Probably not, and the filing volume is not slowing down. In August 2026 alone, plaintiffs filed 432 new ADA web accessibility lawsuits in the United States. The detail that should get every dealer's attention: 134 of those defendants had a third-party accessibility widget installed on their site at the time they were sued. The failures on dealer sites are boringly consistent, most of them are cheap to fix, and you can check for every one of them yourself in an afternoon.
I'm a developer, not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice — website accessibility litigation is highly fact-specific and you should take your exposure to dealer counsel. What I can contribute is the technical audit, because the things plaintiffs' experts test for are things I can test for too.
Primarily US context, with a note on the EU below.
Why dealers specifically
Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination based on disability in places of public accommodation. As the dealership employment and compliance firm Fisher Phillips has documented, those claims traditionally involved physical barriers — bathroom fixtures at the wrong height, parking ramp slopes — but in recent years there's been a wave of lawsuits and demand letters alleging that commercial websites are inaccessible to vision- or hearing-impaired users and therefore violate Title III. A blind visitor using a screen reader can't use a site whose content isn't coded to convert to audio.
The obvious objection is that a blind person isn't buying a car. It doesn't hold. A dealership website does far more than sell vehicles: service scheduling, parts, finance applications, hours and directions, job listings, and research for a household member who will be driving. Fisher Phillips notes the litigation is concentrated in Florida, New York and California.
The scale is worth understanding before you decide this is someone else's problem. Level Access's Legal Intelligence Group counted 1,136 digital accessibility lawsuits in US state and federal courts in the first quarter of 2024 alone, with New York, California and Florida leading. Nearly 60% of those Q1 filings came from just five law firms, with Mizrahi Kroub LLP and Stein Saks PLLC leading on volume — a pattern Level Access attributes partly to settlement mills pursuing quick settlements. Plaintiffs also file strategically: New York and California state laws allow compensatory damages and civil penalties, and a suit can be brought wherever users can reach your site, not just where your store is.
By UsableNet's count, plaintiffs filed 4,928 web accessibility lawsuits across 2025.
Two things dealers usually get wrong about this
There is no federal standard for private business websites. Fisher Phillips's point is that the absence of a standard is itself the problem: with no ADA regulation specifying what a compliant private website is, courts and plaintiffs default to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The Department of Justice's April 2024 Title II rule set WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps, and HHS set the same standard for Section 504 in May 2024. Those apply to the public sector, but they're the benchmark everyone now points at, and Level Access's own recommendation is to aim at WCAG 2.2 AA to stay ahead of where the standards are moving.
Widgets and overlays are not a defence. This is the finding I'd put in front of any dealer who's been sold a one-line JavaScript fix: of the 432 defendants sued in August 2026, 134 already had a third-party accessibility widget running. An overlay sits on top of inaccessible markup. It does not make the markup accessible.
What to test, and what usually breaks
You can run the same three passes an accessibility expert would, on your own site. Do them in this order, and write down what you find along with the date and the URL of each page you tested.
Pass 1: automated. Run Lighthouse's accessibility audit, or axe DevTools, on your homepage, an inventory results page, a vehicle detail page and your contact or finance form. Automated tools catch missing alt text, missing form labels and contrast failures quickly, but they only find a portion of real-world problems, so a clean score is where the checking starts, not where it ends.
Pass 2: keyboard only. Put the mouse away. Tab through each page and try to do what a buyer would do: open a vehicle, move through its photos, apply a price filter and submit an enquiry. Watch for focus that disappears, menus you can't open, and anything you can click but can't reach.
Pass 3: a screen reader. Use NVDA on Windows or VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, and repeat the same tasks without looking at the screen. This is where silent filter updates and filename alt text show up.
Here's what those three passes typically turn up, based on how these sites are built. Every one of these is a recurring failure pattern on inventory-driven sites:
Images without meaningful alt text. Thirty photos per vehicle, and the alt attribute is either empty or the filename — IMG_4471.jpg. A screen reader user gets nothing. Fixing this means alt text generated from the vehicle record at upload time, not typed by hand: year, make, model, and the angle.
Photo galleries that can't be operated by keyboard. Carousels driven by swipe and click with no keyboard handlers, no visible focus indicator, and no way to reach the next image without a mouse.
Inventory filters that don't announce anything. The buyer picks a price range, results silently change, and nothing tells a screen reader that the page updated. Live regions exist for exactly this and are almost never used.
Forms with placeholders instead of labels. Placeholder text disappears on focus and is inconsistently announced. Every field needs a real <label>, and errors need to be programmatically associated with the field they belong to.
