In federal court, nearly half of 2025’s digital accessibility cases named a defendant who’d been sued before.

A demand letter shows up. The website allegedly fails WCAG, the plaintiff and the law firm are names nobody at the company recognizes, and the letter names a figure that makes it all go away. Paying it and getting back to work feels like the obvious move.

It’s also what tends to put a company right back in the same spot within a year — a mowed dandelion, the bloom gone and the taproot still in the ground. The reason it grows back is laid out in the government’s own court filings.

Nearly half were repeat defendants

UsableNet’s review of 2025 filings put it at 45–46% of federal cases: the defendant had already been through an ADA web accessibility claim. The complaints describe the loop in a single line — “a settlement, limited remediation, a new plaintiff, and another filing — often within months.”

These firms track who’s been sued and circle back to anyone who looks like they only patched the surface. To them, an earlier suit is a green light to come back.

Why settling doesn’t remove the exposure

Under Title III, a private plaintiff can only win an order to fix the site — never money damages. DOJ put it plainly in a February filing: “Title III of the ADA does not provide for money damages for private plaintiffs.”

So settling ends one plaintiff’s claim and nothing else. It’s not a ruling that the site passes anything, and on its own it doesn’t change a line of code. The barriers that drew the first complaint are still rooted in the code, waiting for the next person who finds them.

What the Fashion Nova filing shows

The clearest look at the cycle is a case the government stepped into. In February, the United States filed a Statement of Interest in Alcazar v. Fashion Nova, asking the court to reject a proposed class settlement.

DOJ’s description of the plaintiff’s lawyer: “in excess of 500 such suits, with the vast majority ending in a non-disclosed individual settlement.” The named plaintiff, after this case, “filed 15 more class action lawsuits over three months, each alleging four identical accessibility barriers for blind or visually-impaired people — word for word,” then five more the next year. That’s a business model, not bad luck.

DOJ didn’t call the settlement worthless — it agreed the fund “would secure monetary relief for the California Class.” The problem was the fix. The whole remedy was one sentence promising the site would reach “substantial conformance with WCAG 2.1” — no monitoring, no enforcement, and an audit right that was optional, paid for by the plaintiffs’ own side, and, DOJ noted, “appears to have expired on December 14, 2025.” Everyone in the class outside California got that sentence and nothing else.

The settlement website failed the same test

The sharpest detail in the filing isn’t an argument at all. DOJ had an expert test the website the settlement administrator built — the site blind class members had to use to claim their money. It failed, on the same kinds of barriers as the lawsuit that started the whole thing.

The first question was “Are you legally blind?” The labels weren’t tied to the radio buttons, so someone using a screen reader never heard the question — just “Yes” and “No” with nothing attached, and they’d “have to guess the question.” Where a sighted user saw one Submit button, a screen reader announced two, and only one worked. Get it wrong and the error wasn’t announced at all, so a claimant “could think that their form was accepted when it was not.” The Submit button had no visible keyboard focus.

The system built to pay blind people for an inaccessible website was itself inaccessible to blind people. DOJ’s word for it: “ironically.”

The compliance widget isn’t a defense

Plenty of companies think they already handled this, because they installed a plug-in that promised compliance in one line of code. In 2025, EcomBack counted 983 lawsuits against sites that had an accessibility widget running — up from 722 the year before.

The regulator has been blunter than any vendor can be. On April 22, 2025, the FTC finalized a consent order against accessiBe, which had claimed its accessWidget could make any website WCAG-compliant. The order: a $1 million payment, and a ban on accessiBe claiming its automated products can make a site compliant — or keep it that way — without evidence. The vote was 3–0. That’s the federal government putting on the record that the one-click fix doesn’t do what the ads say.

“ADA compliant” is a sales phrase, not a standard

In the same filing, DOJ refused to bless the standard everyone points to: “The United States does not endorse WCAG as the appropriate or necessary standard for the provision of auxiliary aids and services under Title III of the ADA.” It used WCAG 2.1 only because the settlement itself had.

There’s no technical standard written into Title III. WCAG 2.1 AA is what courts and lawyers point to, not something the statute adopts. So “ADA compliant” isn’t a measurement anyone can take — it’s a sales phrase. A product that guarantees it is selling you a legal conclusion.

What actually ends it

The answer nobody wants is the only one that works: pull the whole root — fix the site. Real remediation to WCAG 2.1 AA, on the pages where the barriers actually live — the forms, the checkout, the search, the booking flow — not a widget, and not a settlement that leaves the code untouched. That’s what changes what the next tester finds.

Want to see where a site actually stands? Run it through our free report — no login, no credit card, no sales call. You get the barriers we can detect automatically and a fixed price to fix them.

The fine print

Everything above is sourced. Here’s where each number comes from and how far it goes — because in this market, most of them don’t survive a second look.

  • Two of these figures come from remediation vendors — and so do we. UsableNet and EcomBack sell fixes; so does Guava. Everyone here has a reason to make the problem look big, ours included, so treat the counts as directional. We use them because they’re the best available and they point the same way the government filings do.
  • The 45–46% is UsableNet’s, federal court. Their report gives both figures, so we cite the range. Their scope is “digital accessibility” broadly — websites, apps, and online services, not websites alone.
  • EcomBack’s 983 is 24.90% of the 3,948 filings it tracked, up from 722 (22.65%) in 2024 — and it spans federal and state courts. That’s a different pool than UsableNet’s federal-only number, so the two don’t add together.
  • The FTC order is a consent order, not a court ruling. It binds accessiBe, not overlays as a category; no court has held that overlays fail as a matter of law.
  • A scan is a floor, not a verdict — ours included. Automated tools catch machine-detectable problems, not whether alt text means anything or whether a keyboard user can escape a modal. DOJ’s own expert paired five automated tools (including the axe engine ours is built on) with JAWS, NVDA, and iOS VoiceOver, run by someone with thirty years’ experience. A clean scan means nothing machine-detectable turned up — not that a site is accessible.
  • We’re not lawyers, and none of this is legal advice. It’s what the filings say.

Sources