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Website Accessibility Lawsuits Hit a Record in 2025.

In the United States, if your website is hard for people with disabilities to use, you can be sued for it. This is not new, but the number of lawsuits keeps climbing, and small businesses are not too small to be a target.

The short version

  • Plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025. That is up 27% from 2024, according to the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks these cases.
  • Online retailers are the most common target, but service businesses, restaurants, and clinics get claims too.
  • The US Department of Justice says the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the websites of businesses open to the public. There is no small-business exemption.
  • Most claims come down to the same short list of fixable problems. Fixing them is far cheaper than settling.

How the ADA reaches your website

The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, is a 1990 civil rights law. Title III of the ADA bans discrimination by “places of public accommodation,” which means businesses open to the public: shops, restaurants, doctors, gyms, and so on.

Congress wrote the ADA before the web mattered, so the law does not mention websites. But the Department of Justice has taken a consistent position: the goods and services a business offers online are covered too. Its guidance says the Department “has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to” web content offered by public accommodations. Courts in much of the country agree, though a few still require a physical store for the ADA to apply. Where you can be sued matters more than where you are based.

There is a separate rule for state and local government sites under Title II of the ADA. That rule names a specific standard, WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with compliance deadlines phased in by the size of the government. If you run a private business, that rule is not about you, but it shows where the standard is heading: a specific version of WCAG, written into federal regulation.

Who gets sued, and why

A common pattern: a plaintiff, sometimes represented by a law firm that files many of these cases, visits a business’s website with a screen reader. The screen reader hits problems. The images have no alt text, so the reader announces nothing useful. The checkout form has unlabeled fields. A pop-up cannot be closed with a keyboard. The plaintiff files a claim saying they could not complete a purchase.

Most of these cases settle for a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of dollars, plus a promise to fix the site and often a year or two of monitoring. The legal cost usually dwarfs what it would have cost to fix the problems first. Seyfarth Shaw also reports that 40% of federal ADA Title III filings in 2025 came from people representing themselves without a lawyer, which is a sign the practice has spread well beyond a few specialist firms.

New York and California see the most filings, but a business anywhere can be pulled into those courts if it sells to residents there. Repeat lawsuits are common too: a business that settles, fixes a few things, and then drifts can get sued again a year later.

What a demand letter looks like

Many of these start not with a lawsuit but with a letter from a law firm. It names your site, lists accessibility failures, references the ADA, and offers to settle for a set amount if you pay quickly and agree to fix the site.

If one arrives, do not ignore it and do not reply on your own. Send it to a lawyer who handles ADA matters. Check whether your business insurance covers this kind of claim, because some general liability and cyber policies do. Then start a real audit and fix, because the settlement almost always requires it anyway, and a genuine good-faith effort strengthens your position.

The overlay trap

You may have seen ads for “accessibility overlays,” a bit of JavaScript that promises to make any site compliant overnight for a small monthly fee. Be careful. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered one of the biggest overlay vendors, accessiBe, to pay $1 million over claims that its AI tool could make any website WCAG-compliant. Accessibility professionals have long said overlays do not deliver what they promise, and many businesses that used them were sued anyway. There is no one-line fix. The work has to be done in the actual site.

Three things people get wrong

  • “My business is too small.” Size is not a defense under Title III. Small businesses are sued regularly.
  • “I put a disclaimer on the site.” A note saying you are working on accessibility does not stop a claim. A real accessibility statement with a contact method helps; a disclaimer alone does not.
  • “We passed an automated scan.” Automated tools catch roughly a third of issues. The ones plaintiffs cite most, like keyboard traps and unlabeled controls, often need a person to find.

How to lower your risk

  • Get a real audit against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, done by a person, not just an automated scan.
  • Fix the high-impact issues first: alt text, color contrast, form labels, keyboard access, and clear focus outlines.
  • Publish an accessibility statement that says what standard you aim for and how someone can report a problem.
  • Re-check after any redesign or major content change, and keep a dated record of the work.

None of this guarantees you will never see a demand letter. It does make your site genuinely usable, which is the point, and it puts you in a strong position if a claim ever arrives.

How I can help

A free website health check includes a hands-on accessibility review: keyboard testing, a screen reader pass, automated checks, and a plain-language list of what fails and how serious it is.

From there, most sites need a focused fix list rather than a rebuild. If the problems run deeper, a redesign lets me build accessibility in from the first line of code. Every site I build is made to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and I can write your accessibility statement to match.

Sources

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