Just the Facts · Article

Website accessibility is the most-sued thing on the internet

More businesses are sued over their website's accessibility than over every other issue on this page combined. The numbers, who gets hit, and why the same company can be sued in New York and California for two completely different reasons.

In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal court — a 27% increase over 2024, and 36% of every ADA Title III case filed that year. This is not an emerging risk. It is the single highest-volume category of website litigation in the country.

The numbers

3,117 federal website accessibility filings in 2025, up from 2,452 in 2024 — a 27% rise that reversed two consecutive years of decline.
36% of all ADA Title III federal lawsuits in 2025 were about websites, up from 28% the year before.
New York led with 1,021 cases; Florida nearly doubled to 961; Illinois reached 585, overtaking Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
Federal filings are only part of it — state-court accessibility claims push the 2025 total past 5,000.

The strangest number on the list

California's federal courts saw four new website accessibility lawsuits in all of 2025. Four. Not four thousand — four. That is not because California businesses are more accessible. It is because California judges have grown skeptical about whether the ADA reaches online-only businesses at all, so California plaintiffs bring privacy claims under CIPA instead.

Which produces the situation every multi-state business should understand: the same website, unchanged, gets sued in New York for being inaccessible and in California for its cookies. Fixing one does nothing about the other. They are separate exposures with separate fixes.

Who actually gets sued

Not primarily large corporations. These are high-volume, template-driven filings, and the economics favour targets who will settle rather than litigate — which describes most small and mid-sized businesses. Roughly seven in ten cases target e-commerce. And close to half of 2025's federal filings named a company that had already been sued once before, which tells you something important: many defendants settle, never actually fix the site, and get sued again.

What the scan is looking at

Law-o-matic runs axe-core, the same open-source engine most accessibility auditors use, against the WCAG success criteria courts and settlement agreements typically reference. It catches the machine-detectable failures — images without text alternatives, form fields without labels, insufficient colour contrast, content that can't be reached by keyboard, structural markup that screen readers can't navigate.

Be clear about the limit: automated testing finds roughly a third of accessibility barriers. It cannot tell you whether your alt text is meaningful, whether your video captions are accurate, or whether a screen-reader user can actually complete a purchase. A clean automated scan is a floor, not a certificate.

What actually helps

Fix the machine-detectable failures first. They are the cheapest, they are what an automated plaintiff-side scan finds, and they are what shows up in a complaint.
Publish an accessibility statement with a real contact route. It is not a legal shield, but it gives someone a way to report a barrier and get an answer — which is often what stops a complaint from becoming a filing.
Be wary of overlay widgets that promise instant compliance. Businesses using them have been sued, and plaintiffs' firms have specifically targeted sites running them.
Treat it as ongoing. Nearly half of 2025's federal defendants were repeat targets — a one-time remediation that isn't maintained puts you right back in the dataset.

Educational information, not legal advice. Automated testing detects a subset of accessibility barriers and does not certify compliance with the ADA or WCAG.

Sources

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