Website accessibility lawsuits: what they look like for a small business

Website accessibility lawsuits are claims, mostly under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that a business website can’t be used by someone with a disability. A blind customer tries to read a menu with a screen reader and hears “image”. A keyboard user can’t reach the checkout button. Then a letter arrives.

For a small business it’s a strange letter to get. It names a person you’ve never met, a page they tried to use and a list of things that went wrong. This post covers what these cases are, how many there are, what the letter asks for, two court opinions that set the pattern, why a widget didn’t make them go away, and how to check your own pages from your phone.

What website accessibility lawsuits are

The Justice Department’s guidance, published on 18 March 2022, says the ADA covers businesses that are open to the public, and that its requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web. A restaurant, a shop, a clinic, a gym: if the door is open to the public, the guidance treats the website as part of the service.

The same page lists the barriers it sees most often: poor colour contrast, use of colour alone to give information, missing alt text on images, no captions on videos, inaccessible online forms, and mouse-only navigation. There’s no regulation setting a technical standard for a private website. The guidance points to WCAG as helpful guidance instead.

That gap is why these cases arrive one at a time. There’s no inspector. A person who meets a barrier, and a lawyer who works with them, is the enforcement.

How many there are, and who counts them

Nobody official keeps a tally. The counts you see come from law firms and vendors. Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that publishes a yearly count, counted 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, up from 2,452 in 2024. That’s the firm’s own number, from keyword searches of court data that it reviews by hand, and it covers federal courts only. State court cases, and demand letters that never become a lawsuit, aren’t in it.

So the true number is higher, and nobody knows by how much. What you can take from it: thousands a year, and more in 2025 than in 2024.

What a demand letter asks for

The letters follow the court filings, so the filings tell you what to expect. A complaint names the person, their disability and the software they use, usually a screen reader. It names the pages they tried, the date, and the barriers they met. Then it asks for three things.

• An order to fix the site: the ADA’s remedies for a private person are the ones borrowed from the Civil Rights Act, which means an injunction, an order to make the service accessible. Not money.
• Legal fees: the ADA lets a court give the prevailing party a reasonable attorney’s fee, with litigation expenses and costs. This is the part that makes a quick settlement cheaper than a fight.
• State damages, where a state law adds them: California’s Unruh Act sets damages at no less than four thousand dollars for each offence, plus fees. That’s why a California letter tends to name Unruh alongside the ADA.

A letter will usually offer a way out: fix the barriers, agree to a standard, and pay the fees. It’s written to be answered quickly. It’s also, often, a list of things that take an afternoon to fix.

Two court opinions that set the pattern

Most cases settle, so there are few published opinions. Two from 2019 are the ones everyone cites.

A pizza chain’s website and app

In Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, decided on 15 January 2019, a blind customer said he couldn’t use the website or the app with his screen reader. The district court had dismissed the case. The Ninth Circuit reversed it.

The court’s reasoning was about connection. The website and app, it said, “connect customers to the goods and services of Domino’s physical restaurants”, and the ADA applies to the services of a public accommodation, not only to what happens inside the building. It also dealt with the argument that there’s no official standard. The customer was suing under the ADA itself, and the court said an order to meet WCAG 2.0 could be the remedy at the end. Quoting an earlier case, it called the WCAG question one of remedy rather than liability.

A restaurant menu a screen reader couldn’t read

Thurston v. Midvale Corp., decided on 3 September 2019 by the California Court of Appeal, is closer to a small business. Cheryl Thurston, who is blind, couldn’t read the menu or reserve a table on the website of The Whisper Lounge, a restaurant in Los Angeles. The site’s graphics weren’t labelled, so her screen reader had nothing to say.

The restaurant argued that its phone number was a fair alternative. The trial court said no: a phone number “imposes a burden on the visually impaired to wait for a response via email or call during business hours rather than have access via Defendant’s website as other sighted customers”. The appeal court agreed, and upheld an injunction requiring the site to meet WCAG 2.0, along with the statutory damages under Unruh.

