In Indiana, your ADA website risk rests on one fact most owners miss: the Seventh Circuit treats a website as a place of public accommodation without requiring a physical store. That’s the same plaintiff-friendly posture as neighboring Illinois — and in 2025 it helped push Indiana into the national top ten for ADA Title III filings for the first time.

Indiana’s distinct angle: no storefront required in the Seventh Circuit

Almost every website-accessibility case turns on one question: can a website by itself be a “place of public accommodation” under Title III of the ADA, or only when it’s tied to a brick-and-mortar location? The federal appeals courts are split — and Indiana sits squarely on the side that favors plaintiffs.

Indiana is in the Seventh Circuit, alongside Illinois and Wisconsin. The circuit hasn’t issued a definitive website-specific appellate ruling, but its district courts — including Indiana’s — have adopted the broad reading, leaning on Judge Posner’s reasoning in Doe v. Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co., 179 F.3d 557 (7th Cir. 1999), that a public accommodation is not confined to physical space. As Saul Ewing’s litigation review puts it, “the district courts within the 7th Circuit have begun to side with the 1st Circuit’s broad definition of ‘places of public accommodation,’” and in Walsh v. Dania, Inc. a court applied that view to a furniture retailer’s site, reasoning that the contrary rule “would allow all sales establishments … operating exclusively online to fully deny access” to blind users (Saul Ewing).

That is the opposite of a “nexus” jurisdiction. Circuits like the Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh generally require a connection to a physical place before the ADA reaches a website (Understanding the ADA). Indiana imposes no such gateway — so a purely online-only Indiana business (a SaaS tool, a direct-to-consumer brand, an e-commerce store with no Indiana showroom) is a realistic defendant here. In a nexus state, that same company often isn’t.

This page is general information, not legal advice. Circuit precedent and Indiana statutes change, and district courts apply them unevenly. Consult a qualified Indiana attorney about your specific situation.

The numbers: Indiana cracks the top ten

For years Indiana barely registered in the filing data. That changed in 2025. Seyfarth’s annual tally of federal ADA Title III lawsuits put Indiana in the national top ten for the first time, with roughly 88 filings — enough to push Georgia out of the rankings (Seyfarth ADA Title III). That 88 is a fraction of Illinois’s hundreds or New York’s four figures — but a state going from “not tracked” to “top ten” in one year is the signal worth reading.

The website slice is what should concern Indiana owners. Nationally, plaintiffs filed about 3,117 federal website accessibility suits in 2025, a 27% jump over 2024, per Seyfarth’s website-filings analysis. The driver isn’t more broken sites — it’s lawyer behavior, including new plaintiffs’ firms gravitating to favorable Seventh Circuit venues. As Illinois shows, once filers learn a circuit forecloses the “it’s not a place” defense, volume follows. Indiana is the next, quieter door on that same hallway; see how the repeat filers operate in our breakdown of serial ADA plaintiffs.

Indiana state law: IC 4-13.1-3 and the Indiana Civil Rights Law

Two Indiana statutes matter, and it’s important not to confuse them with the federal ADA.

Indiana Code 4-13.1-3 sets the state’s accessibility bar — but only for government. It requires all state information technology used by the public or state employees to conform to WCAG 2.1 and Section 508, reaching the executive, judicial, legislative, and administrative branches of state and local government (IN.gov Accessibility). Indiana runs this through its Assistive Technology Standards Group (ATSG), formed in 2001, which includes the Indiana Civil Rights Commission and the state’s disability-services agencies. IC 4-13.1-3 carries no financial penalties — a non-compliant entity files a remediation plan and provides alternative access in the interim. It doesn’t regulate private businesses, but it pins WCAG 2.1 as the standard Indiana itself recognizes, the exact benchmark a plaintiff’s expert will cite.

The Indiana Civil Rights Law (IC 22-9) is the state’s anti-discrimination statute and covers public accommodations — but its mechanics differ from a private-lawsuit state like Illinois. Complaints go to the Indiana Civil Rights Commission, must be filed within 180 days, and only reach court if both sides agree in writing to a civil action (Indiana Civil Rights Commission). So Indiana’s state track is largely administrative — there’s no built-in two-year private charge stacking damages on a federal case the way Illinois’s Human Rights Act now does. The upshot: in Indiana, the federal ADA is the real private-lawsuit exposure, and remediating to WCAG 2.1 AA is what closes it.

