Yes, and it's not just big companies getting hit — most ADA website lawsuits now land on small e-commerce sites, not enterprise ones. Courts are increasingly treating a website like a physical place of business, and broken keyboard navigation, missing alt text, or low-contrast buttons can be enough grounds for a demand letter asking $10,000 to $25,000 to make it go away. If you run a store on Shopify, WooCommerce, or Squarespace, this is worth an actual look this week, not a someday project.
Nearly 5,500 ADA Website Lawsuits Are on Pace for 2026
More than 5,000 federal and state lawsuits over website accessibility were filed in the U.S. in 2025, and federal courts are on track to clear 5,500 filings in 2026. New York led with 1,021 federal filings in 2025; Florida took the top spot for a single month in January 2026 with 88 filings and has been climbing since. This isn't a niche legal curiosity anymore — it's a volume business for a specific type of law firm, and the filings are only trending upward. A handful of firms and even individual plaintiffs file dozens or hundreds of these suits a year, testing sites systematically and sending demand letters before a single complaint is ever filed in court.
Why Small E-Commerce Sites Get Sued More Than Big Ones
Here's the part that surprises most solo operators: nearly 70% of these suits target e-commerce and retail sites, and 64% of sued companies had annual revenue under $25 million. Big retailers usually have accessibility teams and legal budgets that make them a slower, costlier target. A small store running on a default Shopify or WooCommerce theme, with no accessibility review ever done, is a much easier and faster case to build — and to settle. The lawyers filing these aren't primarily going after Fortune 500 sites; they're going after the volume of smaller ones that never had a reason to think about this until a letter showed up. If you sell through a marketplace instead of your own site, don't assume that protects you either — plenty of these suits target the seller's own linked storefront, not just the platform itself.
What WCAG 2.1 Level AA Actually Requires From Your Site
Courts in 2026 generally point to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1 or 2.2, Level AA, as the working standard, even though it was never formally adopted as U.S. law for private businesses. In practice, that means things like alt text on product images, enough color contrast between text and background, forms with properly labeled fields, and a site that can be fully navigated with a keyboard alone, not just a mouse. None of this requires rebuilding your site from scratch. Most of it is fixable within an existing theme once you know exactly what's broken. The mistake most solo operators make isn't ignoring accessibility on purpose — it's assuming their site platform handles it automatically, when in reality a theme only gets you partway there, and custom elements like pop-ups, sliders, and checkout widgets are exactly where the gaps tend to show up.
My Take: Some of This Is a Shakedown, and It Doesn't Matter — Fix It Anyway
I'll say the part a lot of accessibility consultants won't: some of these demand letters come from firms running a volume playbook, sending the same template to hundreds of small sites hoping a percentage settle fast to avoid legal fees. That's a real dynamic, and it's frustrating. It also doesn't change what you should do about it. The underlying access problems these letters point to are usually real — a blind customer genuinely can't use a site with no alt text and broken keyboard navigation — and fixing them protects you regardless of whether the next letter that shows up is legitimate concern or opportunistic litigation. Treating this as "just noise from predatory lawyers" is how a fixable problem turns into an actual settlement check.
Run a Free Accessibility Scan on Your Site This Week
Use a free tool like WAVE (wave.webaim.org) or the Lighthouse accessibility audit built into Chrome's developer tools, plug in your homepage and your checkout page, and see what comes back. Fix the obvious stuff first — missing alt text on product photos, form fields without labels, and low-contrast text — since those are the most common triggers in actual demand letters. If you're on Shopify or WooCommerce, check whether your theme has a built-in accessibility mode before paying for a separate plugin, since a lot of newer themes already include one you just haven't turned on.
