More than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025, according to UsableNet’s 2025 Year-End Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report: 3,195 in federal court and 1,919 in New York and California state courts. 64% of the companies sued had under $25 million in annual revenue. UsableNet sells accessibility services, which is worth knowing as you read its report.
We build websites. UpLift Digital is not a law firm, nobody here is an attorney, and none of this is legal advice. If you have a demand letter in hand, or a specific worry about your own exposure, that conversation belongs with an attorney in your state.
What the filing numbers show
UsableNet’s count covers cases filed between 1 January and 15 December 2025, tracked across the 14 federal circuit courts under the Americans with Disabilities Act plus New York and California state courts, and it includes claims about websites, mobile apps and video. Federal filings were 62% of the total, the state courts 38%.
A filing is a claim, not a finding. The count tells you how often these cases get brought, not how often they succeed, and not what any of them cost, since settlement terms are usually private. What it does tell you is that this is routine, high-volume work for the firms filing it.
Who gets sued?
The picture most owners carry is a national chain with a legal department. UsableNet’s figure says otherwise: 64% of the companies sued had under $25 million in annual revenue.
The other pattern is repetition. 1,427 of the 2025 suits went to companies already sued once before, roughly 45% of federal cases. Our read, not the report’s: the first round tends to get handled with a purchase rather than a repair, and the page underneath never changes.
Does an accessibility widget protect you?
A widget, or overlay, is a script you paste into your site. It puts an icon in a corner with buttons for larger text and higher contrast, and some try to patch the page as it loads.
UsableNet counted between 95 and 155 lawsuits in every month of 2025 against companies that already had a widget installed. Not one spike, twelve months in a row.
Here is where that figure stops. The report does not say how many sites run widgets, so it cannot tell you what share of widget users were sued, or whether installing one moves anyone’s odds. Some visitors do use the contrast and text controls.
What it establishes is that a widget did not keep those companies out of court. A script running in a visitor’s browser cannot supply a name for a form field that has no name in the code underneath, and that is where most of the trouble lives.
Why the failure rate got worse in 2026
WebAIM, a research center at Utah State University rather than a vendor, runs an automated engine against the top one million home pages each year. In The WebAIM Million, 2026 report, from data collected in February 2026, 95.9% of those pages had detected failures against WCAG 2 Level A and AA, the international standard for web accessibility, up from 94.8% in 2025, reversing six straight years of small improvement. The average page carried 56.1 detected errors, 10.1% more than the year before.
The engine tests the rendered page, after scripts and styles have run. Our explanation for the reversal, offered as reasoning rather than a finding: pages keep gaining moving parts. A booking embed here, a filter bar there, a cookie banner bolted on in a hurry. Each one is an interface somebody has to be able to operate, and most arrive from a third party.
Does the platform you built on matter?
Set against that 56.1 average, WebAIM’s per-platform numbers run: Squarespace 33.0 errors per home page, Wix 33.3, HubSpot CMS 35.1, Drupal 41.2, WordPress 52.8 across 252,302 WordPress home pages. Pages using the jQuery library averaged 64.9, Shopify 75.1.
WebAIM cautions that a correlation with a technology cannot always be attributed to that technology, and that caution matters more than the ranking. Platform choice also tells you who built the site and how. Tight templates leave a first-time builder less room to go wrong; a platform that lets a developer build anything lets them build it badly. We would not move a site off WordPress on the strength of that table.
The three failures that cover the most common problems
These three account for most of what we find.
Form fields with no label attached to them
WebAIM found 33.1% of form inputs were not properly labeled, and 51% of home pages had at least one input missing a label.
A label is not the grey word inside the box: that is placeholder text, and it vanishes the moment somebody types. A label is code tying the words “Email address” to that box.
When it is missing, a screen reader reaches the field and announces something close to “edit text, blank.” Your visitor has to guess what belongs in it. On a five-field contact form that is five guesses in a row, and most people quit instead.
Who fixes it: whoever built the form. In most form builders it is a per-field setting, not code.
Images that carry information and have no text alternative
Every image can hold a short written description, called alt text, that a screen reader reads in place of the picture. Decorative images get marked so it skips them.
The expensive version is the image carrying information: a graphic with your hours baked in, a flyer with the sale price, a button made out of a picture. If the words exist only inside the image, they do not exist for a screen reader, or for a search engine. What the visitor gets is silence or a file name, and “IMG_4471” tells nobody anything.
We put this second on reasoning, not a count: the WebAIM figures quoted here do not break out alt text. Who fixes it: mostly you. Whoever loads the content writes the description, one line per image, in the same box where you upload it.
Anything that only works with a mouse
Plenty of people navigate a website with a keyboard alone. Tab moves forward, Shift and Tab move back, Enter and the space bar activate.
The usual breaks: a menu that only opens on hover, so everything under it is unreachable; a popup that traps you inside with no way back; a focus outline a designer stripped off because it looked untidy, which leaves a keyboard user unable to see where they are.
You can test this before you pay anybody. Unplug your mouse and press Tab through your homepage and contact form. You should always see where you are, and reach your phone number, menu and form. Check the phone version too, since StatCounter put mobile at 51.51% of worldwide page views in June 2026.
Who fixes it: whoever built the site. This one is code.
What automated testing does not catch
Run a scan anyway. Free ones find real problems. Then treat a clean report as a floor.
WebAIM says outright that its own numbers come from automated detection only, and that true non-conformance is certainly higher than the 95.9% it reports. A scanner sees that a field has no label; it cannot tell you whether the label you wrote says the right thing. It sees that an image has no alt attribute, not whether “banner-final-v2” describes anything. Tab order that jumps around the page, or an error message reading “invalid entry” and nothing else, passes a scan and still leaves a customer stuck.
What this post is not
It is not legal advice, and that bears repeating. Nobody here is an attorney. If you have received a letter, or a question about your own exposure, take it to an attorney licensed where you do business.
A lawsuit count is also not a risk score. More than 5,000 filings across an entire country in a year says nothing reliable about the odds for any one business. What applies to your site depends on your circumstances and your jurisdiction, and sorting that out is not our work.
What we can tell you is what the work is, because it is mostly the same work as building a site properly. Labeled form fields, described images, pages that operate from a keyboard, headings in a sane order, contrast dark enough to read on a phone in a parking lot. All of it is cheaper during a build than bolted on afterward. In Clutch’s August 2025 survey of 406 US small business owners, 90% plan to invest in their website in the next twelve months, and of those, 58% named a full redesign or visual refresh as a priority. If that is you, the redesign is the moment this costs least.
Underneath the filing counts is one concrete first move, and it costs nothing. Unplug your mouse, press Tab from the top of your homepage through the end of your contact form, and write down every place you cannot tell where you are or cannot get where you are going.
Half of what ends up on that list is a setting in your form builder or your image uploader, and you can clear it yourself in an afternoon. The other half is code. Send us the list with your web address if you want to know which half is which before you pay anybody.