Website accessibility lawsuits in the US are not only filed against banks and airlines. Restaurants, stores, salons and other businesses with a website and a front door are named too, often by plaintiffs who file against many businesses at once, and often after a letter asking for money. The law behind them, the Americans with Disabilities Act, says nothing about websites, and the standard they are measured against is one most small-business owners have never heard of.
This is a description of how the rules and the lawsuits work, not legal advice. We build websites; we are not attorneys.
Can a small business be sued over its website?
Yes. Title III of the ADA bans discrimination by “places of public accommodation”, a list that runs from restaurants and hotels to stores, salons, doctors’ offices and gyms. It was written in 1990 and does not mention websites, and courts still disagree about how far it reaches them.
The clearest case is a business with a physical location customers visit. When a café’s website is how people read the menu or order ahead, most courts treat it as part of the café’s service, and a site a blind customer cannot use as a barrier to it. Businesses that exist only online are where courts split. A contractor who goes to the customer sits somewhere between the two, and nobody should take comfort from that: a demand letter does not wait for the question to be settled.
Size is no defense either. Title III has no small-business exemption.
How many lawsuits, and where
The most quoted count is Seyfarth Shaw’s, which tracks federal filings. It found 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025, a 27% increase from 2,452 in 2024. New York’s federal courts had 1,021 of them and Florida’s 961.
California’s federal courts had four, which sounds like good news for California and is not. Plaintiffs there file in state court instead, under the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which treats an ADA violation as a violation of state law and allows statutory damages of at least $4,000 per violation, something federal Title III does not offer. New York plaintiffs have been moving to state court too, after federal judges there tightened the rules on who has standing to sue.
Count state courts as well and the number rises by more than half. UsableNet, which tracks both, recorded 4,928 web accessibility lawsuits in 2025. Neither figure counts the demand letters that are settled before anything is filed, which nobody can count, and which are generally reported to be far more common than lawsuits.
The pattern is consistent. A letter or a complaint arrives listing problems found on the site, usually by an automated scan and a few minutes with a screen reader. It asks for a settlement and a promise to fix the site to a stated standard by a stated date. Most cases settle; very few reach a trial.
What the Department of Justice says
On March 18, 2022 the DOJ published guidance on web accessibility. It says businesses open to the public must make sure the goods and services they offer online are accessible, and that they “have flexibility in how they comply”. It names the barriers it means: poor color contrast, images with no text alternative, videos with no captions, forms without labels, and pages that work only with a mouse. It points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as helpful, without requiring them.
That guidance does not have the force of a regulation, and there is still no Title III regulation for websites. A rule does exist for governments. In 2024 the DOJ issued a Title II rule requiring state and local governments to meet WCAG 2.1 at level AA, and an interim rule in April 2026 moved its deadlines to April 26, 2027 for governments serving 50,000 people or more and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones. It does not apply to private businesses. What it does tell you is which standard the federal government reaches for when it writes one down.
Why WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 AA is the benchmark
WCAG is published by the W3C, the body that maintains the web’s own standards: a list of testable criteria at levels A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the one that matters. Settlement agreements name it, the DOJ’s Title II rule names it, and an expert hired by either side will measure a site against it.
Version 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on October 5, 2023. It keeps the criteria of 2.1, apart from one the W3C retired as obsolete, and adds new ones, among them a minimum size for things you tap and a rule that a focused element must not be entirely hidden behind a sticky header. A site built to WCAG 2.2 AA meets the 2.1 AA that most settlements still cite. Nobody can promise that meeting it prevents a suit; it is what makes a suit hard to win.
The fixes to make first
The full standard is long. Rank the fixes by what they cost a customer, and the ones that stop someone calling, booking or buying come first.
- Phone number, address and hours as text. A number inside an image cannot be read aloud by a screen reader, enlarged cleanly or tapped to call.
- The menu, price list or booking as a web page. A scanned PDF menu is one of the most common findings against restaurants, because a screen reader sees a picture with nothing in it.
- Text alternatives on images. Every photo that carries information gets a short description. Decorative ones are marked as such, so a screen reader skips them.
- Readable contrast. WCAG AA asks for a contrast ratio of 4.5 for ordinary text. Pale gray on white usually fails it.
- Forms with labels and plain error messages. A field labeled only by gray text inside it loses its label the moment someone types. An error shown only in red tells a colorblind visitor nothing.
- Everything works from a keyboard. Menus, buttons, the booking widget and any pop-up can be reached and used with the Tab and Enter keys, and you can see where you are on the page.
- Zoom without breaking. The page still works at 200% zoom and on a narrow phone screen, with nothing cut off and no sideways scrolling.
- Captions on videos. Including the one on the homepage.
You can test most of this yourself in half an hour: use the site with Tab and Enter only, zoom to 200%, and run a free checker such as WAVE. Automated checkers find only part of the problems, so a clean result is a start, not a certificate. And check what other companies supply: a booking system or an ordering platform is on your site, and its failures count as yours.
Why an overlay widget does not protect you
An overlay is a script, usually sold by subscription, that puts an accessibility button on your site and promises to fix problems automatically. The Federal Trade Commission has said it does not do what it claims. In January 2025 it announced that accessiBe, one of the best-known vendors, would pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented its product’s ability to make any website comply with WCAG. The company did not admit wrongdoing, and the final order was approved in April 2025.
The lawsuits say the same thing. UsableNet’s tracker counted 360 web accessibility lawsuits in September 2026, and 91 of the businesses sued were already using a widget. A script that runs on top of a page cannot reliably fix a missing form label or a menu that only opens with a mouse, and some screen reader users find that an overlay gets in the way of the settings they already use. Fixing the page itself is what changes the result.
What to do if a demand letter arrives
Do not ignore it, and do not answer it yourself first. A letter that goes unanswered is often followed by a lawsuit, and a reply written in a hurry can concede things an attorney would not. Talk to an attorney who handles ADA defense before anyone contacts the sender.
- Check it is real. Some letters are scams. A filed lawsuit appears on the court’s docket; a demand letter should come from a lawyer you can look up with the state bar. Contact them through details you found yourself, not the ones in the letter.
- Find an attorney. If you do not have one, your state bar’s lawyer referral service can point you to someone who handles ADA cases. Ask what they charge before they start.
- Call your insurance agent. Some business policies cover claims like this and many do not. Find out which yours is before you agree to anything.
- Keep a record. Save the letter, note the date it arrived, and take screenshots of the pages it names before anything on them changes.
- Fix the site, with your attorney knowing. The problems it lists are real for customers whatever happens to the claim. Fixing them does not, on its own, make a claim go away, especially under state laws that award damages, but it is what stops the next letter.
We build every site to WCAG 2.2 AA and keep to it when we make changes. That is a description of the work, not a promise that nobody will ever send a letter.
If you would like to know what a customer using a keyboard or a screen reader meets on your site, send us the address. We reply in writing within 24 hours with the three things we would change, and if accessibility is one of them we will say so.
