ADA Digital accessibility Law Suits in 2023: Trend and Our Takeaways

Years pass by with the increased stress on digital accessibility. Every year, we do ask ourselves, Have we reached there? One good way to find the  answer to that question is to take a look at the ADA digital accessibility law suits and find out if they have come down.

Yet again, www.usablenet.com has published its reports on ADA digital accessibility law suits for the year 2023 and we bring you the trends, numbers and our takeaways.

Total Cases

The number of law suits in the year 2023 is 4605. This is the combined total of cases filed in federal courts and state courts. This is a 5.44% jump in overall cases from 2022 to 2023.

Out of these 4605 cases, federal courts saw 3086 cases and the state courts saw 1509 cases. The report notes that this is a raise in the number of cases filed in state courts.

Continuing Multiple Law Suits against Businesses that had been

The report noted that over 700 law suits in 2023 had been against businesses that had previous law suits against them. Over 25% of law suits against companies in 2023 also have the same stats.

Besides, same business and brands were sued separately for their websites and mobile applications. This trend shows that any line of digital business is at risk if it is not accessible.

State-wise Counts

In the year 2023, New York had more number of state and federal law suits than other states. This is because businesses need not have their physical locations in New York in order to be sued. On the contrary, filings in California declined as businesses need to be located within California to be sued.

Another new trend is that the federal law suits increased in new states like New jersey and Wisconsin, bearing 33 and 11 cases respectively.

Leading Industry in ADA Digital Law Suits

Once again, eCommerce gained the top spot in digital accessibility law suits while all other industries put together had only 18% law suits. The second top position goes to the food industry with 7%.

If one asks ‘Why eCommerce?’, the answer is that the eCommerce websites and mobile apps have the most complex and rapidly changing digital platforms. So, very often, accessibility is forgotten among the competing business priorities.

Big VS Small Businesses

The report shows a declining trend of law suits against big businesses over the years. For example, the years 2020 and 2021 saw 30% of law suits against big companies but the years 2022 and 2023 saw 28% and 27% respectively. On the other hand, smaller companies and businesses below 25 BN are seeing more law suits over the years. This could be attributed to the following factors:

• Bigger companies are more serious about their enterprise accessibility
• Increase in small businesses and large customer shift towards small enterprises could also be a contributing factor.

Did you Know?

• Large eCommerce companies are in primary focus with 21% law suits.
• Desktop sites with 97% of law suits is the top digital asset to be sued
• Over 900 businesses that use  accessibility overlays are sued.

Conclusion

ADA Digital Accessibility Law Suits are increasing year over year. Though the trend shows the declining law suits against enterprises, they are still in focus. Rapidly changing businesses like eCommerce are still inaccessible to a large number of userbase.

All these observations are just the reflections in US. There are countries where no tracking mechanisms are available; no enforcement agencies are put in place. In such regions, we don’t know the state of digital accessibility. This is an alarming trend globally.

Given this trend, businesses and enterprises must wake up; prioritize accessibility among other competing business priorities. They must keep digital accessibility as a measurable key performance indicator to measure the customer success and business growth. If we consider this as a way forward, we can hope that the law suits come down drastically and digital inclusion becomes a phenomenon in the days to come.

Related Reads

• Decoding Digital Accessibility Lawsuits 2023: Key Trends & Insights by UsableNet
• ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Trends Involving – Websites, Mobile, Apps, Video by UsableNet
• ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits 2021: Our takeaway
• ADA Lawsuits in the Last Five Years: Trends and Take-Aways