Website Accessibility Lawsuits: What the Numbers Actually Show

There is a specific kind of email that arrives on a Tuesday morning: a demand letter, or a filed complaint, alleging that a company's website is inaccessible to blind users under the Americans with Disabilities Act. For most businesses it is the first time anyone has raised accessibility with them at all.

The volume of these actions is not anecdotal and it is not declining. Understanding the actual pattern — who gets sued, where, and for what — is more useful than either panic or dismissal.

The regulatory vacuum that creates the litigation

Here is the structural oddity at the heart of US web accessibility law. There is no federal regulation setting a technical web accessibility standard for private businesses.

Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation and requires effective communication. It does not say what an accessible website is. The Department of Justice began a rulemaking to define one, and withdrew it in December 2017. Its 2022 web guidance for businesses contains no technical standard. In 2024 the DOJ did adopt WCAG 2.1 AA — but only for state and local government under Title II, which does not reach private companies.

So private businesses face a duty with no defined standard, enforced almost entirely through private litigation. Courts have filled the gap by referring to WCAG, but they are not obliged to.

The courts have not even agreed on whether a website alone can be a place of public accommodation. The Ninth Circuit requires a nexus to a physical place. The First, Second and Seventh Circuits have indicated Title III may reach online-only businesses. The Third and Sixth limit it to sites tied to physical locations. That split is a large part of why filings cluster in particular states.

The numbers

Two trackers dominate, and they count different universes, so quoting them interchangeably produces nonsense.

Seyfarth Shaw tracks ADA Title III filings in federal court only — the most conservative count. Their figures: 8,667 total Title III federal filings in 2025, of which 3,117 were website accessibility cases, up from 2,452 in 2024.

UsableNet tracks federal and state digital accessibility cases. Their figures: over 4,000 in 2024, more than 5,000 in 2025, and a midyear 2026 projection of roughly 6,176 for the year — which would be the highest volume they have tracked.

You may also encounter a figure of around 26,000 lawsuits. That comes from AudioEye's litigation report, which counts roughly 5,800 federal and 20,400 state filings for 2025 — a state-court total several times larger than UsableNet's. The gap is a methodology difference in how state dockets are searched and classified, not a disagreement about the underlying facts. Either way it is not comparable to the two counts above and should not be quoted alongside them.

Where the cases are, and why it keeps moving

The geography is unstable, and the reasons are legal rather than demographic.

In federal court in 2025, New York saw 1,021 website filings and Florida 961, while California saw four. California's near-zero federal number is not because California businesses are accessible — it is because Ninth Circuit precedent makes online-only claims difficult there, so plaintiffs use state court and California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which carries statutory damages.

That migration is the dominant trend. Tightened federal standing requirements have pushed filings into New York and New Jersey state courts, where the barrier is lower.

The 2026 story is Illinois. In the first half of 2026, UsableNet recorded New York at 1,269 filings, Illinois at 548, with California and Florida each just under 400 — and attributes the Illinois surge substantially to a single law firm. That is worth internalising: national filing statistics are heavily shaped by the strategy of a handful of firms, and a state can go from negligible to second place in a year.

Who actually gets sued

The pattern is consistent and it is not what most people assume.

It is not only large companies. In UsableNet's 2026 midyear data, around 68% of targets had revenue under $50 million (64% under $25 million, plus a further 4% between $25 and $50 million). In 2024, 67% had revenue under $25 million. Small and mid-sized businesses are the majority of defendants, because they are numerous, their sites are often built on templates with known failures, and they are less likely to fight.

E-commerce dominates. Around 70–79% of cases across recent years, with food service the next largest category. If you sell online, you are in the highest-risk group.

Being sued once does not end it. This is the most striking figure in the data. In 2025, 1,427 cases targeted companies that had already faced a digital accessibility claim — around 45% of all federal filings, and roughly a quarter of the 5,000-plus cases tracked across federal and state courts. Settling without fixing the underlying site buys a pause, not immunity.

Having an accessibility widget does not protect you. In 2024, over 1,000 businesses with an accessibility widget installed were sued anyway — more than a quarter of all cases that year. The pattern continued through 2025. We cover why in do accessibility overlays work.

The counter-currents

Two developments cut the other way, and both are recent.

Standing defences are working in federal court. Courts have grown more willing to dismiss where a plaintiff cannot plausibly show a genuine intent to use the business — for example, a serial filer claiming intent to visit a restaurant fifty miles from home. Several such dismissals were reported through 2026.

States are beginning to legislate against abusive filing. Georgia enacted HB 1470, signed in May 2026 and effective 1 July 2026, creating a cause of action against abusive website-accessibility litigation. It includes a rebuttable presumption in favour of businesses that take corrective action after notice, and authority for the Attorney General to intervene. It appears to be the first state law specifically targeting website-accessibility filing abuse, and whether others follow is one of the more consequential open questions in this space.

Neither development changes the underlying obligation. They change the economics of bringing weak claims.

What actually reduces exposure

Being honest about this: nothing eliminates the risk of being sued, and anyone who tells you their product does is making a claim the FTC has already acted on in this industry.

What genuinely helps is the unglamorous version.

Fix the failures that plaintiffs' firms screen for. Demand letters are generated from automated scans, and they cite the same handful of issues: missing alt text, unlabelled form fields, empty links and buttons, low contrast, keyboard inaccessibility. These are exactly the machine-detectable failures, which means running a scanner over your site puts you in front of the same information the other side has.

Test the transaction, not the home page. Cases focus on whether a person could actually buy something. WCAG conformance is claimed for complete processes, and so, in practice, is the plaintiff's story.

Keep evidence of ongoing work. A dated record of scans, findings and remediation demonstrates good faith. Under Georgia's new law, corrective action after notice carries explicit weight, and more generally, "we have an active accessibility programme and here is the log" is a materially better position than "we had an audit in 2023".

Publish an accessibility statement with a working contact route. Some complaints begin because a user had no way to report a barrier. Give them one, and answer it.

Do not claim compliance you cannot support. Marketing language asserting that your site is "fully ADA compliant" or "WCAG certified" is both unverifiable — there is no certification body for WCAG — and quotable against you.

*Filing figures are from Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III federal court tracking published in 2026 and UsableNet's 2024 year-end, 2025 year-end and 2026 midyear digital accessibility lawsuit reports. Georgia HB 1470 was signed 11 May 2026, effective 1 July 2026. This article is general information about published litigation data and law, not legal advice — take advice on your own circumstances from a qualified attorney.*