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According to UsableNet's tracking, 46% of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) website accessibility cases filed in federal court in 2025 involved a defendant who had already been sued. Across every state and federal filing combined, more than 5,000 lawsuits were filed that year, and 1,427 of them, over a quarter, targeted a company with a prior accessibility claim already on record.
A settlement resolves one complaint. A tool configured once secures a site as it existed when it was set up. Neither adapts as the site keeps changing underneath it, and that gap, the space between a fix and everything that happens after it, is where a second lawsuit comes from. Closing it takes more than any single layer of work: coverage on the live site as it changes day to day, checks built into the development pipeline before a feature ships, and expert review for what automation can't see on its own. That's the shape of a program built to hold up over time, not just when a complaint gets resolved, and it's the throughline for everything below.
Because the people filing these suits are few, organized, and working from a public record. Federal courts received 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, a 27% jump from 2,452 the year before, according to Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III tracking. New York led with 1,021 filings, and Florida nearly doubled its 2024 total to 961.
That volume comes from a small group. Roughly 20 to 25 active plaintiffs, working with the 10 most prolific firms, account for about 84% of filings, and every federal case they file goes into a searchable public docket.
That record is how repeat suits happen. A past lawsuit tells a plaintiff firm three things: the site had documented barriers, the company chose to settle, and the barriers may still be there. What follows is predictable: a settlement, fixes limited to the pages named in the complaint, a new plaintiff, and a new filing. A company that treats its first settlement as the end of the matter is, on the numbers, a likely target for the next one.
E-commerce carries most of the exposure. According to accessiBe's eCommerce trends report, 70% of ADA web accessibility lawsuits in 2025 targeted e-commerce sites]. The reason is the customer journey itself. Browsing a product, adding it to a cart and checking out are easy to test, and a barrier at any of those steps is easy to document as one with a financial cost.
That cost doesn't only show up in court. Online retailers already lose about 70% of carts to abandonment, much of it to preventable UX problems. A checkout that fails for a screen reader user is a lawsuit risk and a lost sale at the same time.
Size raises the stakes. Among the top 500 e-commerce retailers, 35.8% received at least one lawsuit in 2025. For a business that's already been sued once, the traits that drew the first suit (revenue, transaction volume, a public-facing storefront) don't disappear after settlement.
Many companies treat accessibility tooling like a checkbox: install it, configure it, consider the file closed. The site doesn't stay still long enough for that to work.
A checkout flow added eight months later, last quarter's campaign landing page, a script a vendor pushed without anyone on the accessibility team knowing: none of it existed when the tool was configured. Each one is a new page a plaintiff can test and a new place a customer can get stuck.
Coverage on the live site matters, but on its own it can't keep pace with a site that changes every week. It has to work alongside code-level fixes that stop new barriers from shipping, and expert review for what automation can't catch.
Settlements resolve a specific complaint about barriers on specific pages, raised by the plaintiff. They don't function as a comprehensive audit of the whole site, and they don't freeze the site in place afterwards. Unless accessibility is embedded across processes, Marketing will keep publishing, and Product will keep shipping features with no accessibility verification. Third-party scripts get added for chat tools, ad tech, and A/B testing, any of which can introduce accessibility errors unrelated to the original complaint.
A company can close out litigation completely and still be running a site that drifts back toward the same exposure within a year, simply by continuing to operate normally.
Consider how that plays out. A retailer settles a complaint about its product pages and fixes the pages the complaint named. Over the next six months, marketing launches two seasonal landing pages, product adds a new checkout step, and a chat vendor pushes an update to its widget. None of it goes through an accessibility review. By the time another plaintiff firm runs its own test, the site has new barriers, and the earlier case on the public docket tells that firm this company settles.
Settling was a reasonable answer to the first complaint. It's a losing strategy against firms that watch for exactly this pattern.
WebAIM's analysis of the top 1 million home pages, based on data collected in February 2026, found that 95.9% still had detectable failures against the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.x standard, up from 94.8% the year before. The average number of errors per page rose 10.1%, the first reversal after roughly five years of gradual improvement.
WebAIM's researchers tied the decline to rising page complexity. The average home page carried 22.5% more code elements than it did a year earlier, and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) markup, powerful when implemented correctly and actively harmful when it isn't, grew by 27% in the same period. None of that complexity growth belongs to any one company. It's the direction the whole web is moving, driven by richer interfaces, more third-party integrations, and development that increasingly moves at AI speed.
That last driver is growing fastest. In accessiBe's survey of more than 300 eCommerce leaders, conducted with Qualtrics, 78% of brands said they now generate more than a quarter of their content with AI, and 82.5% worry that content is creating barriers they can't see. Among brands that have already faced accessibility legal action, 65.4% named AI-generated content as the factor they cited most. AI lets teams ship faster than ever, which is exactly why accessibility checks need to run at the same pace, continuously, instead of on an occasional audit cycle.
The repeat-defendant data, the AI content data, and the WebAIM numbers point to the same conclusion. A website is a moving target. Treating accessibility as a project that closes after a lawsuit or an audit misreads what both the legal exposure and the underlying code actually require: verification that keeps pace with the site, not a single pass through it. accessiBe CEO Robert Lopez put it plainly in a post marking Global Accessibility Awareness Day: "Accessibility is not something that can be completed and set aside. It requires continuous attention, structured processes, and the right combination of automation and human input.”
A program that holds up over time runs on one end-to-end platform, tailored to how the business actually builds, ships and publishes, instead of separate tools competing for budget. accessWidget re-scans the live site every 24 hours and adjusts screen reader behavior, keyboard navigation and the accessibility interface as pages change. accessFlow brings the same discipline into the development workflow. Its CI/CD and IDE integrations surface new accessibility issues as code changes and route them to the developers who implement the fix, without requiring specialized accessibility knowledge [6]. That catches problems before a feature ships instead of after a plaintiff finds them. accessServices covers what automation can't: audits by IAAP-certified experts, VPATs and remediation roadmaps that turn findings into guidance a team can act on. Each piece covers what the others miss. The result is a documented record of ongoing work, one a compliance team already has before a demand letter arrives instead of scrambling to assemble it after.
ROYCE' Confect USA, the US arm of the Japanese chocolatier, took this approach after facing accessibility-related legal pressure. Its outsourced development team had no in-house accessibility expertise, so the company moved remediation into its source code with accessFlow. Within eight weeks, it had tripled its accessibility score and cut unique issues by 69% across 1,000 monitored pages.
Businesses that treat their first accessibility lawsuit as the finish line are, statistically, more likely to see a second one. The 46% repeat-defendant rate happens when remediation stops at "closed" while the rest of the site keeps changing underneath it, and it's why continuous coverage, development-stage checks, and expert review have to run together rather than stand in for each other.
