Guide · United States
ADA website lawsuits, and what the filings actually have in common
US courts see thousands of website accessibility lawsuits every year. The pattern is consistent and most of it is visible from outside your site — which is exactly how the firms that send demand letters find you.
- Thousands of filings a year, in US courts
- Overlay users are sued too
- No tool can promise you immunity
Six things worth understanding before you buy anything.
There is no ADA certificate
Title III has no government audit, no registry and no seal. Any vendor selling you a certificate is selling comfort, not standing.
A letter usually comes first
Most matters open as a demand letter rather than a filing. The question it asks is what you knew and what you did about it.
A widget is a target, not a shield
The FTC fined overlay vendor accessiBe $1,000,000 in January 2025. Overlay customers have been sued while the widget was running, because the underlying HTML never changed.
The pattern is screen-reader blockers
Buttons with no accessible name, form fields with no label, images with no description, focus that cannot escape. These are cheap to detect at scale.
Evidence is what closes it
A dated record of what was found, what was fixed and what was verified is worth more than any badge, because it answers the only question being asked.
Fixing beats claiming
A site that is partially conformant with a real, dated record is more defensible than a site wearing a compliance badge over broken markup.
How a claim usually unfolds.
Automated tooling finds you
Plaintiff-side tools sweep large numbers of sites for the same handful of machine-detectable failures. You are found by a scan, not by a person browsing.
A demand letter arrives
It names failures on specific pages. At this point the useful question is not "are we compliant" but "what can we show".
You are asked what you did
Whatever you can produce — dated scans, approved fixes, verification on the live page — is the substance of the response.
This page is not legal advice, and AbleGuard is not a legal shield.
We are a software vendor, not your lawyer. Nothing here is a legal opinion about your situation, and no scanner — ours included — can promise that a claim will not land. Roughly a third of WCAG is human judgement that no tool can make for you. What software can honestly do is find the machine-detectable failures, fix the ones that are safely fixable, verify them on your live pages, and keep the record.
- We do not claim ADA compliance for your site
- We cannot promise you will not receive a letter
- We do not offer legal representation or indemnity
Frequently asked questions
About this guide. The product-wide questions are on the features page.
Does AbleGuard make my site ADA compliant?
No, and be careful with any vendor who says yes. There is no certification to hold, and about a third of WCAG needs human judgement. AbleGuard finds what is machine-detectable, fixes what is safely fixable, verifies it on your live pages, and documents all of it.
Is an accessibility widget enough?
No. The FTC fined accessiBe $1,000,000 in January 2025, and overlay customers have been sued while the overlay was running. A script layered over the page does not change the HTML underneath it.
What should I keep on file?
Dated evidence: what a scan found, which fixes you approved, and the re-check that confirmed them on the live page. AbleGuard builds that pack as you work, and it is printable.
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