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WCAGCheck Team

ADA Website Lawsuits Hit Record Highs: How to Protect Your Business

ADA website accessibility lawsuits have reached record numbers, with small businesses increasingly in the crosshairs. Here's what the data shows, which violations trigger lawsuits most often, and a practical guide to reducing your legal exposure.

ADA Website Lawsuits Hit Record Highs: How to Protect Your Business

If you haven't thought about web accessibility as a legal risk, the numbers will change your mind. ADA website accessibility lawsuits have been climbing for a decade, and there's no sign of them slowing down. In 2023, more than 4,600 federal ADA web accessibility lawsuits were filed — roughly 90 per week.

More significant than the volume is the shift in targeting. Where these cases once focused primarily on large retailers and financial institutions, plaintiffs' firms have moved downstream. Small and medium businesses — local retailers, restaurants with online ordering, professional services firms, independent e-commerce shops — now make up a substantial proportion of defendants.

If your website isn't accessible, the question isn't whether you could be sued. It's whether you'll be targeted before you fix it.

The Lawsuit Numbers in Context

Web accessibility litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been growing since the mid-2010s, when courts began consistently ruling that websites are "places of public accommodation" covered by Title III of the ADA.

Key statistics from recent years:

  • 2017: ~814 federal ADA web accessibility lawsuits filed
  • 2019: ~2,235 federal lawsuits
  • 2021: ~4,055 federal lawsuits
  • 2022: ~3,255 federal lawsuits (a brief dip attributed to serial filer restrictions in some jurisdictions)
  • 2023: ~4,600+ federal lawsuits, plus thousands more at state level

These figures only capture federal cases. Many ADA lawsuits are filed in state court (particularly in California under the Unruh Civil Rights Act, and in New York and Florida), and many are resolved through pre-litigation demand letters that never become lawsuits at all. The actual number of businesses receiving legal threats around web accessibility is significantly higher.

Who files these suits? A small number of plaintiffs' law firms account for a disproportionate share of filings. Several serial litigants — individuals who file hundreds of lawsuits each year — drive significant volume, particularly in certain states. This concentration has led to criticism that the litigation is driven by legal fees rather than genuine advocacy. Whatever the motivation, the legal exposure is real: businesses that settle these cases typically pay between $5,000 and $50,000, with attorney fee awards on top.

Who Gets Sued

Large Retailers and Financial Institutions

These remain targets because of their size and brand profile. Major retailers including Amazon, Target, and Domino's have faced high-profile accessibility litigation. The Domino's case (Robles v. Domino's Pizza) reached the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the ADA applies to Domino's website and app — a significant precedent.

E-Commerce Sites

Online retailers of all sizes are heavily targeted. The combination of a transactional website (a "place of public accommodation") with common accessibility failures (non-descriptive image alt text, inaccessible checkout flows, missing form labels) makes them easy cases to build. Plaintiffs' firms run automated scans of thousands of sites and send demand letters to those with WCAG violations.

Hospitality and Food Service

Hotels, restaurants with online menus or ordering, and ticketing platforms face significant exposure. An accessible website is not optional if it's the primary way customers make reservations or purchases.

Healthcare and Professional Services

Medical practices, law firms, accountants, and other professional services are increasingly targeted. The argument is straightforward: if a disabled person cannot access information about your services or book an appointment via your website, they're being denied access to a place of public accommodation.

Small Businesses

This is the category that's grown most dramatically. A bakery with an inaccessible online ordering system, an independent clothing retailer, a small hotel — these businesses are now routinely receiving demand letters from accessibility plaintiffs' firms.

The economics make sense from a litigation perspective: small businesses are less likely to have legal counsel already engaged, more likely to settle quickly, and less likely to mount a costly defence. The fact that a settlement might be $8,000 rather than $80,000 matters less than the sheer volume of cases a firm can process.

What Violations Get Businesses Sued

Plaintiffs' firms typically run automated accessibility scans and target sites with clearly identifiable, objective violations. The most commonly cited issues in ADA web accessibility complaints are:

1. Missing or Non-Descriptive Image Alt Text

Images without alt attributes, or with generic alt text like "image" or "photo123.jpg", are among the most common violations cited in lawsuits. Screen readers read alt text to blind users — when it's missing or unhelpful, those users can't access the content.

2. Inaccessible Forms and Input Fields

Forms without proper labels (the <label> element associated with each input, or aria-label attributes) are a major barrier. Screen reader users may hear a series of blank form fields with no indication of what information is required. Login forms, checkout forms, contact forms, and search fields are all commonly cited.

3. Keyboard Navigation Failures

If your site can't be navigated by keyboard alone, keyboard-dependent users — including many people with motor impairments and some screen reader users — can't use it. Common failures include dropdown menus that only open on mouse hover, modal dialogs that trap keyboard focus, and interactive elements that can't be reached by tabbing.

4. Insufficient Colour Contrast

Text that doesn't meet the WCAG contrast ratio requirements (4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text) is a barrier for people with low vision or colour vision deficiencies. Contrast failures are easy to detect with automated tools and are cited frequently in demand letters.

5. Videos Without Captions

Video content without closed captions is inaccessible to deaf and hard of hearing users. Auto-generated captions (the kind YouTube produces automatically) are generally not sufficient for compliance — they contain too many errors and don't typically meet the accuracy standard required by WCAG.

