People Are Using AI to Sue Websites Over Bad Design

Someone at a conference recently told us she was holding off on expanding her Canadian business into the US. Not because of tariffs, or hiring, or logistics. She was terrified of getting sued over her website. That fear is now rational, and the reason it became rational in the past year is artificial intelligence.

ADA website lawsuits have been a background risk for US businesses for years. In 2026 they stopped being background. The volume is climbing at a rate that has less to do with any change in the law and everything to do with how easy AI has made it to file a claim. If you sell to customers in the United States, this is worth understanding before a demand letter lands in your inbox.

What is actually driving the spike

The Americans with Disabilities Act has applied to websites for years. The Department of Justice interprets digital properties as places of public accommodation, which means Title III obligations that once applied to physical storefronts now extend to the digital front door. None of that is new.

What is new is the barrier to entry for filing. Historically, an accessibility lawsuit meant an individual had to find a law firm, explain how a website's barriers affected them, and work through a legal process. That friction kept volume in check. AI removed the friction. A person can now paste a website into a chatbot, describe the accessibility problems they encountered, and generate the scaffolding of a legal case on their own.

The result is a surge in self-represented claims, known in legal terms as pro se filings. Seyfarth Shaw, one of the law firms that tracks this litigation most closely, has flagged a roughly 40% jump in pro se accessibility claims, along with a telltale sign of the AI involvement: hallucinated citations and errors that a trained lawyer would not make. The technology lowered the barrier exactly as legal-tech optimists predicted, just applied to a use case few of them had in mind.

The numbers tell the story. In 2025, US businesses saw roughly 5,100 web accessibility lawsuits filed. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, filings ran between 3,500 and 4,500. That is close to a full prior year of litigation compressed into three months. For perspective, ADA website cases made up about 28% of Title III federal filings across all of 2024. Early in 2026 that share has climbed past 36%.

Who is getting sued

If you run an e-commerce operation, you are in the highest-risk category. Historical data shows e-commerce sites absorb close to 69% of these lawsuits. The reasons are practical. Online stores have complex, transaction-heavy interfaces with many opportunities for accessibility to break, they serve a broad public, and a barrier that blocks a purchase is easy to document as harm.

But the risk is not limited to retail. Any business whose website functions as a point of service can be a target. Lawsuits typically allege the kinds of failures that block assistive technology: unlabeled form fields, navigation that does not work with a keyboard, images with no alt text, and content that a screen reader cannot parse. These are not exotic edge cases. They are the default state of most websites that were never built with accessibility in mind.

The standard courts actually use

One source of confusion for businesses is that the ADA itself does not name a specific technical standard for private websites. Court interpretations have not settled on a single rule, which can make the obligation feel vague. In practice, though, there is a clear benchmark everyone points to.

That benchmark is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. WCAG is organized into three conformance levels: A is the minimum, AA is the practical target for most organizations, and AAA is the most stringent. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is what the DOJ formally cites, and it's still the baseline most settlements and remediation plans are measured against — though a growing number of accessibility firms are already using WCAG 2.2 AA as the practical target, since it's the current version. WCAG 2.2 was released in October 2023 and extends the guidance further, but AA conformance remains the working target.

What does AA conformance actually require? A representative slice: text alternatives for all non-text content so screen readers can describe images, a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text so people with low vision can read it, full keyboard operability for people who cannot use a mouse, and captions or transcripts for audio and video. None of these are difficult in isolation. The difficulty is that they have to hold across an entire site, including every new page and update.

Why the DOJ timeline matters even if you are private

Most of the recent regulatory movement has been aimed at public entities, but it signals where enforcement expectations are heading. The DOJ set compliance deadlines for state and local government websites under Title II, requiring them to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Large public entities are now targeting April 26, 2027, with smaller entities given until April 26, 2028.

The healthcare wrinkle is worth noting because it shows how fluid this has been — and it's actually a separate rule from a separate agency. Alongside the DOJ's Title II timeline for governments, HHS has its own rule under Section 504 covering any organization that receives HHS funding: hospitals, clinics, Medicaid agencies, community health centers. Large recipients originally had until May 11, 2026 to hit WCAG 2.1 AA. Then, four days before that deadline, HHS pushed it back a full year, to May 11, 2027. Regulators effectively acknowledged the original deadline wasn't achievable at the scale hospitals operate. For private businesses, the takeaway isn't the specific date or which agency it's under. It's that two federal agencies, working independently, have both landed on WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard — and that convergence is what shapes how courts and plaintiffs frame private cases.

The AI shortcut that does not work

There is an irony in all of this. AI is driving the lawsuits, and a lot of businesses are hoping AI will also get them out of trouble. It will not, at least not yet.

The DOJ's own guidance has been clear that AI does not yet reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale. The one-shot tools and accessibility overlays that promise instant compliance are, at best, a partial patch. At worst they introduce new barriers. Overlay widgets that claim to make a site accessible with a single line of code frequently interfere with the assistive technology users already rely on, and they have themselves become a target for litigation. There is no line of code you can paste in to make this problem disappear.

Getting a site compliant is manual work. It means auditing the content and the underlying code, then remediating both so they align with WCAG. For most sites that is a mix of small fixes and larger structural changes, and the only way to know the scope is to look properly.

What to actually do about it

Start by understanding where you stand. There are plenty of free accessibility audit tools available, and running one is a sensible first move. We maintain a free audit tool that gives you an initial read on your site, built in partnership with AccessiBe, one of the established names in the space. If you need more than the summary it produces, we can put together a fuller report.

Be honest with yourself about what an audit is, though. An automated scan is an indicator, not a solution. It tells you the direction you are heading and catches the most glaring issues, but it does not catch everything. A meaningful portion of accessibility problems only surface through manual testing, someone actually navigating the site with a keyboard and a screen reader the way an affected user would.

So the real sequence is straightforward. Audit first to get your bearings. Then bring in people who can do the manual testing an automated tool cannot, and build a remediation plan from there. Nearly every site we assess needs to fix something. The only open question is how much, and that varies widely. The businesses that handle this well are the ones that started before they had a legal reason to.

The fear that conference attendee described is spreading for a reason. But it is fixable, and the fix is a lot cheaper than a settlement — a pre-suit demand letter alone typically runs $5,000 to $25,000, before it escalates into a negotiated settlement or judgment. Proactive remediation is a fraction of that.

If you want to know where your site actually stands, start with our free accessibility audit and go from there.