Is Your Website an ADA Lawsuit Target?
3,948 accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025, up 24% from 2024. Free scan tells you if your site has the exact issues attorneys look for.
Free ADA compliance checker for any website
Paste any URL above and get an ADA and WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance report in about 30 seconds. No account needed for your first scan. We test against the specific criteria courts and plaintiff attorneys cite in ADA web accessibility cases.
We fetch your page and analyze it against the WCAG 2.1 Level AA criteria that plaintiff attorneys most commonly cite in ADA demand letters.
Every issue shows the exact HTML element, the WCAG rule it violates, and a copy-paste fix. You'll know exactly what a plaintiff's attorney would find.
Paid plans crawl your entire site weekly and alert you the moment something regresses. New code deploy breaks accessibility? You'll know Monday morning, not when a demand letter arrives.
ADA web accessibility lawsuits are accelerating
3,948 ADA web accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal court in 2025, a 24% jump from 3,188 in 2024. That number only counts cases that actually made it to court. Pre-litigation demand letters, which most businesses quietly settle, run in the tens of thousands.
Where the cases get filed has shifted. New York is still number one with 1,108 filings (28% of the total), but its share is dropping. Florida surged 51% to 950 cases, California rose 62% to 787, and Illinois exploded from 92 lawsuits in 2024 to 576 in 2025, a 526% increase that turned a quiet jurisdiction into the fourth-busiest ADA web venue almost overnight. Illinois is where plaintiff firms go next.
Most cases never go to trial. A law firm identifies a website with obvious WCAG violations, sends a demand letter citing specific accessibility failures, and the business settles for $5,000 to $75,000 to make it go away. Just 33 serial plaintiffs filed 50% of all 2025 lawsuits, and 16 law firms accounted for 90% of filings. For them, it's a volume business. For the business owner, it's an unexpected five-figure expense plus weeks of stress.
The industries getting hit hardest in 2025: restaurants and food service (34.65% of filings, number one by a wide margin), fashion and apparel (25.96%), beauty and personal care (8%), furniture and home (7.67%), and healthcare (7.17%). If you run an online store, take reservations, sell physical products, or operate a patient portal, you're squarely in the crosshairs.
One more thing. 983 of those 2025 lawsuits, nearly 25%, were filed against sites that already had accessibility overlay widgets installed. In April 2025, the Federal Trade Commission fined AccessiBe $1 million for falsely claiming its widget made websites WCAG-compliant. Widgets are not a compliance strategy.
Doesn't the DOJ just extend the compliance deadline to 2027?
On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice published an interim final rule extending the ADA Title II web accessibility compliance deadlines by one year: April 26, 2027 for public entities with 50,000+ population, April 26, 2028 for smaller public entities and special districts. This is real, and it's good news for state and local governments that needed more time. But the Title II deadline extension has nothing to do with private businesses. Title II covers governments. Title III covers private businesses, and Title III has no waiting period. Courts apply WCAG 2.1 Level AA to private websites today, and 3,948 lawsuits in 2025 are the receipts. Don't let the Title II extension news make you think private sites got a delay. They didn't. See the full breakdown of ADA compliance deadlines here.
What happens when you get an ADA demand letter
Here's what the process looks like. A plaintiff's firm scans your website with the same kind of automated tool you just used above. They find violations. Missing alt text on product images. Checkout forms without labels. No skip navigation link. No keyboard-accessible menus. Then they file.
You receive a demand letter alleging your website violates Title III of the ADA. It lists specific WCAG failures found on specific pages of your site. It demands remediation and monetary damages.
At this point, you have three options. First, you can ignore it. This almost never works. The firm files a formal complaint, and now you're responding in federal court. Second, you can fight it. Your attorney bills $300-500/hour, and you'll spend $15,000-$50,000 on legal fees even if you win. Third, and this is what 90% of businesses do, you settle. Typical settlements range from $5,000 to $100,000 depending on company size and violation severity.
After settling, you still have to fix the accessibility issues. That's another $2,000-$10,000 in remediation costs. And because settlements don't grant immunity, you can be sued again next year if new violations appear. Some businesses have been sued three or four times.
What automated accessibility testing catches
Let's be honest: automated scanning catches about 30-40% of WCAG 2.1 Level AA issues. The rest require manual testing with screen readers, keyboard navigation audits, and cognitive accessibility reviews. No tool can fully replace a human accessibility audit.
But here's what matters: the issues automated tools catch are exactly the issues most commonly cited in demand letters. Missing alt text on images. Form inputs without associated labels. Broken heading hierarchy. Missing document language. Missing skip navigation links. Color contrast failures. These are low-hanging fruit for plaintiff attorneys because they're easy to prove in court.
Fixing automated findings won't make your site perfectly accessible. But it removes the easiest targets from your site, the violations that make you an attractive target for a demand letter.