EAA & ADA Hub
ADA & mobile lawsuits — what the filings actually claim
The US numbers you have been quoted are website filings. Here is what is actually settled about mobile apps, what is not, and which court said what.
Updated 28 July 2026 · Technical readiness assessment — not legal advice.
Almost every US accessibility statistic you will be shown by a vendor is the same figure: the count of federal website accessibility lawsuits filed in a year. It is a real number, and it is not a number about apps. Nobody publishes a mobile-app filing count, because complaints do not carry a field for it — an app claim is usually pleaded alongside the website it shares a brand with, in a single case that gets counted once, as a website case.
That does not make the risk imaginary. It makes it badly measured. Below is what a US team can actually rely on, separated into what a regulation says, what a court has held, and what a private tracker counted.
The one place mobile apps are named in a regulation
Title II of the ADA — state and local government — now has a technical rule. The Department of Justice published it on 24 April 2024 at 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H. It adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and it covers mobile applications by name, defining an app as software designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet that provides services to the public. This is the only US federal rule that states a technical standard for an app and a date by which to meet it.
The dates moved. On 20 April 2026 the DOJ issued an interim final rule extending them:
- Public entities serving 50,000 or more people: was 24 April 2026, now 26 April 2027.
- Entities under 50,000, and special district governments: was 26 April 2027, now 26 April 2028.
The rule carries five exceptions — archived content, pre-existing conventional electronic documents not currently used to access a service, third-party content posted without a contractual arrangement, secured documents about a specific individual or account, and pre-existing social media posts. None of them is an exception for an app that is still in service.
If you build for a city, a transit authority, a university system or a school district, this is the paragraph that has a date in it. If you sell to consumers, read on: it does not apply to you, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
The place mobile apps are not named: Title III
Title III covers private businesses open to the public. It has no web or app regulation. The DOJ formally withdrew four rulemaking actions on 26 December 2017, including the Title III web accessibility rulemaking, and the Title III technical work has not resumed since. So there is no federal standard, no deadline, and no safe harbour for a private app — only the statute, and courts reading it.
Courts read it two ways, and the disagreement is thirty years old and predates the web.
| Reading | Circuits | Leading case |
|---|---|---|
| A public accommodation need not be a physical place | 1st, 2nd, 7th | Carparts, 37 F.3d 12 (1st Cir. 1994) · Pallozzi, 198 F.3d 28 (2d Cir. 1999) · Doe v. Mutual of Omaha, 179 F.3d 557 (7th Cir. 1999) |
| A nexus to a physical place is required | 3rd, 6th, 9th, 11th | Parker, 121 F.3d 1006 (6th Cir. 1997) · Weyer, 198 F.3d 1104 (9th Cir. 1999) · Rendon, 294 F.3d 1279 (11th Cir. 2002) · Peoples, 387 F. App'x 179 (3d Cir. 2010) |
The Eleventh Circuit came closest to settling it and then unsettled it. Its April 2021 panel opinion in Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores held that websites are not places of public accommodation; on 28 December 2021 the court vacated that opinion as moot, because the injunction underlying the appeal had expired. A vacated opinion is not precedent. The circuit is back to no answer.
The practical translation: whether a pure-digital product is reachable at all under Title III depends on where the plaintiff files. A product with stores, branches or restaurants behind it is reachable in every circuit above, because the nexus is not in dispute.
The one appellate decision that is squarely about an app
Robles v. Domino's Pizza, LLC, 913 F.3d 898 (9th Cir. 2019), is the case worth reading in full, because the defendant lost the three arguments a company reaches for first. The Supreme Court declined to hear it in October 2019, so it stands.
On coverage, the Ninth Circuit held the website and the app are covered because they connect customers to the goods and services of the physical restaurants — reasoning that "the statute applies to the services of a place of public accommodation, not services in a place of public accommodation."
On the absence of a regulation, the court was blunt: "the lack of specific regulations cannot eliminate a statutory obligation," and "the Constitution only requires that Domino's receive fair notice of its legal duties, not a blueprint for compliance." Not having a standard to comply with is not a defence to a statute.
And on WCAG, the point most often misquoted: the court did not make WCAG the liability standard. Liability is the statute; WCAG 2.0 was discussed as something a district court could order as an equitable remedy after discovery showed the app failed. WCAG is the yardstick a court reaches for once the question is what to fix — which is exactly the role a measured audit plays, and exactly the role it does not play before then.
What the filings actually count
The most-cited series is Seyfarth Shaw's annual count of federal website accessibility filings, built from keyword searches of Courthouse News Service data with manual review to drop unrelated website cases. Their own methodology note says some cases may be missed. Reported federal filings:
- 2025: 3,117 — up from a dip
- 2024: 2,452
- 2023: 2,794
Filings concentrate heavily by district. In 2025: New York 1,021, Florida 961, Illinois 585, Minnesota 162, Pennsylvania 137. Three states carry roughly four in five federal filings — which tells you that the plaintiff's-bar geography matters at least as much as your product does.
What the series does not contain is a mobile-app figure. It is a website count, described as one by the people who publish it. We are not going to convert it into an app number for you; if we did, we would be doing the thing this page exists to point out.
What a complaint has to allege
A Title III claim is not a conformance audit. The plaintiff has to have encountered a barrier — in Robles, a blind customer using a screen reader could not order food from a nearby Domino's using the site or the app. The pleading is a specific person, a specific screen, a specific task that could not be completed. That is why a generic conformance certificate is a weak artifact in a dispute and a recorded run of the failing task is a strong one: the second is in the same form as the allegation.
It is also why fixing the loudest issue is not the same as reducing exposure. The tasks that get pleaded are the ones with money attached — sign-in, search, add to cart, checkout, account. An audit that measures every screen and cannot tell you whether a screen-reader user completes checkout has measured the wrong thing.
What we would actually do about it
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and no audit — ours or anyone's — makes you compliant with a statute or immune from a filing. What an audit produces is evidence: for each failure, a recording or a measurement, the screen and the control it happened on, the criterion it maps to, and whether it reproduced. That is the artifact that survives being handed to an engineer, and it is the artifact that survives being handed to counsel, because it can be checked rather than believed.
If your exposure is European rather than American, the shape of the question is different — the EAA states requirements and exemptions rather than leaving it to litigation. Four questions tell you whether it reaches you →
Sources
- DOJ final rule, 89 FR 31320 (24 April 2024) — 28 CFR Part 35 Subpart H, WCAG 2.1 AA, mobile apps defined and covered.
- DOJ interim final rule (20 April 2026) — compliance dates extended to 26 April 2027 and 26 April 2028.
- ada.gov — the web rule as published (PDF).
- DOJ notice of withdrawal of four rulemaking actions (26 December 2017) — why Title III has no web or app regulation.
- Robles v. Domino's Pizza, LLC, 913 F.3d 898 (9th Cir. 2019) — slip opinion (PDF).
- Great Lakes ADA Center, Hot Topics in ADA Title III Litigation (PDF) — the circuit split with citations.
- Seyfarth Shaw, federal website accessibility filings in 2025 — the 3,117 figure, the state breakdown, and the stated method.
This is not legal advice. Circuit law, filing patterns and regulatory dates change, and how any of it applies to your product depends on facts we do not have. Confirm with a qualified lawyer.