Contrast failures in exactly the places that matter. Prices in light grey on white, disclaimers in 11px low-contrast text, "monthly payment from" figures rendered as decoration.
Video walkarounds with no captions. Title III claims cover hearing-impaired users too. If you've invested in video merchandising, it needs captions.
Text baked into images. Sale banners and price graphics as flat JPEGs, unreadable to a screen reader and unsearchable by Google.
The fixes are small and mostly markup. A skip link and a properly labelled field look like this:
<a class="skip-link" href="#main">Skip to content</a>
<label for="email">Email</label>
<input id="email" name="email" type="email" autocomplete="email"
aria-describedby="email-error" required>
<p id="email-error" role="alert" hidden></p>Inventory filters announce their results through a polite live region, so a screen reader user hears that the list changed:
<p id="results-status" role="status" aria-live="polite">24 vehicles match your filters</p>Alt text is generated from the vehicle record rather than typed by hand, which keeps it consistent across thousands of photos:
<img src="car-01-800.jpg" alt="2019 Golf GTI, front three-quarter, driver's side"
width="1200" height="800">The gallery gets real previous and next buttons with a visible focus outline, so it can be operated without a mouse, and video walkarounds ship with a caption track.
The maintenance problem nobody sells you
Fisher Phillips makes an observation that I'd underline for any dealer: even a site that's brought into compliance drifts back out, because staff add content. Someone uploads a sale banner with the price as part of the image. Someone posts an untitled video. Someone pastes a low-contrast promo block into a page. Accessibility isn't a project you finish; it's a property of your publishing workflow.
This is a genuine argument for building it into the CMS rather than bolting it on. If alt text is a required field on photo upload, if the editor won't let staff publish a video without a caption track, if the theme simply has no low-contrast text colour available, then compliance survives your own team. That's a build decision, and it's one of the places where owning your stack pays off in something other than money — worth weighing in the custom versus platform decision.
There's also a happy overlap with performance work: real alt text, semantic headings and text that isn't trapped inside images all help search engines for the same reason they help screen readers. The image pipeline article covers the other half of that.
If you sell into the EU
Separate regime, different deadline. The European Accessibility Act sets EU-wide accessibility requirements for certain products and services, and its requirements for e-commerce services applied to transactions with EU consumers from 28 June 2025. If you're a UK dealer shipping or selling into the EU, or an EU dealer, that's a distinct obligation from anything in the ADA discussion above and you should get advice specific to it.
What this means for your dealership
Do three things this week, none of which cost money. Unplug your mouse and try to find a vehicle, filter the inventory, and submit an enquiry using only the keyboard — if you can't, neither can a portion of your customers. Run Lighthouse's accessibility audit on your homepage and one VDP. And check whether your alt text is real text or filenames by viewing source on any vehicle page.
Then ask your website vendor two direct questions: which WCAG version and level do you conform to, and who is responsible if we receive a demand letter. Get the answer in writing. Fisher Phillips's conclusion is the right one — these suits are not going away, and addressing the issues before a complaint is filed is dramatically cheaper than defending one.
Where I'd tell you not to hire me
If you've already received a demand letter or been served, your first call is a lawyer, not a developer. Remediation scope in that situation is driven by the settlement terms, and I'd be working to someone else's specification.
If you need a formal conformance report — a VPAT or an audited accessibility statement — you need a specialist accessibility firm with certified auditors. I can build accessibly and I can find the common failures; I can't sign an attestation, and you shouldn't accept one from any solo developer who offers to.
Sources
- UsableNet, Web Accessibility Lawsuits Tracker — 432 new filings in August 2026, 108 repeat defendants, 134 defendants with an accessibility widget installed; 4,928 filings in 2025.
- Level Access, 2024 U.S. Web Accessibility Litigation: Key Trends — 1,136 filings in Q1 2024, state concentration, five firms behind ~60% of filings, DOJ Title II and HHS Section 504 WCAG 2.1 AA rules, WCAG 2.2 AA recommendation.
- Fisher Phillips, What Dealerships Need to Know About Website Accessibility Lawsuits — Title III application to dealer websites, FL/NY/CA concentration, absence of a private-sector standard, remediation cost and content-drift warnings.
- European Commission and Bird & Bird — European Accessibility Act e-commerce requirements applying from 28 June 2025.
Website accessibility litigation is fact-specific and this isn't legal advice. If you want the technical audit, send me your URL and I'll run the keyboard and screen-reader pass and send you the findings.