The 7 Most Common ADA Website Violations That Get Businesses Sued (2026)
2,014 ADA website lawsuits were filed in just the first half of 2025. These 7 violations appear in nearly every complaint — and most of them are trivially detectable.
2,014 ADA website lawsuits were filed in the first half of 2025 alone — and that's before the April 24, 2026 WCAG 2.1 AA compliance deadline for government websites sends even more scrutiny toward the private sector.
Here's the uncomfortable truth about most of these cases: the violations cited aren't obscure edge cases. They're the same seven problems, appearing in complaint after complaint, because plaintiffs and their attorneys use automated scanning tools to find them in bulk. They're targeting the easiest issues first.
If you want to understand where your actual legal exposure is, start here.
1. Missing Alt Text on Images
This is the single most commonly cited violation in ADA website lawsuits. When an image has no alt attribute — or has an empty, meaningless one like alt="image123.jpg" — screen readers either skip it entirely or read the filename aloud. For a blind user navigating your product catalog, that's a dead end.
WCAG 1.1.1 (Level A) requires that all non-decorative images have meaningful text alternatives. It doesn't get more foundational than this. E-commerce sites are the hardest hit: product photos, promo banners, and button icons are all image-based, and all invisible to assistive technology when unlabeled.
Fix: Every <img> needs an alt attribute. Decorative images get alt="". Functional images (buttons, links) need descriptive text that matches their purpose, not just their appearance.
2. Inaccessible Forms
Forms are where lawsuits hit most viscerally, because they represent the action a user was trying to take — and couldn't. Checkout forms. Contact forms. Login flows. Insurance quote submissions.
Three patterns appear in nearly every complaint:
- Unlabeled inputs —
<input>elements without an associated<label>(oraria-label) are invisible to screen readers. A sighted user sees a field labeled "Email"; a screen reader user hears "edit text" with no context. - Missing error messages — When validation fails, the error needs to be programmatically associated with the failing field and announced to assistive technology. A red border isn't enough.
- No keyboard tab order — Users who can't use a mouse rely entirely on Tab to move between form fields. If your tab order is broken or certain fields are keyboard-unreachable, the form can't be completed.
WCAG 1.3.1, 2.1.1, 3.3.1, 3.3.2 — multiple criteria apply to forms. A botched checkout flow is a gift to a serial plaintiff.
3. No Keyboard Navigation
Keyboard accessibility is a proxy for a much wider range of disabilities than most people realize. It covers users with motor disabilities, users of switch access devices, and screen reader users who navigate primarily by keyboard.
The test is simple: can you reach and activate every interactive element on your site using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Space, and arrow keys? No mouse. No trackpad.
Most sites fail silently because developers test with mouse clicks. Dropdowns that only open on hover, modals that trap focus, custom widgets that never receive keyboard focus — all of them are WCAG 2.1.1 violations, all of them show up in demand letters.
4. Missing Captions and Transcripts
Any multimedia content — video, audio, podcasts, webinars — requires captions (for video) and/or transcripts (for audio-only content) under WCAG 1.2. This applies to pre-recorded content at Level A, and to live content at Level AA.
This one catches businesses off guard because it feels like a media production decision, not a web development one. But if you embed a product demo video or a testimonial clip without captions, you've created an ADA exposure point. Courts and the DOJ have been explicit about this.
Auto-generated captions from YouTube or similar tools are not sufficient for compliance — they're error-prone and often lack punctuation. Proper captions need to be accurate, synchronized, and cover all meaningful audio.
5. Poor Color Contrast
WCAG 1.4.3 requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text against its background (3:1 for large text). This exists so that people with low vision, color blindness, or situational impairment (glare, aging) can read your content.
Why does this show up so frequently in lawsuits? Because it's mechanically detectable. Automated scanners can check every text element on a page and flag failures in seconds. Serial plaintiffs don't need a human to find it.
Light gray text on white. White text on a medium-blue button. Placeholder text styled at 40% opacity. These look fine on a calibrated display in a bright office. They're invisible to a significant portion of your audience — and documented WCAG violations.
6. PDFs That Aren't Tagged
Businesses routinely upload PDF documents — menus, terms of service, product specs, application forms — without any thought to accessibility. An untagged PDF is essentially an image to a screen reader: it has no readable structure, no logical reading order, and no way to navigate headings or tables.
WCAG 1.3.1 and 4.1.2 apply to PDFs when they're part of a web-accessible workflow. The "it's just a PDF" defense doesn't hold up in court.
Tagging a PDF for accessibility requires either creating it from a properly structured source document (Word, InDesign) or remediating it in Adobe Acrobat Pro. If you have dozens of uploaded documents, this is often the most labor-intensive remediation on the list.
7. Overlay Widgets as a "Fix"
This one deserves special attention because it's the most dangerous misconception in accessibility compliance right now.
Accessibility overlay widgets — the floating toolbar that claims to make your site WCAG-compliant with a single script — are actively litigated. Not as a last resort. As a specific cause of action. Courts have repeatedly found that overlays do not constitute compliance. The DOJ has stated publicly that overlays cannot substitute for genuine accessibility remediation. In some cases, businesses have been sued despite having an overlay in place.
The FTC action against accessiBe in 2025 formalized what accessibility advocates had been saying for years: these tools overpromise and underdeliver. Their marketing claims are not defensible in court.
If you have an overlay on your site, it's not protection. It may be evidence that you knew about the problem and chose a non-compliant shortcut.
Where to Go From Here
These seven violations account for the majority of what appears in ADA demand letters and federal complaints. The good news: they're all detectable before a plaintiff finds them.
Start with our free ADA checklist — it covers the manual checks that automated scanners miss. If you want a technical audit report you can act on (or hand to a developer), an AccessiGuard full scan runs $15 and checks for WCAG 2.1 AA violations across your entire site.
If you're doing a deeper WCAG implementation review and want a structured reference, the WCAG Checklist on Gumroad covers every Level A and AA criterion with plain-English explanations and pass/fail examples.
The violations above are well-documented, consistently litigated, and fixable. The question is whether you find them first or a plaintiff does.