Website Accessibility Lawsuits in California

A cracked concrete sidewalk with the shadow of a palm tree falling across it

If you run a business in California and you've started hearing about website accessibility lawsuits, you're not imagining a trend. Website accessibility claims have been climbing steadily, and California is consistently among the most active states in the country for them.

Here's what's actually going on, why California specifically, and what to do about it.

The shape of the problem

Of the roughly 8,700 federal ADA Title III lawsuits filed in 2025, about 3,100 concerned websites - that's around 36% of all such cases, up from about 28% the year before. Website claims are not a niche within ADA litigation any more. They're a third of it, and growing.

The pattern is fairly consistent. A plaintiff - often one who has filed many similar claims - visits a website, finds it can't be used properly with a screen reader, and files. It's frequently the same handful of failures each time: unlabelled forms, missing alt text, a checkout that can't be completed without a mouse.

(Worth knowing: many of the statistics circulating on this subject are published by companies that sell accessibility products. Treat the scariest numbers with appropriate suspicion - including, frankly, any you read on a web studio's blog. The figures above come from published litigation data.)

Why California in particular

Two reasons, and the second is the one that matters to your wallet.

First, volume. California has an enormous number of businesses with websites, and an established plaintiffs' bar experienced in bringing these claims.

Second, and more importantly - the Unruh Civil Rights Act. This is California's own civil rights statute, and it does something federal law doesn't: it allows statutory damages per violation, on top of any federal relief. A violation of the ADA is treated as a violation of Unruh.

This changes the economics entirely. Under federal law alone, a plaintiff generally recovers an order to fix the site plus attorney's fees. Under Unruh, there's a per-violation damages figure attached as well. That's precisely why a California demand letter is expensive to ignore, and why so many of these cases are filed here.

What these cases actually cost

Most never see a courtroom. They settle - quietly, and relatively quickly.

For small and mid-sized businesses, reported settlements commonly land somewhere in the $5,000 to $20,000 range, before your own legal fees. And here's the part that stings: you still have to fix the website afterwards. The settlement doesn't buy you an accessible site. It buys you the end of that particular lawsuit.

So the true cost is the settlement, plus your lawyer, plus the remediation you were going to have to do anyway - remediation that would have cost a fraction of the total had you simply done it first.

"Surely they only go after big companies"

No. Small and mid-sized businesses make up the majority of defendants, and they're targeted precisely because they're small - less likely to have anyone watching the site, less likely to have in-house counsel, and far more likely to settle quickly rather than fight.

A local restaurant, a boutique, a dental practice, a small e-commerce store. These are not edge cases. These are the typical defendants.

If a demand letter has already arrived

Talk to a lawyer. Today. Not a web developer - an attorney who has handled these. We're saying this as a web studio actively turning away the work: this is the one situation where the technical question is genuinely secondary. Do not reply to it yourself, and do not ignore it.

And do not rush out and install an accessibility overlay in the hope it helps. It won't - in 2024 roughly a quarter of all website accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that already had an overlay installed, and the FTC fined the biggest vendor $1 million for overstating what it could do. It can be read as an admission that you knew. (We go deeper on this in is my website ADA compliant?)

If one hasn't

Then you're in the good position, and the work is straightforward.

1. Find out where you stand. Run a free automated scan (Google Lighthouse is built into Chrome). It'll take two minutes and catch the obvious failures - missing alt text, contrast problems, unlabelled forms.
2. Understand its limits. Automated testing catches roughly a third of real accessibility issues. It's a floor, not a finish line.
3. Fix what it finds. Most of it - alt text, labels, contrast, keyboard access - is genuinely an afternoon or two of a developer's time.
4. Keep it fixed. Accessibility rots. Every new page, plugin and product photo is a fresh chance to reintroduce a problem.

The honest framing is this: nobody can make you lawsuit-proof, and be extremely wary of anyone who says they can. What you can do is fix what's genuinely broken, make your site usable by more of your customers, and be able to show that you took it seriously and acted in good faith. That is a materially better place to stand than having done nothing at all.

It's also, incidentally, just the right thing to do. The people locked out of your site aren't a legal abstraction. They're customers who wanted to buy something from you and couldn't.

We're a web development studio in Los Angeles, not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and no automated test can determine legal compliance. For the legal question, speak to an attorney.

If you want that first automated scan done for you, our free Accessibility Check sends back a plain-English read on where your site stands.

Related reading

• Is my website ADA compliant? - an honest answer, and why nobody can truly promise you are.
• How to make your website more accessible - where the barriers come from and how to fix them.
• ADA website lawsuits: what business owners should know - the wider legal picture.