3,117 federal filings in 2025, and 64% hit companies under $25M
Web accessibility lawsuits are not a big-company problem. In 2025 there were 3,117 federal web accessibility filings, up 27% year over year, and roughly 64% of accessibility suits targeted companies under $25 million in revenue. There is no small business exemption in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Defending one of these costs $5,000 to $125,000 even when no damages are ultimately awarded. And an estimated 94.8% of websites fail the standard today, which means the odds are simply that yours does too.
What the standard actually is
Courts have consistently pointed to WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, at level AA. The current version is WCAG 2.2. It is not vague design advice: it is a testable checklist. A site either passes a criterion or it does not.
Six failures that account for most of it
- Images with no alt text. A screen reader announces "image" and the visitor learns nothing. This is the single most common failure and the easiest to fix.
- Low colour contrast. Light grey text on white looks refined to a designer and is unreadable to a large number of people. AA requires a 4.5:1 ratio for normal text.
- Forms without labels. Placeholder text is not a label. It disappears when typing starts and screen readers often skip it, so the visitor cannot tell which field is which.
- Nothing works by keyboard. If you cannot tab through your navigation, open your menu and submit your form without a mouse, a significant group of people cannot use your site at all.
- No visible focus indicator. Designers frequently remove the outline because it looks untidy. For keyboard users it is the cursor.
- Video without captions. Also costs you every viewer watching with the sound off, which is most of them.
The five-minute check you can do right now
- Put your phone down and unplug your mouse. Tab through your homepage. Can you reach the menu, open it, and submit a form?
- Can you always see where you are while tabbing?
- Zoom the browser to 200%. Does the layout still work or does text overlap?
- Turn on your operating system's screen reader and listen to your homepage for one minute.
- Run a free automated checker. It will only catch about a third of issues, but a bad automated result is a reliable signal.
If any of those fail, your site would not pass an audit.
Two warnings
Overlay widgets are not a defence. The plug-in accessibility toolbars that promise instant compliance have been named in lawsuits themselves. They do not fix the underlying markup. Do not buy compliance as a script tag.
Automated scans are not an audit. Most WCAG criteria require human judgement. A clean automated scan and a passing audit are different things, and only one of them is worth anything if you are challenged.
The upside nobody mentions
Accessible sites are better sites. Proper heading structure and alt text help search engines read your pages. Keyboard-navigable forms convert better. Captions get watched. Higher contrast helps everyone reading a phone in daylight. This is one of the few compliance exercises that pays for itself in performance.
Where we stand on it
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA on every site at every price, and on our Growth tier and above you get the written audit report to keep. We also audit existing sites standalone for $350, which gets you the same report on whatever you have now, with every failure ranked by exposure and what it takes to fix.
If you would rather just know where you stand, that is the cheapest way to find out.