Local Disability Lawsuits: Website Risk, Tester Standing, Cure Laws

ADA lawsuits against small businesses have become one of the fastest-growing categories of civil litigation in the country, and most of them now target a company’s website rather than its storefront. Federal filings under ADA Title III hit 8,667 in 2025, roughly three times the 2,722 filed in 2013, and website and app cases alone exceeded 5,000 — a 37% jump in a single year. If you own a small business, the risk is no longer theoretical: about 45% of federal digital accessibility suits in 2025 named defendants that had been sued before, and tens of thousands of demand letters go out each year to companies that have never heard of the law being used against them.¹

Why Small Businesses Get Hit So Hard

Three features of the law make small businesses the easiest targets.

First, there is no federal requirement that a plaintiff warn a business before suing. No notice letter, no grace period, no chance to fix the problem first.² An owner usually learns there’s an accessibility barrier only when a process server shows up or a demand letter arrives, and by then the legal meter is already running.

Second, the fee structure makes high-volume filing financially viable. A private Title III plaintiff in federal court can win only injunctive relief ordering the business to fix the problem, plus attorney’s fees. No monetary damages are available at the federal level.³ But some states add state-law damages on top: California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act provides a minimum of $4,000 per violation plus punitive damages and attorney’s fees.⁴ California, Florida, and New York consistently see the most filings, with California alone recording 3,252 federal Title III cases in 2025. Illinois has become a hot venue too, with a 745% year-over-year jump in digital accessibility suits as plaintiff firms moved operations out of New York, where judges have grown skeptical of certain filings.¹

Third, almost no case ever gets tested. An investigation by Cox Media Group found that of more than 15,000 website accessibility cases filed over a four-year period, zero went to trial. Every one settled or was dismissed.⁵ For a small business, the math is punishing in either direction: average out-of-court settlements run about $30,000, with a range of $5,000 to $150,000, and even a business that wins can expect to spend around $30,000 defending itself.¹ In Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks region, small businesses have reported paying $10,000 to $20,000 to settle — the equivalent of three to four months of loan payments, according to state lawmakers — and at least one Missouri business closed entirely after a suit.⁶

Who Is Actually Filing These Suits

The litigation is remarkably concentrated. In 2025, more than half of the roughly 4,000 website accessibility cases were initiated by just 33 individuals, and 90% were filed by 16 law firms.⁶⁵

Victor Ariza, a blind man based in Miami, had 383 ADA website lawsuits filed in his name between 2022 and 2025.⁷ His defendants have ranged from Walt Disney Parks and SeaWorld down to a small flower shop called Leaf & Blossom, Co., which spent more than $7,000 in legal fees and settlement costs to resolve its case. Asked about the shop, Ariza told reporters he could not recall using the website because he had filed so many cases.⁵ He has described the lawsuits as having a “100% success rate” for the blind community and said settlement money funds “technological assistance.”⁸ The National Federation of the Blind has called certain filings a “business model” rather than genuine advocacy.

A newer wave is accelerating things further. Pro se plaintiffs — people filing without a lawyer — accounted for 40% of all federal Title III cases in 2025, a 40% year-over-year increase, which observers attribute to AI tools that can scan websites for accessibility violations and generate legally coherent complaints. Beyond formal lawsuits, an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 demand letters were sent to businesses in 2025 alone.¹

Website Accessibility Is Where the Risk Lives

Physical access cases still happen, but digital filings are driving the growth. Federal website case filings alone reached 3,117 in 2025, up 27% from 2024.² The problem is widespread on the technical side too: nearly 95% of websites fail the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, according to the WebAIM Million study, and 96% of lawsuits are driven by six common violations such as low-contrast text and missing image descriptions.¹

Many owners have tried to protect themselves by installing automated accessibility “widgets” or overlays — software that sits on top of a site and claims to make it ADA-compliant. It doesn’t work. In the first half of 2025, nearly 23% of web accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that already had such tools installed.¹ In April 2025, the Federal Trade Commission finalized a $1 million settlement with accessiBe, one of the leading overlay providers, after finding the company falsely claimed its AI-powered tool could make any website WCAG-compliant and had disguised paid content as independent third-party reviews.⁹ If a business is relying on an overlay as its compliance plan, it is likely still exposed.

State Laws That Give Businesses a Cure Period

A handful of states have started pushing back by requiring plaintiffs to give businesses a chance to fix a website before they can sue.

