In 2015, a blind man named Guillermo Robles tried to order a pizza. He had the screen-reading software, the patience, and presumably strong opinions about toppings. What he didn’t have was a working website: Domino’s online ordering system wouldn’t cooperate with JAWS on his desktop or VoiceOver on his iPhone, so the custom pizza stayed theoretical. Robles sued, and in 2019 the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act applied to Domino’s website and app. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, and Domino’s eventually made its site accessible.
Here is the part that should stop you mid-scroll: had Robles lived somewhere else, he might have lost. Not because the facts would differ — same website, same screen reader, same pizza — but because the question of whether a website is a “place” under federal law has a different answer depending on which federal appellate circuit the courthouse sits in. The ADA was signed in 1990, months before Tim Berners-Lee shipped the first web browser. Its central guarantee runs to “any place of public accommodation,” and its regulations define that term through twelve categories of facilities — lodgings, restaurants, theaters, stores — with “facility” itself defined as buildings, structures, sites, complexes, equipment. Bricks, in other words. Congress wrote a statute about architecture, and the internet arrived anyway.
What followed is one of the stranger experiments in American law: three decades of judges, few of whom asked for the assignment, reverse-engineering a web accessibility doctrine out of a statute that never mentions the web.
Two readings of the same sentence
The courts have split into two camps, and the dividing line is a single interpretive question: does “place of public accommodation” require a physical place?
One line of cases says no. As far back as 1999, the Seventh Circuit suggested in passing that the statute’s core meaning covers an owner or operator of a store, hotel, restaurant, theater, or website — “whether in physical space or in electronic space.” That was dicta, a remark rather than a holding, but plaintiffs have been quoting it ever since. District courts in the First and Second Circuits have followed the logic: in 2012, a federal judge in Massachusetts held that Netflix’s streaming service was itself a place of public accommodation, no building required.
The other camp reads the statute’s twelve categories as what they appear to be — an exhaustive list of physical spaces — and demands a “nexus” to a real-world location. An early version appeared in 2002, when a Florida court held that Southwest Airlines’ website was not a place of public accommodation standing alone. The dominant modern formulation came in 2006, when a California court let the National Federation of the Blind sue Target, but only because the inaccessible website impeded use of Target’s physical stores. The Ninth Circuit’s Domino’s ruling fits this mold: the site and app connected customers to actual restaurants, so the ADA reached them.
Then there is the Eleventh Circuit, which in 2021 went further than anyone. Juan Carlos Gil, a blind Winn-Dixie shopper, had won an injunction after he couldn’t refill prescriptions or clip coupons through the grocer’s website. The appellate court vacated it, holding that public accommodations under Title III are “limited to physical spaces,” full stop — the twelve categories, the panel wrote, include only physical places. (The panel opinion was itself later vacated as moot after the injunction expired, which tells you something about how provisional this whole edifice is.)
The map is the law
The practical result is a kind of jurisdictional weather system. A purely online business sued in Boston or New York faces real exposure; the same business sued in Atlanta may be outside the statute entirely. Even the headcount is contested — depending on how you tally district versus appellate holdings, somewhere between seven and nine circuits have weighed in, and the split’s exact shape is genuinely unsettled. The Second Circuit, despite a heavy docket of website cases, has never squarely resolved the threshold question; the Eighth Circuit hadn’t opined as of early 2025, when a Minnesota district court simply decided for itself that web-only businesses are covered.
Notice what this means. Congress never wrote a single sentence about websites. The Justice Department floated rulemaking during the Obama years, produced nothing final, and saw the process shelved under Trump. Into that vacuum stepped the judiciary, and the judiciary — case by case, plaintiff by plaintiff — has produced something arguably more detailed than legislation would have been: a nexus doctrine, an electronic-space doctrine, an exhaustive-list doctrine, each with its own factual tests and edge cases. It is common law doing the work of a regulatory state, assembled by judges who mostly would have preferred the question go away.
The contrast that makes this vivid is the airline industry. In 2013, the Department of Transportation issued actual regulations under the Air Carrier Access Act requiring airline websites to be accessible. Where an agency acted, the metaphysical question — is a website a place? — simply vanished. The rule existed; airlines complied or didn’t. Nobody had to ask a court to philosophize.
The improvisation is the point
It is tempting to frame this as a story about courts failing to keep up with technology. That gets it backwards. The courts have kept up fine — too well, arguably. The failure is upstream. Every year Congress declines to amend a 1990 statute to mention the medium through which Americans now shop, bank, learn, and refill prescriptions, it delegates the question to whichever panel of judges draws the next case. The law of web accessibility is being written, it just isn’t being written by anyone elected to write it.
And the improvisation has a quiet cost beyond inconsistency. A doctrine built from nexus tests and expired injunctions is a doctrine that mostly serves the parties who can afford to litigate it — serial plaintiffs and large defendants — while everyone else reads tea leaves. Robles got his pizza, eventually, through the courts. The next blind customer in the wrong circuit gets a civics lesson: your rights under a landmark civil rights statute are a function of geography, drafted in real time by judges working from a text that predates the commercial internet.
The statute will turn thirty-six this year. The web it never mentions is older than some of the judges interpreting it. At some point the improvisation stops being a stopgap and becomes the system itself — which, depending on your view of common law, is either the genius of American jurisprudence or its most elegant way of avoiding a decision.