More Than 5,000 Accessibility Lawsuits Were Filed Last Year. No Federal Rule Tells a Small Business What Counts as Compliant.

Plaintiffs filed 1,021 website accessibility lawsuits in New York's federal courts in 2025, according to a count by the law firm Seyfarth Shaw. Many of them began the same way, with a blind or low-vision user trying to buy something with a screen reader and failing. Florida followed with 961, more than double its 2024 total, and Illinois logged 585. A large share of the defendants were not household names but ordinary online stores, restaurants, and service businesses.

Many owners on the receiving end assume accessibility is governed by some regulation they were never told about. The reality is stranger. No federal rule spells out what a private business website must do, and the lawsuits keep coming anyway.

The short answer for a small business is that the ADA still requires the goods and services you sell online to be accessible, and courts and plaintiffs measure that against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The handful of errors that automated scans flag most often are both the easiest to fix and the easiest for a plaintiff's firm to find.

What the Law Says About Private Websites

The Department of Justice enforces the Americans with Disabilities Act, and its guidance for businesses has not changed since March 2022. "The Department of Justice does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards," the agency states on its web accessibility guidance page. Businesses can currently choose how they will ensure their online offerings are accessible, the guidance continues, but they "still must ensure that the programs, services, and goods that they provide to the public" are accessible to people with disabilities. DOJ describes WCAG as helpful guidance rather than a mandate.

That gap between an obligation and a specification is where litigation lives. Title III of the ADA covers places of public accommodation, plaintiffs argue that websites tied to those businesses are covered, and a number of federal courts have agreed, while WCAG supplies the measuring stick in demand letters, settlement terms, and expert reports.

The Government Rule That Keeps Getting Mentioned

Much of the confusion traces to a different rule. In 2024 DOJ finalized a regulation under Title II, which covers state and local governments, requiring their websites and apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The original deadline for large public entities was April 24, 2026. An interim final rule published April 20, 2026 pushed that back a year. The compliance date for entities with a population of 50,000 or more moved to April 26, 2027, and smaller entities and special district governments moved to April 26, 2028. DOJ explained the delay by saying "the Department believes those deadlines are infeasible and unfair to covered entities."

The rule does not apply to a private shop. It reaches private developers only indirectly, since a government-provided mobile app must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA even when a private company runs it, and agencies are writing that standard into vendor contracts. A small clinic that receives federal health funding faces a parallel rule from HHS under Section 504, which an interim rule in May 2026 extended to May 11, 2027 for recipients with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for smaller ones.

Selling Into Europe

The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 28, 2025 to services provided to consumers in the EU, and e-commerce is on the list. The directive defines a service provider as anyone providing a service on the Union market, which is how a U.S. store shipping to EU customers can fall within its reach. Microenterprises, defined as businesses with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or a balance sheet of 2 million euros or less, are exempt for services.

Who Gets Sued, and How Often

Two firms track the numbers, and their counts differ because their methods do. Seyfarth Shaw counts federal cases only and recorded 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, a 27 percent increase over the 2,452 filed in 2024, after 2,794 in 2023. UsableNet, a digital accessibility vendor, counts federal cases alongside state cases in New York and California, and its 2025 year-end report reviewed more than 5,000 lawsuits, 3,195 in federal court and 1,919 in state court.

UsableNet's breakdown is the more useful one for a small operator. Ecommerce accounted for 70 percent of the cases and food service for 21 percent. Some 1,427 federal suits, about 45 percent, named companies that had already been sued before. In the first half of 2025, 36 percent of the companies sued had revenue above $25 million, which means close to two in three were smaller than that.

The repeat-defendant number carries a lesson. A settlement that ends one case without fixing the site leaves the door open for the next plaintiff, and remediation is the only thing that closes it.

Why the Widget Is Not the Fix

Accessibility overlays, the scripts that add a toolbar icon promising instant compliance, became popular because they cost less than remediation and install in minutes. The Federal Trade Commission tested that promise in court. In January 2025 it ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million over allegations that its accessWidget product, marketed as able to make any website compliant with WCAG, did not make all user websites WCAG compliant. The FTC also alleged that the company placed claims in articles on third-party websites formatted to look like impartial reviews.

"Companies looking for help making their websites WCAG compliant must be able to trust that products do what they are advertised to do," Samuel Levine, then director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in announcing the order. UsableNet's lawsuit data points the same way, stating plainly that accessibility widgets did not slow litigation in 2025.

The Six Errors That Show Up Everywhere

WebAIM runs automated accessibility tests on the home pages of the top one million websites for an annual report. Its February 2026 scan found that 95.9 percent of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures, up from 94.8 percent in 2025, "reversing a trend of small improvements each of the previous 6 years," according to the WebAIM Million report. The average page carried 56.1 errors, a 10.1 percent increase. Automated tools catch only a portion of real barriers, so those figures are a floor.

The same six failure types dominate year after year. Low contrast text appeared on 83.9 percent of home pages, missing image alternative text on 53.1 percent, form inputs without labels on 51 percent, empty links on 46.3 percent, empty buttons on 30.6 percent, and a missing document language on 13.5 percent. Fixing those six covers most of what a scan, and most of what a plaintiff's firm running the same scan, will find.

Contrast, Alt Text, and Language

Contrast failures usually live in the theme: light gray body text, pale placeholder text in form fields, or white text over a photo. WCAG's Level AA threshold for normal body text is a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1, and a browser's developer tools will report the ratio for any element. Alt text is a content habit as much as a code fix, and it pays twice, since descriptive alternative text is part of the same image hygiene covered in our guide to essential SEO practices. Decorative images get an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them. The document language is a single lang attribute on the html element, and most WordPress themes set it from the site language setting.

Labels, Links, and Buttons

Unlabeled inputs, empty links, and empty buttons share a cause: icons and placeholder text standing in for words. A search field with a magnifying glass and no label, a social icon linked with no text, and a hamburger menu button with no accessible name all read to a screen reader as silence. Each needs a visible label or an accessible name. On WordPress, the fastest route is often a theme or block setting rather than custom code, and page builders vary widely in how they handle it.

After the six, test the flows that make money with the keyboard alone, using Tab, Shift and Tab, and Enter to move through a product page, a cart, a booking form, and a contact form. If focus disappears or gets trapped, a keyboard user is stuck in the same place. Running Lighthouse covers some of this alongside performance, the same report many site owners already use to track the metrics in our beginner's guide to Core Web Vitals.

Which Standard to Build To

WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation and is the current version, with a December 12, 2024 date on the published standard. It added success criteria aimed at mobile and login friction, including Focus Not Obscured, Dragging Movements, Target Size (Minimum), and Accessible Authentication at Level AA, along with Consistent Help and Redundant Entry at Level A. It also removed one criterion, 4.1.1 Parsing. The DOJ Title II rule references WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so building to 2.2 AA covers the regulatory standard and the newer one at once.

Theme choice is a head start, not a guarantee. The WordPress theme directory awards an accessibility-ready tag only after a manual review. The theme team's handbook is careful to say the tag means a theme meets its minimum requirements, not that a site built on it meets WCAG AA, because conformance depends on the content you put in it.

A small business does not need a six-figure audit to cut most of its exposure. It needs an afternoon with a contrast checker and a keyboard, a habit of writing alt text when images go up, and a skeptical eye toward any product that promises compliance in one line of JavaScript.

In WebAIM's 2026 data, missing alt text and missing document language were the two common failures that fell from the year before, and both are fixes a site owner can make from the dashboard without touching theme code.