Website Accessibility Lawsuits Keep Hitting Small Businesses — Is Your Site a Target?
If you assume website accessibility lawsuits only happen to big corporations, the numbers say otherwise. Filings hit record highs in 2025 and are climbing into 2026 — and the majority target smaller companies, many of them e-commerce shops running on WordPress or Shopify. For any business with a website, not having your website ADA compliant is a real, quantifiable risk that a little attention now can defuse.
What happened
The litigation trend is steep and well documented. Per UsableNet’s widely cited lawsuit-tracker research, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in U.S. federal court in 2025 — a 27% jump over 2,452 in 2024, with total federal and state filings topping 5,000. Roughly 70% targeted e-commerce and retail sites, and by revenue, 64% of sued companies were under $25 million — squarely in small-business territory. New York (1,021 federal filings) and Florida (961) led the country, and Q1 2026 filings are projected to run between 3,500 and 4,500.
Why are small businesses in the crosshairs? In a July 10, 2026 analysis, accessibility expert Kris Rivenburgh of lays out the logic: “Enterprise websites have been sued, settled, and remediated over the past decade, so the easy large targets are gone.” Smaller sites, he notes, rarely run manual accessibility audits, so error counts stay high and visible; themes, plugins, and page builders quietly reintroduce problems with every update; and most owners never encounter WCAG conformance standards until a demand letter arrives.
Why it matters
These claims typically hinge on the Americans with Disabilities Act, and for a small business the exposure isn’t just a possible settlement — it’s legal fees, remediation costs, and the scramble of dealing with it all at once. Plaintiff firms often find targets with automated scans that flag detectable errors, then build claims around real barriers a user with a disability would hit.
The encouraging flip side: accessibility is fixable, and fixing it also widens your customer base. An accessible site serves more people — including customers with disabilities you’d otherwise turn away — while lowering your legal risk.
In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits — a 27% jump over 2024 — and roughly 64% of sued companies had under $25 million in revenue. — UsableNet lawsuit-tracker research
What this means for small businesses
You don’t need to panic — you need to close the obvious gaps:
- Run an accessibility scan. A scan won’t catch everything, but it surfaces the detectable errors that plaintiff firms use to find targets in the first place.
- Mind your themes and plugins. As Rivenburgh notes, updates silently reintroduce issues. Accessibility isn’t a one-time fix — it needs monitoring.
- Cover the fundamentals. Image alt text, sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation, labeled forms, and readable structure address a large share of common claims.
- Aim for WCAG conformance. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the practical standard these cases reference. Building to them is your best defense.
- Document your work. If a demand letter ever arrives, Rivenburgh advises preserving dated evidence of what you fixed and when to support your position.
For a Michigan small business — especially one selling online — an accessibility review is inexpensive insurance against an expensive problem.
The bottom line
Website accessibility has moved from “nice to have” to a genuine legal and business issue, and the filing numbers show it isn’t slowing down. Make your site usable for everyone, keep it that way as your site changes, and you’ll protect your business from a lawsuit while opening your doors to more customers. It’s the rare fix that reduces risk and grows your market at the same time.