Overview
In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal courts, a 27% jump over 2024. Roughly 70% targeted ecommerce. This page explains what is behind those numbers and gives you an honest way to judge whether your store fits the target profile.
The legal mechanics are covered separately in Shopify ADA lawsuits: what store owners need to know.
Why the numbers keep climbing
Three reasons, none of them going away:
- Fee-shifting. The ADA lets winning plaintiffs recover attorney fees. A small number of firms have built entire practices filing hundreds of near-identical suits per year.
- Scanning is cheap. Serial filers use the same automated tools you can. They scan store after store until something fails loudly, then verify the hit by hand.
- Most defendants settle. Fighting costs more than settling, as the numbers in settlement amounts show, so the model funds itself and grows.
Nothing in that loop depends on your intentions or your size. It is an economic machine, and it selects for stores that are cheap to sue.
The target profile
Court filings show a consistent pattern. You are more likely to be targeted if:
- You sell physical products to consumers. Apparel, beauty, food, and home goods lead the filing lists year after year.
- You ship to New York or California, whose state laws add damages on top of the federal claim. The details are in who is exempt from ADA compliance.
- Your home page fails an automated scan. Filers start with the same scanners everyone uses. If axe or WAVE lights up red on your store, you are visible to them.
- You run a popular theme with known issues. One theme flaw repeats across thousands of stores, documented in the most common WCAG failures.
Being small does not help. Small stores settle faster, which makes them better targets, not worse ones. The filing data consistently shows small and mid-sized businesses absorbing most of the volume while large retailers with legal teams see proportionally fewer suits.
Estimate your own risk in 15 minutes
- Run the 10-minute self-check: keyboard-only navigation, zoom to 200%, check your forms.
- Tab through checkout without touching the mouse. If you cannot complete a purchase, you have the exact failure most complaints describe.
- Look at your product pages. Missing alt text on product photos is the single most-cited issue in filings, and it takes seconds to spot.
- Open your store on a phone and try to close every popup that appears. A popup that cannot be dismissed by keyboard is a complaint waiting to be written.
If you fail two or more of these, you fit the profile. The fix path is how to make your Shopify store ADA compliant.
Example
A skincare brand doing $800k a year ships nationwide from Ohio. Its theme is three years old, its product photos have no alt text, and its newsletter popup traps keyboard focus. Every item on that list is machine-detectable or visible in a two-minute manual pass. To a filing firm scanning a thousand stores that week, this store looks identical to the last five it sued. Whether the owner ever thought about accessibility is invisible and irrelevant to the selection process.
Common mistake
Assuming a green score from an automated scanner means you are safe. Scanners catch only a fraction of real barriers, as measured in why automated tools miss most issues. Passing the scanner just means you are not the lowest-hanging fruit. The issues that block real purchases, and that complaints describe in detail, need a human check.