ADA website lawsuits: who gets sued, and why

The short version: US courts have seen thousands of web accessibility lawsuits a year for years running, plus an estimated multiple of that in private demand letters. The targets are mostly ordinary small and mid-sized businesses — especially online stores — and the alleged failures are almost always the same handful of mechanical problems. That last part is good news: the most-cited issues are also the most fixable.

How a website becomes an ADA case

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires "places of public accommodation" to be accessible. The statute predates the web, and the Department of Justice has never issued formal Title III regulations for websites — but DOJ's long-held position, and the position of most courts, is that business websites are covered, particularly when the site connects to a physical business or sells goods and services to the public.

In practice, the standard everyone measures against is WCAG 2.1 level AA. It's the benchmark DOJ wrote into its 2024 web rule for state and local governments, the one used in settlement agreements, and the one plaintiff experts test against.

The numbers, briefly

• Industry tracking (UsableNet and others) has counted roughly 4,000+ web accessibility suits per year in US federal and state courts in recent years — with New York, Florida, and California the dominant venues.
• Demand letters that settle before any filing are estimated to outnumber lawsuits severalfold.
• The large majority of suits target e-commerce, and most defendants are small or mid-sized businesses, not household names.
• A significant share of sued companies were already running an accessibility overlay widget when the complaint arrived — hundreds per year. The widget doesn't prevent the claim; it can attract it.
• Typical resolutions: settlements in the $5,000–$25,000 range plus plaintiff's legal fees plus an agreement to remediate — meaning you pay the settlement and still have to fix the site.

What complaints actually cite

Read a stack of these complaints and the same failures repeat, because plaintiffs' firms test with screen readers and automated tools just like anyone else:

• Images without alt text — the single most-cited barrier, and the reason product images are such a liability for stores
• Buttons and links with no accessible name — a screen reader announces "button" and nothing else
• Form fields without labels — checkout and contact forms that can't be completed
• Insufficient color contrast — text that low-vision users can't read
• Keyboard traps and missing focus indicators — pages unusable without a mouse

Every one of these is detectable by automated scanning, and most are mechanically fixable at the source.

Reducing the risk — what actually works

What doesn't: an overlay widget. The FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1 million over its compliance claims, and complaints now sometimes name the overlay itself as a barrier.

What does:

1. Scan and fix the top-cited failures first. Alt text, button names, form labels, contrast, keyboard access. This is the bulk of real-world complaint material, and it's exactly what a risk-weighted scan surfaces first.

2. Fix in your actual code, and verify. An expert witness looks at your HTML, not your intentions. Fixes applied at the source and re-tested on the live page hold up; JavaScript paint does not.

3. Publish an accessibility statement and a feedback channel. A working way for users to report problems — and evidence you respond — matters in practice. See what a statement must say.

4. Keep a dated record. If a demand letter arrives, the difference between a shakedown settlement and a quick resolution is often whether you can demonstrate ongoing, documented remediation effort. That's what an evidence pack is for.