ADA website lawsuits, in plain English

If your business has been sued over its website, or you've heard about a business near you that was, here's how these cases generally work and what's actually checked on the site.

This is a technical accessibility assessment, not legal advice, and automated testing cannot establish ADA compliance.

How common are they?

Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that tracks these filings, counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal courts in 2025, up from 2,452 in 2024. Most were filed in New York, Florida and Illinois. Those counts don't include cases filed in state courts.

What the law says

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers businesses that are open to the public. The Department of Justice's 2022 guidance on web accessibility says the ADA's requirements apply to what those businesses offer “on the web” too.

There's no federal regulation that sets out technical standards for business websites. The Department of Justice says it “does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards”. In practice, letters and complaints usually point to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.1 or 2.2, level AA.

Courts in different parts of the country haven't always agreed on some questions, such as whether a business that only sells online is covered. How that applies to your case is a question for your attorney.

How a case usually starts

• Sometimes a demand letter comes first. Sometimes the first thing you receive is a lawsuit.
• The complaint usually names a person with a disability, often someone who is blind and uses a screen reader, who says they couldn't use your site.
• It describes barriers such as images without alternative text, form fields without labels, or menus that don't work with a keyboard.
• It usually asks the court to order the business to make its website accessible, and to award attorney's fees.

What gets checked on your website

The barriers named in these complaints are mostly concrete and testable:

• Images without alternative text, so a screen reader can't describe them.
• Form fields, like search, newsletter and quantity boxes, without labels.
• Text that doesn't have enough contrast with its background.
• Links and buttons with no readable name, like icon-only cart or menu buttons.
• Pages that don't declare their language.
• Parts of the site that can't be used with only a keyboard.

An automated check finds most of the first five reliably. Keyboard use, and whether alt text actually describes the image, need a person to test. Step-by-step fixes: for Shopify stores and for WordPress sites.

If you've been sued

1. Talk to a lawyer now. A lawsuit comes with a short, fixed deadline to respond. Don't ignore it.
2. Check that it's genuine. A filed lawsuit has a case number you can look up in court records.
3. Get the technical facts. Find out which of the claimed barriers actually exist on your pages today.
4. Fix the real issues on your site itself, starting with your most important pages. An add-on widget doesn't change the underlying issues; here's why.
5. Keep dated records of what was wrong, what you changed and when. Your attorney will want them.

Received a letter rather than a lawsuit? See what to do about an ADA demand letter.