How many website accessibility lawsuits are filed each year?

It depends on who is counting, and on which courts they read. Seyfarth Shaw put website accessibility filings in US federal court at 3,117 for 2025, up 27% from 2,452 in 2024. UsableNet's tracker puts the same federal figure at 3,195. Adding the New York and California state courts, which is the wider scope UsableNet reads, its 2025 total is 4,928. Nobody's count is a census of every case, and none of them counts businesses rather than filings.

Can my small business be sued over its website?

Yes. There is no revenue floor in the ADA, and small businesses are sued regularly. What draws a complaint is a barrier on a public-facing site, not the size of the company behind it.

Does an accessibility widget protect me from a lawsuit?

The record does not support that. Businesses running a widget have been sued, twice in 2021 federal courts refused to dismiss cases on the strength of one, and in April 2025 the FTC finalised a $1 million consent order against accessiBe over how the product was marketed. Complaints and settlements keep asking for substantive repair rather than a script.

What standard do these lawsuits measure against?

WCAG, almost always, and not because any statute says so. The ADA names no technical standard for private businesses and WCAG is not formally written into it, so the guidelines became the measuring stick by everyone reaching for the same one. Plaintiffs plead WCAG, experts test against it, and settlements specify conformance with it. Our audits test WCAG 2.2 Level AA, which is a superset of the 2.1 AA that complaints usually cite.

What is the fastest way to reduce my exposure?

Find out where you actually stand, then fix the barriers that stop somebody finishing a task before you touch anything cosmetic. After that, publish an honest accessibility statement with a contact route a person actually watches. One number is worth holding on to here. UsableNet reported that 45% of 2025's filings named a company that had already been sued. That is a share of the cases filed rather than a measure of your odds, and nobody publishes what happened inside those businesses in between. Read it as a reason to finish the job rather than as a prediction.

The record

Website accessibility lawsuits: what actually gets sued.

We are not going to scare you with this page. Fear sells badly and ages worse. What we will do is show you the numbers, name the barriers that actually turn up in complaints, and give you a way to check your own site for each one. That is the useful version.

Federal web lawsuits in 2025, Seyfarth's count: 3,117
Growth over 2024, on the same count: +27%
Of 2025 filings named a company already sued (UsableNet): 45%
Of 2025 filings that targeted e-commerce (UsableNet): 70%

What these cases are actually about

Almost every US web accessibility claim runs through the Americans with Disabilities Act, which never mentions websites once. Courts got there anyway, on the reasoning that a shop you cannot enter with a screen reader is legally a shop with steps and no ramp.

Because no codified technical standard exists for private businesses, everyone reaches for the same measuring stick. Plaintiffs plead WCAG, experts test against WCAG, and settlements specify WCAG conformance as the remedy. Which is worth stating precisely, because the guidelines are not formally written into the ADA at all. They became the standard by convergence rather than by statute, and Level AA is the rung the whole system converged on.

The filings are concentrated in a way that surprises most owners. New York saw 1,021 federal filings in 2025, Florida 961 and Illinois 585. California saw four. That is not because California is easier, it is because plaintiffs there file in state court under the Unruh Act, which awards statutory damages the ADA itself does not. Read a federal-only table and you will conclude California is safe, and you will be wrong by a wide margin.

One more thing this page should say that most of the market does not. These cases do not all succeed. Federal appeal courts disagree about whether a website with no physical store is a place of public accommodation at all, the split runs several circuits deep, and judges in the Southern District of New York have dismissed standalone-website claims with prejudice while other judges in the same district have let them proceed. The filing numbers above are filings, not verdicts, and anyone quoting them at you as if they were outcomes is arguing rather than informing.

The eight barriers that keep showing up

These are the failures that stop somebody finishing a task, and they are also the ones that turn up most on real sites. WebAIM scans a million home pages a year and finds six error types accounting for 96% of everything detected, which is why the same eight things recur. Each row below carries a check you can run yourself in a couple of minutes.