The case turned on images without labels, on a menu page.

Why an accessibility overlay didn’t stop them

An accessibility overlay is a line of script you add to a page. It promises to fix barriers on the fly: a widget with contrast settings, bigger text, a screen reader mode. For a worried owner it sounds like the whole problem, solved, for a monthly fee.

In January 2025 the FTC announced an order against accessiBe, the maker of accessWidget, and made it final on 22 April 2025. The FTC alleged that the company claimed its product could make any website WCAG-compliant, that it didn’t, and that the claims were false, misleading or unsubstantiated. It also alleged that paid articles were formatted to look like independent reviews. accessiBe agreed to pay $1 million and is barred from saying its automated products can make any website WCAG-compliant, or keep it so over time, unless it has the evidence.

The FTC’s consumer protection director, Samuel Levine, put it this way: Overstating a product’s AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive, and the FTC will act to stop it.

The order is about one claim: that a widget makes a website compliant. That claim needed proof and didn’t have it. A screen reader user would tell you the same thing in fewer words. An image with no alt text has no alt text, whatever widget sits in the corner. The barrier is in your HTML, and that’s where the fix is.

Check your own site from your phone

You don’t need a tool for this. Take your phone and your own home page, then the page where someone would book, buy or get in touch.

1. Turn on the screen reader. VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android, both in the accessibility settings. Swipe right through your home page and listen. Every image should say something useful. If you hear “image” or a file name, that’s missing alt text. That’s the Whisper Lounge menu, on your own site.
2. Go to your contact or booking form. Swipe to each field. You should hear what the field is for, not just “text field”. If you don’t, the label isn’t attached.
3. Look at your buttons and the small text. Pale grey on white, or white on a light photo, is poor contrast. Take the phone outdoors; if you squint, so does everyone.
4. Find anything that only works with a mouse. A menu that opens on hover, a button that’s a bare icon, a map you can’t get past. Keyboard users and switch users meet those as walls.
5. Play any video on the site. Is there a caption track? If not, write it down for later.
6. Put what you found next to the Justice Department’s list of six barriers. That’s your fix list, in the order a letter would use.

This covers the four of the six that an automated engine can read on a public page: alt text, form labels, contrast and keyboard access. Captions and colour-only meaning need a person.

If you sell to the EU or the UK, the same four barriers come up under different rules. The EU’s accessibility act and the UK’s Equality Act work through authorities and individual claims rather than a wave of private suits. The barriers they look for are the same ones.

Peeky reads the public pages of your site. For keyboard and screen reader barriers, the checks are US-06, EU-10 and UK-12 in the Handbook. The ADA compliance checklist walks through the fixes one by one.

Questions people ask

What counts as an ADA problem on a website?

The Justice Department's guidance lists the barriers it sees most: poor colour contrast, colour alone to give information, missing alt text, no captions on videos, inaccessible forms and mouse-only navigation. Both 2019 opinions in this post turned on the alt text one.

What are the odds of winning an ADA website lawsuit?

There are few published opinions, because most cases settle. In the ones that exist, courts have applied the ADA where the website connects to a physical business. The Ninth Circuit did that in Robles v. Domino's Pizza, and a California appeal court did it for a single restaurant in Thurston v. Midvale. Both opinions involved a website tied to a physical place, and the Ninth Circuit said it was deciding only that situation.

How much is an ADA website lawsuit worth?

Under Title III a private person gets an order to fix the barriers, not damages, plus attorney's fees for the prevailing party. California's Unruh Act adds statutory damages of at least $4,000 for each offence.

Does an accessibility overlay stop lawsuits?

The FTC's 2025 order against accessiBe found that its claim to make any website WCAG-compliant was false, misleading or unsubstantiated. A widget sits on top of the page. The barriers a screen reader meets are in the page itself.