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.
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:
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.
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:
EcomBack's first-quarter count shows which kinds of businesses show up most often:
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.
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:
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."
A handful of states account for most federal cases, according to Seyfarth:
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.
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:
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."
Federal guidance and web accessibility standards point to a few practical steps businesses can take to reduce risk.
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.
