983 ADA lawsuits in 2025 hit sites that already had an accessibility widget

If you installed an accessibility widget so you wouldn't get sued, the 2025 numbers are worth ten minutes of your time. Last year, roughly one in four ADA website lawsuits was filed against a site that already had a widget running when the complaint was written.

That figure is not ours. It comes from the firms that track these filings, and every number below links to the source it came from.

The 2025 numbers

EcomBack's 2025 annual lawsuit report counted 3,948 website accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025, up 23.84% from 3,188 in 2024. Of those:

• 983 lawsuits (24.90%) were filed against websites with an accessibility widget present, up from 722 lawsuits (22.65%) in 2024.
• 424 of the 983 involved sites running accessiBe (43.13% of widget-detected lawsuits).
• UserWay appeared in 273 (27.77%) and AudioEye in 88 (8.95%).
• The top five widget providers together accounted for 869 of the 983 lawsuits (88.40%).

One framing note, because precision matters here: these are lawsuit counts, not counts of unique stores. A site can be sued more than once in a year, and some are. The share of filings is the meaningful number, and it went up, not down, as widget adoption grew.

UsableNet, which tracks the same space with its own methodology and its own totals, shows the same pattern. Its 2025 midyear report charts lawsuits against widget-equipped sites every single month of the first half of 2025, never fewer than 85 in a month. Its 2024 year-end report found over 1,000 businesses sued in 2024 despite having a widget installed, more than 25% of that year's cases, and noted that many of those lawsuits "cited the widget's features as barriers to equal access, WCAG violations, and other web accessibility issues."

Two tracking firms, two methodologies, one conclusion: the widget did not make the lawsuits stop. Keep each firm's percentages attached to its own totals if you quote them; they count differently and the numbers are not interchangeable.

What the FTC said about the biggest vendor

On April 22, 2025, the FTC approved a final consent order against accessiBe, the most widely detected widget in EcomBack's lawsuit data. The order requires accessiBe to pay $1 million and bars it from representing that its automated products can make any website WCAG-compliant, or can ensure continued compliance over time, unless it has evidence to support those claims. The FTC's January 2025 complaint alleged that, despite the company's marketing, its widget "did not make all user websites WCAG-compliant and these claims were false, misleading, or unsubstantiated."

That is the regulator's finding about the marketing, not a court ruling about any individual site. But if you bought a widget on the strength of a compliance promise, the FTC has now put a number on what that promise was worth.

Why a widget doesn't stop the complaint

The mechanics are unglamorous. A widget is a script that modifies the rendered page after it loads. The complaints, meanwhile, cite the kinds of failures that live in the page's own code: images with no text alternative, form fields with no label, links that announce nothing to a screen reader, text without sufficient contrast, controls a keyboard can't reach. An automated scan of the underlying page finds those issues whether or not a widget is layered on top, and plaintiff firms run exactly that class of scan at volume.

To be fair about the other direction: overlays are not all identical, and some do patch some issues at runtime. In our own scanning we have seen one vendor's overlay genuinely fix missing image alt text on a live store. The honest conclusion is not "widgets do nothing." It is that a widget's presence tells you nothing about what a scan of your site finds, and the 983 lawsuits above suggest the gap between those two things is where the risk lives.

The ten-minute check

Scan your site with the widget active. If the findings persist, they are your exposure, widget or not. Our free scanner runs axe-core, the same open-source engine widely used in accessibility audits, against any public URL. It catches roughly 57% of WCAG issues, which is a baseline, not a verdict, but it is the same baseline a plaintiff firm's scan starts from.

Fix what it finds at the source, in your HTML, and the next automated sweep of your site, whoever runs it, finds less.

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This post describes public filing data, regulatory records, and vendor-tracking reports. It is not legal advice. If you have received a demand letter or complaint, speak to a lawyer.

Sources: EcomBack 2025 annual report · UsableNet 2025 midyear report (PDF) · UsableNet 2024 year-end report · FTC press release, April 22, 2025 · FTC case file 2223156