Yes, it can be. In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility suits in federal court, up 27% from 2024. Add state courts and the total passed 5,000. One tracker counted 787 suits in California, up 62% in one year, and nearly all were filed in state court under a law with a $4,000 floor per violation. Restaurants and food brands sit first or second on the two trackers that sort suits by industry, in part because of PDF menus, unlabeled order forms and low-contrast text. This article is general information, not legal advice. Talk to a lawyer about your own situation.

The 2025 numbers

Several trackers count these cases. Their totals differ a little because they count different courts, but they all point the same way.

  • Federal court: 3,117 web accessibility suits in 2025, a 27% jump from 2,452 in 2024 (Level Access; Seyfarth Shaw).
  • Federal plus state: more than 5,000 (Level Access; UsableNet).
  • California: 787 suits in 2025, up from 485 in 2024, a 62% rise (EcomBack).

Here is the California twist. Seyfarth counted only four new website suits in California federal courts last year. So almost all of California’s 787 were filed in state court. The reason is the Unruh Civil Rights Act. It lets a plaintiff claim up to three times actual damages, “but in no case less than four thousand dollars ($4,000)” per offense. That $4,000 floor is a state-law number, which helps explain why the cases go to state court.

What does settling cost? One compliance vendor’s guide for restaurants puts an early demand-letter settlement (a demand letter is a lawyer’s letter asking for money before any suit is filed) at $3,000 to $12,000 and a court-ordered settlement at $8,000 to $40,000. Those are one vendor’s figures, not court data, and the cost of fixing the site comes on top.

Why restaurants get sued most

EcomBack put “Restaurant, Food, Drinks & Beverages” first in 2025 with 1,368 suits, about 35% of its total. UsableNet, which counts differently, put food service second at roughly 21%, behind online stores. Either way, it is a lot.

The reason is simple. A restaurant site has three things a screen reader (software that reads a page aloud for blind users) trips on:

  1. PDF or image menus. A photo of a menu is a blank wall to a screen reader. A PDF is often nearly as bad.
  2. Unlabeled order and reservation forms. If a field has no label, the software cannot say what goes in it. These forms are often a third-party widget, but the plaintiff sues you.
  3. Low-contrast text. Light gray on white, or white text over a food photo, fails the contrast test below.

Plaintiffs look for these because they are easy to spot from the outside.

One more California point. In Martinez v. Cot’n Wash, a state appeals court said an online-only company’s website is not a “place of public accommodation” under the ADA, so the Unruh claim failed. That helped a company with no store. A restaurant has a dining room. The court set aside earlier cases where a website was tied to a physical business and did not decide them, so do not count on that ruling.

The benchmark: WCAG 2.1 AA

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is a public checklist from the W3C. “2.1” is the version. “AA” is the middle level. In 2024 the Department of Justice adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for state and local government sites. For private businesses, the DOJ says Title III of the ADA covers businesses open to the public and points to WCAG as guidance without naming a version. Level Access reports that courts “typically reference” WCAG 2.1 AA as the benchmark. It is the target to build to.

Why an overlay widget does not fix it

An overlay is a bit of third-party code that adds an accessibility menu to your site. It cannot rewrite a PDF menu or label a form it does not control. The Overlay Fact Sheet says no overlay “can cause a website to become fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard.” EcomBack counted 983 suits in 2025, about 25% of its total, against sites that already had a widget. UsableNet saw “no meaningful reduction” in suits against widget users. And in 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million, saying its claims that the widget made sites WCAG compliant were false, misleading or unsupported.

A 6-item self-check

Do this in ten minutes. Each “no” is a gap.

  1. Is your menu real text? Open it and try to select a dish name with your mouse. If you cannot, it is an image or a locked PDF.
  2. Can you order with the keyboard only? Put the mouse away. Use Tab, Enter and the arrow keys to go from the homepage to a placed order. If you get stuck, so does a screen reader user.
  3. Does every form field have a visible label? Placeholder text that vanishes when you type does not count.
  4. Does your text pass 4.5:1 contrast? WCAG 2.1 requires 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Free online checkers test this in seconds.
  5. Do your food photos have alt text? Alt text is the short description a screen reader speaks. “IMG_4021.jpg” is not a description.
  6. Have you tested your third-party widgets? Run items 2 and 3 inside your ordering and reservation tools, not just your own pages.

What we would do

Soraxis builds restaurant sites with a text menu, labeled forms and passing contrast from the start, because fixing them later usually costs more than doing it once. See how on the websites page. If you already have a site, our free 20-minute audit can start with this checklist, and you get three written findings within two business days. None of this is legal advice. If a demand letter arrives, call a lawyer first.

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