6. Missing Skip Navigation Links

Without a "skip to main content" link at the top of the page, keyboard users have to tab through every navigation link on every page before reaching the main content. On a site with a complex header, this might mean pressing Tab 30 or 40 times to reach the first piece of actual content.

7. Inaccessible PDFs and Documents

PDFs that aren't tagged for accessibility — documents generated from Word, scanned images saved as PDFs — are typically completely inaccessible to screen readers. Downloadable menus, product catalogues, and policy documents are commonly cited.

The Legal Landscape: Where Things Stand

Federal Law (Title III ADA)

Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by "places of public accommodation." Courts have consistently held that websites are covered, though with some nuance — some circuits still require a "nexus" between the website and a physical location, while others apply the ADA to purely online businesses.

In March 2024, the US Department of Justice issued a final rule under Title II of the ADA (covering state and local government entities) mandating WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, with compliance deadlines varying by entity size. While this directly covers government, it signals the DOJ's position on private sector obligations and strengthens the argument that WCAG 2.1 AA is the appropriate technical standard.

The DOJ has long indicated it intends to issue similar guidance for private sector Title III compliance, and this is now widely expected.

State Law

Several states have accessibility statutes that go beyond federal law:

  • California (Unruh Civil Rights Act): Provides for statutory damages of $4,000 per incident, making California a particularly active litigation state
  • New York: New York Human Rights Law and New York City Human Rights Law provide independent causes of action; New York is one of the highest-volume states for web accessibility suits
  • Florida: Florida Accessibility Code referenced in some litigation

The combination of federal ADA exposure and state law claims means businesses in California or New York can face compound liability.

What Happens When You Get a Demand Letter

Most businesses' first encounter with ADA web accessibility liability isn't a lawsuit — it's a demand letter from a plaintiffs' law firm.

A typical demand letter:

  1. Identifies specific WCAG violations found on your site
  2. States that these violations violate the ADA (and often applicable state law)
  3. Demands a settlement payment (typically $5,000–$20,000 for smaller businesses)
  4. Demands a written agreement to remediate the violations within a stated timeframe

Do not ignore these letters. An ignored demand letter will typically result in a lawsuit being filed.

What to do:

  • Retain counsel experienced in ADA website accessibility litigation before responding
  • Don't respond to the firm directly without legal advice
  • Begin an accessibility audit immediately — you need to understand the actual scope of your violations
  • Document your existing accessibility efforts (if any)

Businesses that can demonstrate a good-faith accessibility programme and a commitment to remediation are in a materially better negotiating position than those with no accessibility work at all.

How to Reduce Your Legal Exposure

The most effective risk reduction strategy is making your site actually accessible. A site that meets WCAG 2.1 AA is a dramatically harder target for plaintiffs' firms, who rely on finding objective, easily demonstrable violations.

Step 1: Run an Automated Scan

Automated tools can catch 30–40% of WCAG violations, including the most commonly litigated issues: missing alt text, contrast failures, missing form labels, and missing page titles. This is the fastest way to identify your highest-priority fixes.

WCAGCheck runs automated WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 scans and produces prioritised reports with specific remediation guidance.

Step 2: Fix the High-Volume Issues First

Prioritise by both severity and prevalence:

  • Missing alt text across your image library
  • Contrast failures in your colour palette (often a CSS fix)
  • Form label associations
  • Keyboard navigation for menus and modals

Step 3: Conduct Manual Testing

Automated tools miss things. Test your site with a screen reader (NVDA or JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac). Try navigating your entire checkout or booking flow by keyboard alone. These tests surface issues that automated scans can't detect.

Step 4: Publish an Accessibility Statement

An accessibility statement demonstrates good faith and gives users a mechanism to report issues directly to you. Courts and plaintiffs' firms look for evidence of accessibility commitment — a published statement, even acknowledging known limitations and a remediation roadmap, is better than nothing.

Step 5: Build Accessibility Into Your Workflow

Retrofitting accessibility is expensive. Build it into your development process:

  • Include accessibility acceptance criteria in development tickets
  • Run automated scans as part of your CI/CD pipeline
  • Add accessibility to your QA testing checklist
  • Brief content editors on alt text and heading structure

Common Misconceptions

"We're too small to be targeted." Small businesses are disproportionately targeted precisely because they're easier to settle with. Size is not a defence.

"We have an accessibility overlay widget, so we're covered." Overlays do not make a site legally compliant. Courts have rejected this defence, and several lawsuits have specifically targeted sites that had overlay widgets installed. More on this in our separate article on why overlays don't work.

"Nobody has complained to us, so it can't be that bad." Plaintiffs' firms find targets through automated scanning, not through user complaints. The absence of complaints doesn't indicate accessibility — it may just mean users with disabilities have already given up on your site.

"We'll fix it if we get a letter." By the time you receive a demand letter, you're already in a negotiating position that's weaker than if you'd made progress proactively. Documentation of pre-existing remediation efforts matters significantly to settlement outcomes.

The Bottom Line

ADA web accessibility litigation is an established and growing area of law. Plaintiffs' firms have refined their business model, courts have established precedents supporting liability, and the DOJ has signalled ongoing focus on web accessibility enforcement.

The cost of an accessibility audit and remediation programme is a fraction of the cost of defending or settling a lawsuit — to say nothing of the reputational damage of being publicly named in litigation.

Start with an automated scan to understand where you stand. Fix the most common violations. Build accessibility into your ongoing development practice. The goal isn't legal defensibility alone — it's a website that works for everyone. That also happens to be the best legal protection available.