Most of what we write about here is opportunity — showing up in AI answers, catching the calls you miss. This one is the opposite: a risk that arrives by certified mail. Litigation trackers counted more than 5,000 website accessibility lawsuits filed in the U.S. in 2025, and 2026 is running higher still — one tracker projects roughly 6,000 across federal and state courts. The businesses on the receiving end mostly aren’t national chains. They’re small operators who had no idea their website was a legal exposure.
What these claims actually say
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires places of public accommodation to be usable by people with disabilities, and courts have broadly extended that to the websites businesses use to serve customers. In practice, the claim is that someone using a screen reader or keyboard navigation couldn’t book, buy, or contact you. The reference standard everyone points at is WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the Department of Justice formally adopted it for public-entity sites, and it has become the practical benchmark for everyone else.
Two details make this different from most compliance topics: there is no small-business exemption in the ADA, and a very small number of firms drive most of the volume — one analysis found roughly 16 law firms behind over 90% of these filings in the first half of 2025. They work from automated scans, at scale. Nobody is auditing your business personally; a crawler flagged your homepage.
This isn’t a lawsuit about your business. It’s a lawsuit about your code — and the scan that found it never met you.
The part that surprises owners: the widget doesn’t save you
A lot of small businesses installed an accessibility overlay — the little accessibility icon that pops open a menu of contrast and font-size toggles — and reasonably assumed the problem was handled. The data says otherwise. Reporting on 2025 filings found that a substantial share of sued businesses already had an overlay or widget installed when the complaint arrived, with estimates ranging from about 20% to nearly 40% depending on the tracker. In April 2025, the FTC ordered a major overlay vendor to pay $1 million over claims that its tool could make any site compliant.
The reason is mechanical. An overlay sits on top of your page; screen readers read the underlying code. If your buttons aren’t labeled, your images have no alt text, and your form fields aren’t connected to their labels, a widget layered over the top hasn’t changed any of that. And liability follows the site owner, not the software vendor you paid.
What actually gets flagged
The failures cited in these complaints are boring and repetitive — which is good news, because boring and repetitive is fixable. Studies of the top million homepages find detectable WCAG failures on the overwhelming majority of them, averaging dozens of errors per page. The usual suspects:
- Images with no alt text. Every photo, logo, and icon that carries meaning needs a text description. Decorative images should be marked as decorative.
- Low-contrast text. Light gray on white looks elegant in a mockup and fails automatically in a scan.
- Unlabeled form fields and buttons. A booking form where the fields are only identified by placeholder text, or a button that reads as “button” to a screen reader, is a direct hit.
- Keyboard traps. If a customer can’t tab through your menu, form, and popups without a mouse — and can’t escape a modal — that’s a failure.
- Video with no captions, and PDFs of your menu or price list that are really just scanned images.
The reframe worth holding onto
Roughly one in four U.S. adults reports some form of disability. Every fix above is also a customer you were quietly turning away — and, conveniently, the same work that makes a site readable to a screen reader makes it readable to the AI agents now shopping on your customers’ behalf. Real text instead of images, clear labels, logical structure, keyboard-usable forms: that’s one list serving three purposes.
What to do this month
- 1Run a free automated scan of your homepage and your booking or contact page. Free checkers catch maybe a third of real issues, but that third is exactly what the plaintiff-side scans look for.
- 2Try your own site with the mouse unplugged. Tab from the top through your menu, your form, and your popups. If you get stuck, so does a customer.
- 3Fix alt text and contrast first. They’re the two highest-volume flags and usually the cheapest to correct.
- 4Don’t rely on a widget as your compliance plan. Keep it if you like it, but treat it as a convenience feature, not a legal shield.
- 5Write an accessibility statement with a real contact method, and respond quickly if someone reports a barrier. A business that fixes a problem on request is a far less attractive target than one that ignores the email.
One honest caveat: we build websites, we’re not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice. If a demand letter actually lands in your inbox, call an attorney before you reply — and before you assume it’s a scam, because plenty of them aren’t.
Accessibility isn’t a plugin — it’s how the site is built. Every site we build starts with real text, proper labels, and keyboard-usable forms. See what that looks like.
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