Images without alt text
WCAG 1.1.1
Turn images off and read the page. Filenames where descriptions belong is the failure. A decorative image saying nothing is correct, so ask what each one is doing there.
Check your alt text
Form fields with no label
WCAG 3.3.2
Look for a visible label on every field, plus the format hints a field needs before somebody can fill it in, because 3.3.2 asks for both. Then click each label, because focus moving into the field shows the two are wired together.
The forms checks
Text that fails contrast
WCAG 1.4.3
Measure each text and background pair rather than judging by eye.
Check a colour pair
Links that say nothing
WCAG 2.4.4
Read each link with the text around it, because 2.4.4 lets nearby text supply the purpose as long as a screen reader can reach it too. Reading them stripped of context is the stricter 2.4.9 test at AAA.
The link purpose rule
Keyboard traps and unreachable controls
WCAG 2.1.1 and 2.1.2
Put the mouse out of reach and Tab through the page. Controls you cannot reach fail 2.1.1. If Tab will not take you out of something, try Escape and the close button before calling it a trap, because 2.1.2 asks for a way out rather than for Tab specifically. Menus and modals break first.
The keyboard pass
Invisible focus
WCAG 2.4.7
Tab through and watch for something that clearly marks where you are at every stop. An outline is the usual answer, not the only one.
The focus rule
Video without captions
WCAG 1.2.2
Play your prerecorded video and read the captions. Auto-captions are worth a human pass, because names, jargon and numbers are where they fail.
The captions rule
Checkout that cannot be finished by ear
WCAG Several
Run your own checkout end to end with a screen reader, using a test account or a test payment method rather than a real order.
The checkout audit

The widget question

A lot of owners install an accessibility widget precisely because they are worried about this, so it is worth knowing what happened to the ones who did. Businesses running a widget get sued, and twice in 2021 federal courts in New York refused to dismiss cases on the strength of one. In the sharper of the two, the defendant produced three audit reports from the vendor concluding the site complied, and the court held that barriers were still alleged, so nothing had been put beyond doubt. In April 2025 the FTC finalised a $1 million consent order against accessiBe over how the product was marketed.

We have put the full documented record, every claim linked to its source, on the overlays page, with even-handed assessments of each vendor alongside it.

What actually reduces your exposure

Find out where you stand. You cannot fix what nobody has measured. The free 10-page scan gives you the mechanical picture in minutes, and the eight checks above cover a good deal of the rest.
Fix what blocks people from finishing a task first. A keyboard trap in checkout matters more than a heading level in your footer, so rank the list by user impact rather than by rule number and the first week's work does most of the good.
Publish an honest accessibility statement with a contact route somebody actually watches. It is the cheapest step on this list, and it gives a person who hits a barrier somewhere to go that is not a lawyer.
Answer complaints quickly and specifically. A named barrier, a date it will be fixed by, and a person's name reads very differently from a form response, and it is the difference between a conversation and an escalation.
Re-check after redesigns. Every release can introduce a barrier, and a site that passed in March has a new marketing banner by June. On UsableNet's count, 45% of 2025's filings named a company that had been sued before, which is enough to say one pass is not where this ends.

One honest limit

Nobody can make a website lawsuit-proof, and any vendor who says otherwise is selling something that does not exist. What an audit gives you is evidence of where you stand and a fix list your team can clear. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and if you have received a complaint, the person to call is a lawyer, not us.

What owners ask when they land on this page

How many website accessibility lawsuits are filed each year?: It depends on who is counting, and on which courts they read. Seyfarth Shaw put website accessibility filings in US federal court at 3,117 for 2025, up 27% from 2,452 in 2024. UsableNet's tracker puts the same federal figure at 3,195. Adding the New York and California state courts, which is the wider scope UsableNet reads, its 2025 total is 4,928. Nobody's count is a census of every case, and none of them counts businesses rather than filings.
Can my small business be sued over its website?: Yes. There is no revenue floor in the ADA, and small businesses are sued regularly. What draws a complaint is a barrier on a public-facing site, not the size of the company behind it.
Does an accessibility widget protect me from a lawsuit?: The record does not support that. Businesses running a widget have been sued, twice in 2021 federal courts refused to dismiss cases on the strength of one, and in April 2025 the FTC finalised a $1 million consent order against accessiBe over how the product was marketed. Complaints and settlements keep asking for substantive repair rather than a script.
What standard do these lawsuits measure against?: WCAG, almost always, and not because any statute says so. The ADA names no technical standard for private businesses and WCAG is not formally written into it, so the guidelines became the measuring stick by everyone reaching for the same one. Plaintiffs plead WCAG, experts test against it, and settlements specify conformance with it. Our audits test WCAG 2.2 Level AA, which is a superset of the 2.1 AA that complaints usually cite.
What is the fastest way to reduce my exposure?: Find out where you actually stand, then fix the barriers that stop somebody finishing a task before you touch anything cosmetic. After that, publish an honest accessibility statement with a contact route a person actually watches. One number is worth holding on to here. UsableNet reported that 45% of 2025's filings named a company that had already been sued. That is a share of the cases filed rather than a measure of your odds, and nobody publishes what happened inside those businesses in between. Read it as a reason to finish the job rather than as a prediction.

Sources

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