on social media and in virtual tastings.

How can you test your winery website for accessibility?

Start with a free automated checker such as WAVE or Accessibility Insights. They’ll flag missing alt text, weak contrast and broken heading order in minutes. Treat them as a starting point, because they catch the obvious mistakes and not much else.

Then test it the way your customers would. Put the mouse away and try to shop using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and the space bar: can you get past the age gate, add a wine to the cart and check out? Turn on a screen reader, VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone or NVDA on Windows, and listen to whether the page makes sense in the order it’s read.

If either test stalls, you need a professional audit. The best ones use people who rely on assistive technology every day, alongside testers certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).

How does 5forests build an accessible winery website?

It has to be built in, then kept. Our custom Commerce7 sites are built to be accessible from the ground up, to WCAG 2.2 AA, the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (W3C). That matters more than it sounds. Commerce7 says its own widgets meet the AA level, then hands the rest to whoever builds your site: “Once your designer takes over, they must ensure they are following ADA Compliance rules” (Commerce7). The theme, headings, images and forms around those widgets are where accessibility is won or lost.

That testing is built into every project. Our developers test every build by keyboard and screen reader, and every site is also tested by real people using real assistive technology, through an independent testing partner.

You won’t find an overlay widget on any site we build. They leave the underlying problems in place, and a widget on the page is no defense in court (more on that in the FAQ below).

Then we train your team, because accessibility is lost one upload at a time: a PDF without tags, a photo without alt text, a new widget dropped into a page. A care plan catches regressions before a plaintiff does.

Michael Bourne, our CTO, has been writing about this since 2019, from what the rules mean for your winery website to why your website probably isn’t accessible.

What about privacy laws like CIPA?

The same thing is happening with tracking. Under California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, law firms are sending wineries demand letters over tracking pixels that load before a visitor has agreed to them, and wineries outside California that sell to Californians are exposed too. We’ve set out how those claims work, and what to change, in the CIPA demand letters hitting winery websites. Accessibility and privacy usually fail for the same reason: nobody built them in.

Not sure whether your winery website is accessible?

If you’re worried your winery website isn’t as accessible or privacy-safe as it should be, let’s talk. We’ll show you where you’re exposed, prioritize fixes that matter for both guests and regulators, and help you build a web presence that feels like good hospitality: inclusive, respectful, and robust enough to rely on.

Frequently asked questions