Who is getting sued in Indiana

Indiana’s emergence isn’t disabled Hoosiers suddenly hitting more broken sites — it’s the same plaintiffs’-firm volume strategy that built Illinois’s docket, now finding the Southern and Northern Districts of Indiana. Because the Seventh Circuit forecloses the threshold “a website isn’t a place” defense, the cases filers can win cheaply are the ones landing here. Two features stand out:

  • Online-only brands are fully in scope. In a nexus circuit, a web-only retailer can move to dismiss on whether it’s a “place” at all. After the Seventh Circuit’s broad reading and Walsh, that motion fails in Indiana — so complaints can name pure-play e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sites with no Indiana presence.
  • Small and mid-size Indiana businesses, not just nationals. Filing is cheap and the posture is favorable, so firms target modest restaurant, hospitality, healthcare, and local-services sites — often built on templated platforms where the same theme-level barriers recur across dozens of defendants.

The barriers cited track WCAG 2.1 AA and the DOJ’s own web guidance (ADA.gov on web accessibility): images without alt text, forms a screen reader can’t complete, insufficient color contrast, content unreachable by keyboard, and broken focus states. Under Title III a plaintiff need not prove monetary harm — only that the site presented a barrier to access. If a letter has already arrived, read what to do after an ADA demand letter before you respond.

How an Indiana business reduces exposure

The Seventh Circuit’s posture changes which defenses are even on the table. In a nexus state, a web-only defendant can attack the threshold “is this a place?” question. In Indiana, that escape hatch is closed — so the load-bearing move is an accessible site, plus the narrower procedural arguments (standing, mootness once fixes ship) that counsel can raise. Remediating the code, not arguing jurisdiction, is what actually protects you. Three steps:

  1. Audit against the standard Indiana itself adopts. The DOJ points to WCAG 2.1 Level AA (ADA.gov web guidance; W3C/WAI), and IC 4-13.1-3 names WCAG 2.1 for state IT — so there’s no live dispute in Indiana about which yardstick applies. Start with a manual accessibility audit that pairs automated scanning with keyboard and screen-reader testing. Automated tools catch only a fraction of failures; the ones they miss — illogical reading order, unlabeled custom controls, misleading ARIA — are precisely what a plaintiff’s expert documents.
  2. Remediate the real code. Because the “it’s not a place” defense is foreclosed here, a genuinely usable site is your strongest position. Curbcut’s manual remediation rewrites the underlying HTML, ARIA, contrast, and focus management by hand, file by file, so the barriers are gone rather than masked at runtime. We’re deliberately anti-overlay: those widgets paint over source code, screen-reader users routinely report they make sites harder to use, and they don’t resolve the WCAG failures a complaint recites. See whether accessibility overlays actually work before trusting one in a circuit with no jurisdictional fallback.
  3. Document the conformance. Keep the audit and remediation log, and publish an accessibility statement naming WCAG 2.1 AA and a way to report barriers. That paper trail supports a good-faith, standing-and-mootness defense once fixes ship — and because a fixed-then-rebroken page can revive a dismissed claim, it pairs with ongoing monitoring after a new product page or third-party widget goes live.

For a small Indiana business, that program costs far less than a single round of S.D. or N.D. Indiana litigation — and unlike a one-line widget, it removes the barriers a Seventh Circuit complaint is built on. 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.

Authoritative sources for Indiana

The sources that govern an Indiana claim, in the order you’d reach for them:

The bottom line for Indiana

Indiana is no longer a quiet state on the ADA map. The Seventh Circuit already answered the question every other defense turns on: a website is a public accommodation in its own right, with no storefront required — so an Indiana defendant can’t dismiss its way out on the “it’s not a place” argument. IC 4-13.1-3 settles which standard applies (WCAG 2.1), the Indiana Civil Rights Law leaves the federal ADA as the real private exposure, and Indiana’s first-ever top-ten finish in 2025 shows filers have noticed. The defense that holds up in a Southern or Northern District of Indiana courtroom is a site that passes WCAG 2.1 AA when someone tests it. Start with a free accessibility scan, then have Curbcut audit and remediate the code by hand — so the jurisdictional escape hatch you don’t have in this circuit isn’t the one you were counting on.