By Kristina M. Launey & Minh N. Vu
Seyfarth Synopsis: Plaintiffs filed 2,452 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2024 – a 13% decrease from 2023.
Website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court fell for the second consecutive year in 2024, with a significant decrease from 2023 filings. The total number of lawsuits filed in federal court alleging that plaintiffs with a disability could not use websites because they were not designed to be accessible and/or work with assistive technologies in 2024 was 2,452. This number is 342 fewer than 2023’s total of 2,749, representing a 13% decrease.
Website accessibility lawsuits accounted for 28% percent of the total number of ADA Title III lawsuits filed in federal court in 2024 (2,452 out of 8,800 cases). In 2023, website accessibility lawsuits made up 34 percent of all the ADA Title III lawsuits filed in federal court (2,794 out of 8,227 cases). Also, as shown in the graph below, the number of filings per month ranged from a low of 167 cases in April to a high of 261 cases in October.
New York federal courts continued to be the busiest with 1,564 lawsuits. Florida was a distant second with 470 lawsuits, up from 385 in 2023. Minnesota came in third with 114 lawsuits. Pennsylvania passed Illinois for the fourth spot with 103 lawsuits. Illinois did manage to stay in the top 5 with 93 lawsuits. Remarkably, California’s federal courts only had three new website accessibility lawsuits last year.
If you’re wondering why California has so few website accessibility cases relative to New York, it is likely because judges in New York federal courts have been more favorable toward plaintiffs when the defendant is an online-only business. Although the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has yet to decide whether online-only businesses are covered by the ADA, most district court judges in New York – with a few exceptions – to have addressed the issue have concluded that they are. That said, New York federal courts have been more demanding lately with regard to the allegations necessary to establish a plaintiff’s standing.
In California, both federal and state courts of appeal have reached the conclusion that online only businesses are not covered by the ADA, making it virtually impossible for plaintiffs to file viable lawsuits against online-only businesses for accessibility violations. Thus, we predict fewer website accessibility cases in both California state and federal courts in the future; though we still see a significant number of demand letters and lawsuits filed in state courts, which are not included in our federal lawsuit numbers, especially against businesses with physical locations.
Why was there an overall decrease in the number of website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal courts throughout the country last year? While there is no way to know for certain, we think there are at least three possible factors in play.
First, and most significantly, more and more plaintiffs’ firms responsible for historically significant numbers of filings have been filing website accessibility lawsuits in state courts instead of federal court. Since these filings are difficult to track, it may well be that the total number of website accessibility lawsuits increased year-over-year when accounting for state court filings.
Second, some of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who used to file a substantial number of these lawsuits have been less active in this space.
Third, more businesses are making website accessibility a priority which, in turn, may have reduced the number of inaccessible websites to sue.
One thing is likely certain: Unless the present administration and/or Congress makes significant changes to the ADA Title III statutory, regulatory, or enforcement schemes – a highly unlikely scenario – website accessibility lawsuits will continue to be filed. What the numbers will look like remains to be seen.
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About our methodology: Our 2024 numbers are based on searches using keywords of data from the Courthouse News Services. Thus, it is possible that there are some website accessibility cases that were not captured in the searches if their descriptions did not include the keywords. We then review the thousands of entries manually to remove lawsuits that may be about websites but are not about a website’s accessibility to a user with a disability.
Edited by John W. Egan
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