2,014 ADA Website Lawsuits in Six Months. Is Your Business Next?

Somewhere in your state right now, a law firm is scanning small business websites with an automated tool. They're looking for missing alt text, broken form labels, and low contrast ratios. When they find issues (and they will, on most sites), they file a lawsuit or send a demand letter. The settlement? Usually $5,000 to $75,000.

This is already happening. In the first six months of 2025, 2,014 ADA website accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal courts alone, a 37% increase over the same period in 2024, according to EcomBack's mid-year report. And those numbers only count federal filings. Demand letters that pressure businesses into quiet settlements never hit the public record.

If you run a small business in Michigan or Texas, you need to pay attention. This is expanding fast, and it's heading your way.

What's actually happening

The uncomfortable truth is that most of these lawsuits aren't filed by people who genuinely tried to use your website and couldn't. They're filed by a small group of serial plaintiffs working with specialized law firms.

The numbers are lopsided. Out of 2,014 lawsuits filed in the first half of 2025, just 31 plaintiffs were responsible for more than half of them. Sixteen law firms handled over 90% of all cases. One firm alone, Manning Law, APC, accounted for 14% of every ADA website lawsuit filed in the country.

This is an industry. These firms use automated scanning tools to identify websites with accessibility issues, then file lawsuits in bulk. Some firms filed hundreds of lawsuits each. One firm showed a suspicious pattern: nearly all its lawsuits landed in January, suggesting batch filing rather than genuine encounters with inaccessible websites.

Does that mean accessibility doesn't matter? Absolutely not. The ADA is important legislation, and making your website usable for people with disabilities is the right thing to do. But the current enforcement mechanism has been hijacked by a litigation machine that extracts settlements from small businesses while doing very little to actually improve accessibility.

Why Texas and Michigan business owners should care right now

Historically, ADA website lawsuits concentrated in New York, California, and Florida. Those three states still see the most activity. But 2025 data from legal analysis firm NK Legal shows big increases in filing activity across previously low-activity states, including Texas.

Illinois saw a 746% year-over-year increase. Other states that were once considered low-risk are now seeing regular filings. The plaintiff firms are expanding their geographic reach because they've saturated their traditional markets.

Michigan businesses face additional pressure. The state has a growing tech and services economy, and many small businesses launched or redesigned websites during the pandemic without considering accessibility standards. Those sites are now targets.

For government and municipal websites, there's a separate deadline. The DOJ's Title II rule requires state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards by April 2026 for larger entities and April 2027 for smaller ones. Cities and counties that haven't started remediation are already behind.

What makes your website a target

The law firms use automated scanners, similar to tools any developer can access for free. They look for specific, easily detectable violations of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1 Level AA, the standard most courts reference for ADA compliance.

These are the issues that show up most often in lawsuits:

Missing alternative text on images. Every image on your website needs descriptive alt text that explains what the image shows. Decorative images need an empty alt attribute. If you have a gallery of your work, a team photo page, or product images without alt text, that's a violation for every single image.

Forms without proper labels. Your contact form, quote request form, or newsletter signup needs HTML label elements properly associated with each input field. Placeholder text inside the field is not a label. Screen readers can't parse unlabeled form fields, and this is one of the most commonly cited issues in lawsuits.

Insufficient color contrast. Text needs a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 against its background (3:1 for large text). That light gray text on a white background that your designer thought looked clean? It's both an accessibility barrier and a lawsuit target. Tools like WebAIM's contrast checker can verify this in seconds.

Missing or broken keyboard navigation. Every interactive element on your site, including buttons, links, form fields, and dropdown menus, needs to be operable using only a keyboard. If you can't tab through your entire site and use Enter to activate elements, that's a violation. Custom JavaScript widgets are frequent offenders here.

No skip navigation links. Screen reader users shouldn't have to listen to your full navigation menu on every page. A "Skip to content" link (it can be visually hidden until focused) is standard accessibility practice and its absence is frequently cited.

Missing page language declaration. Your HTML needs a lang attribute specifying the page language. This is a one-line code change that takes 10 seconds, and its absence shows up in nearly every automated scan.

Video content without captions. Any video on your site needs accurate captions. Auto-generated captions from YouTube often aren't accurate enough to meet the standard.

The accessibility overlay scam

If you've seen ads for accessibility overlay widgets, the ones that promise compliance by adding a small toolbar to your site, save your money. These tools, including products from companies like accessiBe and UserWay, have been widely criticized by accessibility advocates and have not protected businesses from lawsuits.

In fact, sites running overlay widgets have been successfully sued. The National Federation of the Blind released a position statement opposing overlays, stating they "do not make sites accessible" and can actually interfere with assistive technology. Multiple class action lawsuits have been filed against overlay companies themselves.

An overlay is like putting a bandage over a check engine light. The underlying code issues remain. A screen reader still encounters the same broken markup. The toolbar adds a layer of JavaScript that often conflicts with actual assistive technology.

What to actually do about it

This is the practical playbook for a small business owner. It isn't exhaustive, but it covers the highest-risk issues that appear in most lawsuits.

Step 1: Run a free automated scan. Go to WAVE and enter your URL. It's free, runs in seconds, and will flag the obvious issues. Google Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools) also includes an accessibility audit. These tools catch about 30-40% of accessibility issues, but they catch the ones most commonly cited in lawsuits.

Step 2: Fix the low-hanging fruit first. Add alt text to images. Add a lang attribute to your HTML tag. Fix color contrast on text. Label your form fields. These changes require minimal development effort and eliminate the easiest targets for automated scans.

Step 3: Test keyboard navigation. Unplug your mouse and try to use your website with only the Tab key, Enter, and arrow keys. If you get stuck anywhere, that's a problem. If focus indicators (the outline that shows where you are on the page) are missing, that's another problem.

Step 4: Get a professional audit. Automated tools only catch a fraction of accessibility issues. A manual audit by someone who understands WCAG guidelines will find the problems that scanners miss, like logical heading structure, meaningful link text, and proper ARIA implementation. This is especially important if your site has complex interactive elements, custom forms, or JavaScript-heavy features.

Step 5: Document your efforts. If a demand letter arrives, showing documented good-faith effort toward compliance can make a real difference in the outcome. Keep records of your audit, your remediation plan, and the changes you've made.

Step 6: Build accessibility into your next redesign. If you're planning a new site, make WCAG 2.1 AA compliance a requirement from day one. It's dramatically cheaper to build accessible from the start than to retrofit later. Ask your developer specifically about their accessibility experience. "Yes, we do that" is not a sufficient answer. Ask for specifics.

The bigger picture

What frustrates me after 20 years building websites is that accessibility should have been standard practice from the beginning. The web was designed to be accessible. Semantic HTML, proper heading structures, descriptive links: that's ordinary good web development, and it should never have been treated as a special accommodation.

Somewhere along the way, the industry got lazy. Designers prioritized aesthetics over usability. Developers skipped form labels because the placeholder text "looked fine." Template marketplaces sold themes with zero accessibility consideration. And now small businesses are paying the price for an industry-wide shortcut.

The lawsuit surge is a symptom of websites built without regard for the people who use them. Fixing your code deals with the symptom. Fixing the cause means demanding better from whoever builds your next site.

If you're unsure whether your website meets current accessibility standards, contact us for an audit. We'll tell you exactly where you stand and what needs to change, no overlay widget sales pitch included.