Judith Pelaez is visually impaired and lives in Lake County, Indiana. Between February and May of this year, she filed roughly a dozen lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Hammond, each one alleging the same thing: a company's website locked her out. Missing "skip to content" links. A shopping cart her screen reader couldn't parse. Product listings she couldn't tell apart. The defendants ranged from a beauty brand to a gift-box company to a maker of air sanitizers, and in each case, the fix she wanted was simple. What she got, in most cases, was a settlement check and a website that may or may not have changed.

That gap between "case closed" and "problem fixed" is the story disability advocates are telling right now, and it's putting them in an uncomfortable position: pushing back on lawsuits filed by people with real, well-documented barriers.

A Legal Strategy That's Scaling Faster Than Its Results

Website accessibility litigation isn't new, but the volume is climbing fast. Federal filings hit 3,117 in 2025, up 27% from 2,452 the year before, according to Seyfarth Shaw's annual tally, and now account for more than a third of all ADA Title III lawsuits filed in a year. Add state courts and other digital properties like apps, and one industry tracker counted over 5,000 digital accessibility suits filed across the country last year.

Most of them end the same way: a settlement, because a business with an inaccessible website has very little legal room to argue otherwise. Jason Marshall, an attorney with Equal Access Law Group, says that pattern has created a reputation problem for the whole strategy. "There's a negative perception that people are skimming businesses and saying, 'Gotcha!'" he said, even though his own read on the goal is straightforward: "equal access to the economy."

A review of Missouri's federal and state dockets found that one plaintiff, working with a single law firm, filed every one of the 121 website accessibility lawsuits brought in that state across 2024 and 2025.

Why Advocates Say the Wins Don't Stick

Teresa Torres, with the advocacy group Everybody Counts, has watched this play out from the other side. "It's a larger problem," she said. "Lawsuits force businesses to pay settlements, but nothing changes." A settlement can require a payment without requiring a rebuilt checkout flow, an audited codebase, or a compliance timeline anyone is tracking. The site that triggered the suit can stay exactly as inaccessible as it was, for the next blind or low-vision customer who lands on it.

Chris Danielsen of the National Federation of the Blind put it more bluntly still: the current wave of litigation "is making it harder for actual advocates to get anywhere." His organization isn't opposed to lawsuits in principle. Its 2006 case against Target produced a settlement with real teeth: specific accessibility standards, a monitoring period, and terms that stayed unsealed so other advocates could point to them. NFB treats that as the model, and treats litigation as a last resort reserved for exactly that kind of systemic case, not a first move against every small business with a clunky product page.

The backlash has already reached statehouses. Missouri passed a law in May, effective August 28, 2026, aimed at curbing what lawmakers called abusive website accessibility suits against state residents. The state ranked sixth nationally for 2025 filings, with 86, well behind New York's 1,021. And in a case elsewhere this year, the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest urging a court to reject a proposed class settlement on the grounds that the relief wouldn't meaningfully improve accessibility while the payout disproportionately benefited the attorneys.

What Moves a Business to Fix Its Site

The advocates pushing back on lawsuit-first tactics aren't arguing families should tolerate an inaccessible checkout page. They're pointing to a different sequence that tends to hold up better once the settlement check clears:

• Contact the business directly, in writing, before anything else. Describe the specific barrier, not just that the site is "inaccessible." A vague complaint is easy to ignore; a documented one, naming the exact button, page, or field that fails with your screen reader, gives a developer something to fix.
• Leave the legal language out of the first message. Advocates who've done this successfully say naming a lawsuit up front tends to route your complaint straight to legal counsel instead of a product team, which slows everything down and makes a defensive settlement more likely than an actual fix.
• Ask for a written commitment with a timeline, not just an apology or a coupon. If the business won't put a fix date in writing, that's useful information about how seriously they're taking it.
• Save your documentation regardless of what happens next. If direct contact goes nowhere and legal action becomes the only option, a dated record of your outreach makes a stronger case than a lawsuit filed cold.
• If you do pursue legal action, look for representation that treats a public, monitored settlement as the goal, the way NFB's Target case worked, rather than a quiet payout with no enforcement mechanism attached.

None of this asks a disabled customer to accept less than full access. It's a recognition that the fastest legal outcome and the fix that holds are often two different things, and knowing that going in changes which door you knock on first.