Website accessibility lawsuits are rising, and smaller businesses are frequent targets

Can a small business be sued because its website doesn't work for people with disabilities? Thousands of businesses have already been sued this year, and the pace is picking up. Plaintiffs filed 5,006 federal lawsuits in the first six months of 2026 under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the civil rights law that requires businesses open to the public to be accessible, according to a midyear report from the law firm Seyfarth Shaw.

That is about 430 more cases than in the same period of 2025, and the highest first-half total since 2021. Those numbers count only lawsuits filed in court. Many more businesses get a demand letter first: According to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, an estimated 265,000 annually receive a lawyer's letter claiming a website is inaccessible and usually asking for payment to settle before filing a case.

A large share of these cases target websites: pages that screen readers, the software many blind people use to hear a page read aloud, can't make sense of, or buttons that can't be reached without a mouse.

Most of the businesses named are not big brands. About 2 in 3 website and app lawsuits tracked through mid-June were filed against companies with less than $50 million in yearly revenue, according to UsableNet, an accessibility technology company that tracks these cases.

Clym reviewed midyear lawsuit reports from Seyfarth Shaw, UsableNet and EcomBack, along with WebAIM's annual audit of 1 million home pages, to examine who is being sued over website accessibility in 2026 and where.

How fast are accessibility lawsuits rising?

Three groups track these lawsuits, and each counts something slightly different, so their totals can't be added together. All three point to an increase in filed litigation:

• Seyfarth Shaw counts federal disability-access lawsuits against businesses, including physical stores and websites. It found 5,006 in the first half of 2026, up 9% from 4,575 a year earlier.
• UsableNet counts website and app lawsuits in both federal and state courts. Based on filings through June 14, it projects about 6,176 for the full year, nearly one-fifth more than in 2025.
• EcomBack counts website lawsuits only. It recorded 1,037 in the first quarter, up about 5% from 983 a year earlier.

Websites were already a growing slice of the total. In 2025, website cases made up more than a third of the 8,667 federal filings Seyfarth counted, and they rose 27% from 2024, according to the firm's year-end report.

Which businesses are being sued?

Online sellers carry most of the risk. Nearly 4 in 5 lawsuits UsableNet tracked were filed against e-commerce businesses. By the defendant's yearly revenue, the split looked like this:

• Under $50 million: About 2 in 3 lawsuits
• $50 million to $1 billion: About 1 in 5
• Over $1 billion: 1 in 10

EcomBack's first-quarter count shows which kinds of businesses show up most often:

• Restaurants, food and drink: 334 of the 1,037 lawsuits, nearly 1 in 3
• Lifestyle, fashion and clothing: 261, about 1 in 4
• Medical and health: 75
• Beauty and skin care: 75

Put simply, this is not only a big-company problem. A boutique with a web store, a restaurant with an online menu, a medical practice with a patient intake form and a salon with an online booking page all run the kinds of websites named in these lawsuits.

Why are more lawsuits being filed now?

Part of the rise comes from new law firms entering the field. Minh N. Vu, a Seyfarth Shaw partner who leads the firm's team on disability-access law for businesses, and her co-authors wrote that "several relatively new plaintiffs' firms have arrived" and that the higher totals match that trend. The numbers in two states show how much a single firm can move a total:

• Illinois ranked third in federal filings with 505 cases, and one law firm filed 336. EcomBack's count shows Illinois website lawsuits more than doubled, from 111 in early 2025 to 256 in early 2026.
• Minnesota ranked fifth with 124 cases, and one firm filed 121 of those.

Jason Taylor, chief innovation strategist at UsableNet, pointed to a gap in government enforcement. When federal enforcement slows, he wrote, "private plaintiffs step in to fill the gap."

Where are the lawsuits being filed?

A handful of states account for most federal cases, according to Seyfarth:

• California: 2,426 cases, nearly half of all federal filings
• Florida: 709
• Illinois: 505
• New York: 485
• Minnesota: 124

New York, which usually ranks second or third, slipped to fourth. Seyfarth's authors said the drop likely reflects federal judges in New York being stricter about who can bring a website case, pushing plaintiffs to file in state court instead. UsableNet, which counts state cases too, says New York still leads in total filings.

What problems do these lawsuits point to?

Most websites still have basic accessibility gaps. WebAIM, a nonprofit service center at Utah State University, scanned the home pages of the top 1 million websites in its 2026 report. It found at least one failure of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, the widely used technical standard for making websites usable by people with disabilities, on roughly 96 of every 100 pages. That is slightly worse than 2025, and it ends six straight years of small improvements. The average home page had 56 detectable errors, about 10% more than a year earlier.

The most common problems are basic ones:

• Text that is hard to read against its background: More than 4 in 5 home pages
• Images with no text description for screen readers: Just over half
• Form fields, such as name or email boxes, with no label: About half
• Links with no readable text: Nearly half

WebAIM's researchers tied the backslide to how websites are built today: "Home pages are getting larger and more technologically complex at a significant pace, making accessibility harder to sustain."

What should businesses do now?

Federal guidance and web accessibility standards point to a few practical steps businesses can take to reduce risk.

• Focus on critical user journeys. Test whether people can navigate the site, make a purchase, book an appointment, and complete forms using a keyboard or screen reader.
• Combine automated and manual testing. Accessibility testing software can identify common issues, but it cannot catch everything. The W3C and Justice Department recommend supplementing automated checks with manual testing, including assistive technologies where possible.
• Fix issues at the source. Address problems in the site’s code and content, such as missing form labels, image descriptions, or insufficient color contrast, rather than relying solely on overlays or temporary fixes.
• Make accessibility ongoing. Keep records of testing and remediation, and include accessibility checks when adding new pages, features, or redesigns.

The numbers ultimately tell a larger story than whether 2026 sets another litigation record. Websites have become an essential point of access to restaurants, retailers, health providers, and thousands of other businesses, while those sites are simultaneously becoming larger and more complex. That makes accessibility less of a one-time technical project and more of an ongoing business process.

For businesses that have historically viewed website accessibility as an issue affecting only major national brands, the 2026 litigation data offers a clear lesson: Small businesses are at the greatest risk.

This story was produced by Clym and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.