ADA Lawsuit Trends: Who's Getting Sued and Why

ADA web accessibility lawsuits aren't slowing down. They're accelerating. Here are the numbers that every small business owner should know.

The Numbers

2,014

lawsuits filed in the first half of 2025 - a 37% increase year over year

73%

of lawsuits target businesses under $25M revenue

41-46%

of defendants get sued again within two years

$5K-$20K

typical settlement range - before attorney fees

It's a Business Model

This isn't random litigation. It's systematic. 31 individual plaintiffs filed over half of all ADA web accessibility cases. The top filer sued 312 businesses since 2022.

The playbook is simple: send 100 demand letters, 60 settle at roughly $7,500 each. That's $450,000 from one batch. Then do it again. The plaintiff firms use automated scanning tools to find violations at scale, then file complaints in bulk.

They don't follow up to see if anything got fixed. They don't care about accessibility. They care about volume.

Who Gets Targeted

Small businesses are the easiest marks. 73% of lawsuits target businesses under $25 million in revenue. The reasons are practical:

Small businesses are less likely to have accessibility testing in place
They can't afford to fight in court, so they settle faster
Their websites are more likely to have basic violations (missing alt text, unlabeled forms)
They don't have legal teams to push back on frivolous claims

The Most Common Violations

The same issues appear in the vast majority of complaints:

Missing alt text on images - 89% of complaints cite this. Screen readers can't describe images without alt attributes.
Unlabeled form fields - users relying on assistive technology can't tell what a text box is for without a proper label.
Keyboard navigation failures - 61% of complaints cite this. Interactive elements that can't be reached or operated without a mouse.
Missing or broken heading structure - screen readers use headings to navigate. Without them, the page is a wall of undifferentiated text.
Insufficient color contrast - text that blends into the background makes content unreadable for users with low vision.

The Repeat Problem

Here's what makes this cycle so damaging: 41-46% of defendants get sued again. Settling a complaint doesn't fix the underlying issues. And as websites get updated - new products, new pages, new features - new violations appear.

A one-time fix isn't enough. Websites change constantly, and every change is an opportunity for new accessibility issues to appear. That's why ongoing monitoring matters more than a one-time audit.

What You Can Do

The good news: the issues that generate lawsuits are fixable. Missing alt text, broken heading structure, unlabeled forms - these aren't architectural rewrites. They're straightforward code changes.

The key is knowing what's actually wrong. Not what a generic scanner says might be wrong - what a plaintiff attorney would actually put in a complaint. That's a different kind of testing.