Website Accessibility Lawsuits: A Dramatic Rise

Jun 12, 2022 | ADA/WCAG Conformance

Courtroom in the Federal Court Eastern District of New York

The Numbers Keep Climbing

When we first wrote about website accessibility lawsuits, a few thousand cases a year seemed like a lot. The numbers have grown quite a bit since then.

According to UsableNet, more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in state and federal courts in 2025, up from 4,187 in 2024. The first half of 2026 was busier still, putting this year on track for more than 6,000 cases, an increase of nearly 20 percent.

Federal Court Eastern District of New York

Website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court each year. Source: Seyfarth Shaw, ADA Title III blog.

Federal Filings Bounced Back in 2025

The law firm Seyfarth Shaw has tracked website accessibility lawsuits in federal court for years. After two years of decline, federal filings jumped 27 percent in 2025 to 3,117, the second highest total they’ve recorded. Website cases made up 36 percent of all ADA Title III lawsuits filed in federal court that year.

  • 2018: 2,258
  • 2019: 2,256
  • 2020: 2,523
  • 2021: 2,895
  • 2022: 3,255
  • 2023: 2,794
  • 2024: 2,452
  • 2025: 3,117

Those are federal cases only. State court filings, mostly in New York, push the total well past 5,000.

Where the Lawsuits Are Filed

New York leads by a wide margin. In the first half of 2026 alone, UsableNet counted 1,269 cases in New York, followed by Illinois with 548, California with 392 and Florida with 387.

Illinois is the one to watch. It went from a minor player to the second busiest state in a matter of months, driven largely by one Illinois-based plaintiff firm filing on behalf of several different plaintiffs.

In federal court, the top states in 2025 were New York with 1,021 cases, Florida with 961 and Illinois with 585. California had only four federal cases, largely because appellate rulings there have found that businesses that exist only online fall outside the ADA.

Who’s Getting Sued

Online stores are the biggest target by far, making up 79 percent of lawsuits in the first half of 2026. Restaurants and food service account for most of the rest.

Small and midsize businesses take most of the hits. In the first half of 2026, 68 percent of suits were filed against companies with less than $50 million in annual revenue.

Being sued once also makes a second suit more likely. In 2025, 1,427 federal cases, about 45 percent, were filed against companies that had already been sued before.

Why the Rise?

A big part of it is that filing these cases has become a business for a small group of law firms. Automated scanners make it easy to spot common problems on thousands of websites, and those firms know exactly what to look for.

It also helps that most websites still have those problems. WebAIM’s 2026 study of the top one million home pages found detectable accessibility failures on 95.9 percent of them.

Federal rules haven’t settled things either. The DOJ’s rule for state and local government websites, which requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA, had its deadlines pushed back a year in April 2026, to April 2027 for larger governments and April 2028 for smaller ones. There’s still no matching rule for private businesses, so the courts remain the main place these questions get decided.

What This Means for You

We’d much rather you hear about this from us than from a process server. The best protection is an accessible website, built and checked by people who know what to look for, and kept up as your site changes.

Widgets and overlays won’t do it. Businesses using them keep getting sued, as we explain in Businesses Using Overlays Like accessiBe and UserWay Keep Getting Sued.

If you’d like us to look over your site, just reach out. We’ll tell you plainly where you stand and what, if anything, needs fixing.

Sources and Further Reading

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