Somewhere in America right now, a small business owner is opening a letter from a law firm she has never heard of, informing her that her website discriminates against blind people. The letter is polite, precise and expensive. It cites a plaintiff she has never met, a screen reader she has never used, and a settlement figure calibrated — she will soon learn from a lawyer of her own — to sit just below the cost of fighting. She will pay it. She will probably not fix the website, because nobody in this transaction actually requires her to. And in eighteen months, statistically speaking, there is a decent chance another letter arrives.
This is the machinery of web accessibility litigation in the United States, and it runs at industrial scale. Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks federal filings using Courthouse News data, counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court in 2025 — up 27 percent from 2,452 the year before, and more than a third of all federal ADA Title III cases. A competing tally from the accessibility firm EcomBack put the 2025 figure at 3,948, attributing part of the rise to serial plaintiffs refiling under new names. The exact number depends on who is counting and which courts they count, but the direction is not in dispute. Depending on your politics, this is either the most sustained civil rights enforcement campaign in internet history or the most successful legal shakedown of the ecommerce era. The uncomfortable truth is that it is both, because those are two descriptions of the same machine.
The missing standard
The machine exists because of something Congress didn't do. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires “public accommodations” to be accessible, and courts have largely agreed that websites qualify — the Ninth Circuit said so explicitly in 2019, when it ruled that Domino's Pizza had to make its site and app usable by a blind customer named Guillermo Robles, even without any federal regulation explaining what that meant. Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the retail industry's litigation arms, begged the Supreme Court to take the case and resolve the question. The Court declined. What the law has never contained, thirty-five years in, is a technical standard for private business websites: no specification, no checklist, no line a developer can code to and a judge can point at.
The federal government knows how to write one. In April 2024, the Justice Department published a rule under Title II of the ADA — the part covering state and local governments — naming WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, as the binding technical standard, with compliance deadlines phased by population. (Those deadlines were recently pushed back again, to 2027 and 2028, by an interim rule published in April 2026.) For private businesses under Title III, there is still nothing. WCAG 2.1 AA functions as the de facto benchmark that courts and settlement agreements reference, but it has no formal legal status for the private web. The result is a right with no defined shape: businesses cannot know with certainty whether they comply, plaintiffs cannot lose by claiming they don't, and the only institution empowered to sort it out, case by case, is a federal court.
This is the part that tends to get lost in the shouting. The United States made a genuine policy choice — mostly by omission — to enforce digital accessibility through private lawsuits rather than regulation. Title III sweetens the arrangement by letting prevailing plaintiffs recover attorney fees, which means every noncompliant website is, in effect, a small financial instrument. A plaintiff's firm can work through a list of sites with a screen reader and a template complaint the way a trawler works a fishing ground. Defense lawyers call this a shakedown, and the economics support them: settlements typically run from the mid-four to low-five figures, while actually defending a case costs multiples of that, so rational defendants pay quickly and quietly. One accessibility-defense firm estimates that demand letters — the threats that never become lawsuits — numbered between 30,000 and 60,000 in 2025 alone, a ratio of ten or twenty letters for every case filed. That figure comes from a single source and should be treated accordingly, but nobody on either side of the bar finds it implausible.
The settlement that fixes nothing
Here is the mechanism that makes the whole system self-perpetuating: the cheapest rational response to an accessibility lawsuit is to settle without remediating. Settlement agreements are typically confidential, and many require little more than a payment and a vague promise. The business pays, the plaintiff's firm collects its fees, and the website stays exactly as inaccessible as it was — which means it remains available as a target for the next plaintiff, the next firm, the next letter. EcomBack's analysis attributes part of the 2025 filing surge to precisely this recycling. A system designed to produce accessible websites instead produces a renewable resource: inaccessible websites that generate fees on a recurring basis.
It would be convenient to blame the serial filers, and they are genuinely easy to dislike. A handful of plaintiffs and firms account for a disproportionate share of filings; some plaintiffs have sued hundreds of businesses, including companies whose products they could never plausibly use. But serial filers are a symptom of the design, not the disease. Where enforcement is privatized and fees are recoverable, specialization is inevitable — the same way privatized debt collection produces debt collectors. You cannot build a machine that pays people to find violations and then express surprise that it found professionals.
Meanwhile, the people the law was written for occupy a strange position in this economy: necessary and instrumentalized at once. Every one of these lawsuits rests on a real grievance. A blind person who cannot order groceries, book a vaccine appointment or read a restaurant menu online is experiencing exactly the exclusion the ADA was meant to end, and the threat of litigation is one of the few forces that has ever made businesses take accessibility seriously. Disability advocates are not wrong that without the lawsuits, voluntary compliance would be close to zero — decades of a largely inaccessible commercial web prove the point. But an enforcement regime in which the plaintiff's role is to be paid to go away, and in which the barrier that excluded them frequently survives the settlement, serves the bar better than it serves the blind.
There is, in theory, an exit. H.R. 3417, the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act, introduced in May 2025 by Representative Pete Sessions of Texas with a bipartisan handful of cosponsors, would finally write uniform accessibility standards for websites and apps into law. It has been sitting in committee since the day it was introduced, which is where most attempts to fix this have gone to die — industry would rather fight a standard than live under one, and some plaintiff-side actors have little reason to want the ambiguity resolved either. Clarity is the one outcome that threatens everyone currently being paid.
So the letters keep going out. The business owner pays, the firm collects, the website stays broken, and the next blind customer who tries to use it discovers that her legal right to access was enforced, at scale, thousands of times last year — just never in a way that required anyone to actually grant it.