Kansas was first. Its Act Against Abusive Website Access Litigation (HB 2016), effective July 1, 2023, lets a business sued over website accessibility countersue the plaintiff and law firm in Kansas court if the litigation is found to be abusive. A case is presumed abusive if the business makes a good-faith effort to fix the violation within 30 days of notice, and courts can award punitive damages up to three times the attorney fees.¹⁰ Missouri lawmakers cited Kansas as a model, saying “sue and settle” cases reportedly stopped in that state after the bill’s passage.⁶

Missouri’s SB 907, the Act Against Abusive Website or Web Content Access Litigation, passed both chambers unanimously and was awaiting the governor’s signature as of April 2026, with an effective date of August 28, 2026. It sets a 90-day cure period: if a business takes “substantial steps” to fix its website in good faith within 90 days of notice, any subsequent lawsuit is presumed abusive. Defendants found to have been abusively sued can recover attorney’s fees, and courts can impose punitive damages or sanctions up to three times the fees awarded.¹¹¹⁰

At the federal level, Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri introduced the Protecting Small Businesses from Predatory Website Lawsuits Act in February 2026, which would bar website compliance lawsuits until the owner has been notified and given 180 days to fix the site.¹² A separate bill, the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act (H.R. 3417), introduced in May 2025, would direct DOJ and EEOC to develop enforceable accessibility standards and confirm that digital spaces are covered under Title III regardless of whether the business has a physical location.¹³ Neither has become law.

Can the Plaintiff Even Sue You? The Tester Standing Question

One defense worth knowing about: in some parts of the country, serial plaintiffs who had no real plan to visit a business or use its services may lack standing to sue at all. Federal appeals courts have split on this “tester” question. The Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits have held that such plaintiffs lack standing, while the First, Fourth, and Eleventh Circuits have said they have it.¹⁴

The Supreme Court had a chance to settle it in Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer. Deborah Laufer, who used a wheelchair, had searched hotel websites for noncompliance with the ADA’s reservation rule and filed hundreds of lawsuits. After her attorney was suspended by a Maryland federal court for fraud — including lying in fee petitions and demanding $10,000 per case for boilerplate complaints — Laufer dismissed all her pending cases.¹⁴ On December 5, 2023, the Court vacated the lower judgment and sent the case back with instructions to dismiss as moot, declining to reach standing.¹⁵ The split remains unresolved, so whether your circuit recognizes tester standing matters when a defense lawyer evaluates a complaint.

What To Do If a Letter or Complaint Arrives

Don’t ignore it, and don’t assume an overlay installed on the site counts as a fix. Talk to a lawyer who handles ADA Title III defense before contacting the plaintiff or paying anything; what you say and how fast you move can determine whether a state cure-period defense is still available to you.

Before anything hits your inbox, the most useful work is on the website itself. The vast majority of filings cite the same handful of WCAG failures — missing alternative text on images, low-contrast text, form fields without labels, inaccessible navigation. A real accessibility audit by a human, not a widget scan, closes most of the exposure that serial plaintiffs are hunting for. Compliance isn’t a guarantee against being named — about 45% of 2025 federal digital accessibility suits named repeat defendants¹ — but it shortens the cure window dramatically and, in Kansas or (once effective) Missouri, can flip a lawsuit into an abusive-litigation claim against the filer.

The underlying tension isn’t going away. The ADA relies on private enforcement because Congress never funded the DOJ to police compliance itself, and no federal administration has issued the web accessibility standards that would tell businesses exactly what they owe. Until that changes, the smartest money for a small business is spent fixing the site, not fighting the suit.

1
WCAGSafe. ADA Lawsuit Statistics
2
Seyfarth Shaw LLP. Federal Court Website Accessibility Lawsuit Filings Bounce Back in 2025
3
Texas Lawsuit Reform Foundation. Access Litigation in Texas Under the Americans With Disabilities Act
4
University of Texas Journal. A Growing Threat to the ADA
5
U.S. Congress. House Judiciary Committee Hearing Document
6
Missouri Independent. Missouri Lawmakers Move to Curb Predatory ADA Lawsuits Targeting Small Businesses
7
WSOC-TV. People With Disabilities Accuse Companies of Breaking the Law; Critics Say Plaintiffs Game the System
8
Boston 25 News. Businesses Push Back as ADA Website Lawsuits Surge Nationwide
9
Federal Trade Commission. FTC Approves Final Order Requiring accessiBe Pay $1 Million
10
Seyfarth Shaw LLP. New Kansas Website Accessibility Law Provides Local Businesses With a Litigation Sword
11
Ecomm Alliance. A Win for Online Merchants: Missouri SB 907 Takes Aim at Predatory Website Accessibility Lawsuits
12
Office of Congressman Sam Graves. Graves Moves to Protect Small Businesses From Predatory Lawsuits Over Websites
13
American Bar Association. Digital Accessibility Under Title III of the ADA
14
Supreme Court of the United States. Acheson Hotels LLC v. Laufer
15
SCOTUSblog. Acheson Hotels LLC v. Laufer