The common assumption about website accessibility lawsuits is that they are a large-company problem, aimed at national retailers with legal departments and eight-figure web budgets. The filing data shows a different pattern. Most of these cases are brought against companies far smaller than that, and the reasons have less to do with any individual business than with how cheap the cases are to file.
This article covers what the filings show, what one of these cases actually costs a small business, why the volume keeps climbing, and which measures hold up. For what the standards themselves ask of a business website, see Understanding the Basics of ADA Web Accessibility Requirements.
What the Filings Show
UsableNet, which tracks digital accessibility cases across the federal circuits and the busiest state courts, counted more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States in 2025. Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 website accessibility suits in federal court alone, up 27 percent from 2,452 the year before.
The distribution is the part worth sitting with. Roughly 64 percent of 2025 cases were filed against companies with annual revenue under 25 million dollars. Online retail drew the largest share by industry, with food service second, though the filings reach well beyond both.
Filed lawsuits are also only the visible portion. Demand letters, which arrive by mail or email and propose a payment to make the matter go away, are more common than filings and leave no public record. A business can be through the entire experience without ever appearing in a court database.
What One of These Cases Costs
The Wall Street Journal reported the case of Bob Kramer, who makes handcrafted knives in Bellingham, Washington, and has one employee. A visually impaired shopper in New York sued Kramer Knives over its website, saying she was unable to purchase a knife case. She never called or emailed the company first. The suit was one of more than 1,100 web accessibility cases brought that year by a single New York firm, according to figures the Journal cited from UsableNet.
The plaintiff offered to settle for 20,000 dollars and later agreed to dismiss. By then Kramer had spent roughly 16,000 dollars in legal fees and another 3,000 dollars on his website, and he had stripped out links and material he could not fully control.
The Journal also reported on Electric Bike Technologies in Croydon, Pennsylvania, which spent about 46,000 dollars in legal fees and 13,000 dollars updating its websites after a 2022 suit. Its chief executive told the paper, <q>Some days, I feel like I should have settled.</q>
Neither company was accused of doing anything to a customer. Both were accused of having a website that did not meet a standard, which is a category of exposure that most business owners have never priced.
Why the Volume Keeps Climbing
These cases are inexpensive to produce. In a published analysis, accessibility specialists at Equal Entry placed two complaints side by side, filed by the same plaintiff against a coffee shop and a furniture retailer. Both ran exactly 20 pages. The numbered paragraphs aligned. The statement of facts used identical wording in both. Neither described anything specific that the plaintiff had been unable to do on either site.
Courts have started to notice. A federal judge in the Southern District of New York sanctioned a plaintiff's attorney for filing complaints that failed to plead standing, criticizing them as cookie-cutter filings, and offered to stay the sanction if the firm agreed not to file similar cases in that district for two years.
Two structural features keep the economics working anyway. Demand amounts are often set below what it would cost a defendant to mount a response, which makes paying the rational choice even when the claim is thin. And a business can be sued where its customers are, not only where it is located, so serving customers in a state is enough to create exposure there.
The threshold dropped again recently. Seyfarth Shaw counted 40 percent more federal pro se ADA Title III filings in 2025 than in 2024, attributing the rise in part to plaintiffs using artificial intelligence to draft complaints that previously required hiring a lawyer. The supply of targets is not the limiting factor: WebAIM's February 2026 survey of the top one million home pages found 95.9 percent with at least one detectable WCAG failure, the first year-over-year regression in six years, averaging 56.1 errors per page.
What Does Not Protect You
Being small. Small companies are not overlooked in this litigation, they are the majority of it. Limited revenue tends to make settlement more attractive, which is the opposite of a deterrent.
Having settled once. Of the 2025 filings, 1,427 targeted companies that had already faced an accessibility claim, accounting for 45 percent of all federal cases. Where remediation only addressed the pages named in the first complaint, a second filing often follows within months.
Installing an accessibility overlay. These are the widgets that promise compliance from one line of code. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission brought a complaint against accessiBe, the overlay vendor it acted against, over claims that its product would make websites conform to WCAG. The final order, approved that April, requires the company to pay one million dollars and bars it from claiming its product can make any website WCAG compliant, or keep it that way, unless it has evidence to support the claim. The FTC's complaint described sites running the widget that still failed on menus, headings, tables, images, and recordings.
A one-time audit. A site that conformed at launch drifts as pages, images, documents, and embedded video are added. Accessibility is a property of the site as it stands today, not of the site as it was inspected.
What Reduces Exposure
Actual conformance, verified by testing rather than asserted by a vendor, and maintained as the site changes. That is the whole of it, and there is no shortcut that survives contact with a complaint.
Kansas offers an instructive illustration of how the legal system is starting to treat this. Its Act Against Abusive Website Access Litigation, in effect since July 2023, lets businesses recover fees from plaintiffs who bring abusive claims. Where a business makes a good-faith attempt to fix the problem within thirty days of written notice, continued litigation is presumed abusive. The protection rewards businesses that respond and remediate.
One honest caveat: no site is provably immune, and anyone promising immunity is selling something the FTC has already taken an interest in. What conformance does is remove the barriers that these complaints are built on, and it does so while making the site usable for the people the standards exist to serve. Specific legal exposure is a question for your attorney, and this article is not a substitute for that conversation.
What We Manage on Your Behalf
For clients whose sites we manage, accessibility is part of the build and part of every change afterward:
- Designed and tested against ADA (WCAG) standards at build. Pages are checked before launch, not certified by a plug-in.
- Rechecked on every change. New pages, images, documents, and embedded video are reviewed as they are added, which is where conformance is usually lost.
- Maintained as standards move. Accessibility requirements have climbed steadily for a decade, and keeping current with them is our work rather than an item on your calendar.
For sites we did not build, a site audit establishes where things actually stand before any decisions get made. Details of the ongoing work are on our management page.
The Realistic Picture
Accessibility litigation is now a routine cost of doing business online for companies that leave it unaddressed. Filing volume dipped in 2024 and climbed again in 2025, but across the period the trend has held. The businesses that avoid it are not the ones that stayed small enough to escape notice. They are the ones whose sites work for everyone, and who can demonstrate it.
If you are unsure where your site stands, or a demand letter has already arrived, let us know.
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Sources: UsableNet 2025 Year-End Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report; Seyfarth Shaw ADA Title III filing data, 2026; WebAIM Million, February 2026; Federal Trade Commission, accessiBe order, January and April 2025; Equal Entry, side-by-side analysis of near-identical accessibility complaints; The Wall Street Journal, "The Law Firm Hitting Businesses With Thousands of Disability Suits," July 15, 2024.
Notice: provided for informational purposes only; not legal, financial, or professional advice.
Notice: The information provided in this document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. All materials and guidance offered by Generose Corporation dba Risingline are subject to its Client Services Agreement and are provided without warranty as to accuracy, completeness, or applicability to any specific situation. While Risingline takes reasonable precautions to ensure the reliability of the information presented, compliance with regulatory requirements varies based on specific circumstances, jurisdiction, and evolving standards. Recipients are encouraged to conduct independent due diligence and consult with qualified professionals before implementing any recommendations. Generose Corporation dba Risingline expressly disclaims any liability for actions taken or not taken based on this document. Receipt of this information does not establish a client, advisory, or fiduciary relationship between Risingline and the recipient.