In Louisiana, your ADA website risk is defined by uncertainty: the Fifth Circuit — which governs Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi — has never decided whether a website is a “place of public accommodation.” There is no binding rule to lean on, and that open question is the central fact for any Louisiana business. It cuts in surprising ways.

Louisiana’s distinct angle: an undecided Fifth Circuit

Almost every ADA website case turns on one question: is a website itself a “place of public accommodation” under Title III of the ADA, or does it only count when tied to a brick-and-mortar location? The circuits are split, and Louisiana sits where the controlling court has not answered. As the Louisiana firm Kean Miller states plainly, “the Fifth Circuit (whose decisions are controlling for Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi) has not decided the issue” (Kean Miller — The ADA in Cyberspace). Elsewhere there is certainty: some circuits treat a website as a public accommodation on its own, while others require a nexus to a physical place. Louisiana defendants get neither a clean shield nor a clean rule — they get a coin toss decided one judge at a time.

What the Fifth Circuit has said leans toward a physical-place reading. In Magee v. Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Inc., 833 F.3d 530 (5th Cir. 2016), the court held that vending machines were not “sales establishments” because that category “follow[s] a list of retailers occupying physical stores,” tying public accommodations to a physical space. But Magee involved machines encountered in person, not a website — so it telegraphs a leaning without resolving it, and a Louisiana judge could borrow the Ninth Circuit’s Robles v. Domino’s nexus logic, or not.

This page is general information, not legal advice. Fifth Circuit law on this point is unsettled and district courts apply it unevenly; your facts control. Consult a qualified Louisiana attorney before relying on any defense.

What “unsettled” actually means for a Louisiana business

Uncertainty is not safety:

  • An online-only Louisiana business — a SaaS product, a web-only store with no Louisiana storefront — has a plausible argument that Title III may not reach a standalone site, the argument that wins in nexus circuits. But because the Fifth Circuit never adopted that rule, it’s a defense you bet on, not one you bank on.
  • A business with a physical location — and most Louisiana defendants have one — has almost no upside. A New Orleans restaurant, a Baton Rouge clinic, or a Lafayette retailer whose site shows hours, takes bookings, or sells the same goods as the store supplies exactly the physical nexus every theory of the case treats as covered.

The open question helps a narrow slice of pure-play businesses, weakly — and the cost of finding out which way a judge rules dwarfs the cost of an accessible site.

Louisiana state law: La. R.S. 49:146 and Civil Code article 2315

Federal Title III isn’t the only exposure. Louisiana’s public-accommodation statute, La. R.S. 49:146, prohibits discrimination at facilities to which the public is invited, and a person denied access “in violation of this Section” has civil remedies under Article 2315 of the Louisiana Civil Code — the state’s broad tort-liability provision. (The separate disability provisions in La. R.S. 23:322–325 cover employment, not websites.)

R.S. 49:146 sets no WCAG number, and case law applying it to a website is thin. But it lets a plaintiff pair a federal ADA claim with a state-law theory and the Civil Code’s damages hook — a second avenue even where the Title III posture is murky, and one more reason the durable answer is an accessible site.

The Title II signal: Ellerbee and the WCAG 2.1 AA deadline

Two developments fix WCAG 2.1 AA as Louisiana’s operating standard, even though both arise on the government (Title II) side. First, the litigation. In Ellerbee v. State of Louisiana, a blind resident sued state agencies — the Louisiana Department of Health and the Department of Children and Family Services — over websites unusable with a screen reader, under ADA Title II and Section 504. On January 28, 2025, the court refused to dismiss, rejecting the state’s argument that the future Title II web-rule deadlines made the claim premature; the technical standards, it reasoned, are “merely illustrative” — the program-access duty exists now. Counsel was the New Orleans firm Bizer & DeReus.

Second, the regulation. The DOJ’s Title II web rule sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for state and local government sites, with compliance dates — after an April 2026 extension — of April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000+ people and April 26, 2028 for smaller jurisdictions. That binds Louisiana parishes, cities, and agencies — not private businesses directly — but it settles “which standard?” The answer is WCAG 2.1 AA, the same bar the DOJ applies to Title III.

Who’s getting sued — and where Louisiana fits

Nationally, litigation rebounded in 2025: roughly 3,117 federal website cases were filed, a 27% increase over 2024, concentrated in plaintiff-friendly venues — New York led with 1,021 filings, Florida 961, and Illinois 585. Louisiana is not a top filing state; its unsettled posture and Magee’s leaning make it a less predictable venue for serial filers than New York or Florida.

But “few federal filings” is not “no risk.” Louisiana businesses still face these claims in the Eastern (New Orleans), Middle (Baton Rouge), and Western (Lafayette, Shreveport) Districts — and far more often as pre-suit demand letters that never hit a docket. The targets mirror the national pattern: e-commerce and any site with online ordering or booking, citing missing alt text, unlabeled forms, weak color contrast, keyboard traps. If a letter arrives, read what to do after an ADA demand letter and how serial plaintiffs operate before you respond.

How a Louisiana business reduces exposure

The open Fifth Circuit question is a litigation gamble, not a compliance plan. What lowers risk on both the Title III and R.S. 49:146 tracks is a site that survives a real assistive-technology test:

  1. Audit against WCAG 2.1 AA. Start with a manual accessibility audit that pairs automated scanning with keyboard and screen-reader testing (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver). Automated tools catch only a fraction of failures, and the ones they miss — illogical reading order, misleading ARIA — are exactly the barriers a plaintiff’s expert documents against the W3C/WAI standard.
  2. Remediate the real code. Curbcut’s manual remediation rewrites the HTML, ARIA, and JavaScript file by file — real alt text, 4.5:1 contrast, full keyboard operation with a visible focus ring, and accessible forms with associated labels. In an unsettled circuit you can’t reliably dismiss your way out, so a usable site is your strongest position. Curbcut is deliberately anti-overlay; see why accessibility overlays don’t deliver compliance.
  3. Document the conformance. Keep the audit reports and remediation log, and publish an accessibility statement naming WCAG 2.1 AA with a way to report barriers — a record that supports a mootness argument if a fixed site is later challenged and answers any R.S. 49:146 theory with proof of good faith.

That program costs a fraction of one round of E.D., M.D., or W.D. Louisiana litigation. Find out where your site stands with a free accessibility scan, then let [EXPERT_NAME] and the [AGENCY_NAME] team remediate the issues by hand.

The bottom line for Louisiana

Louisiana’s profile is its own: the Fifth Circuit has never ruled on whether a website is a public accommodation, so there is no rule to win on and none to hide behind. Magee gives online-only operations an untested argument, and the typical store-plus-website business gets no benefit at all. With La. R.S. 49:146 as a state-law backstop and the Title II web rule fixing WCAG 2.1 AA as the recognized standard, the one variable you control is whether the site meets that standard when tested. That’s fixable — and it’s what Curbcut remediates by hand, file by file, not behind a widget.