Law Firm Website Accessibility in 2026

By Site Brace Research · Published June 11, 2026

These are big, well-resourced firms, drawn from the list of the largest US firms by revenue, the kind of practice with a marketing department, an outside web agency, and in several cases its own disability-rights or ADA-defense group. The most heavily defended of their sites blocked our scanner and are not even in the count. Three out of four of the ones we could read still ship a measurable accessibility barrier on the home page.

Key findings

• 74% of the largest law firms' home pages had at least one automated WCAG 2.1 AA violation (34 of 46). Because automated tools cover only 30 to 40 percent of WCAG criteria, that figure is a floor, not a ceiling.
• Low color contrast was the most common failure, on 20 of 46 sites (43%) - the restrained gray-on-white palettes that read as "professional" but fall under the contrast minimum for comfortably readable text.
• Links with no accessible name came next, on 17 of 46 sites (37%) - icon-only menu and search controls, and bare "read more" links into attorney bios and practice pages, that a screen reader announces with no readable text.
• One firm site in five switched off pinch-to-zoom (9 of 46, 20%), which stops a low-vision visitor from enlarging the text. It is one line of code with an outsized cost, and it showed up on the law firm sites more than on almost any other sector we measured.
• These are the largest firms, not the typical one. A small or solo practice on an off-the-shelf theme has fewer resources for this work, not more. We did not scan small firms for this report, so treat that as a reasoned expectation, not a measurement.

How accessible are law firm home pages?

Of the 46 firm home pages we scanned cleanly, 34 had at least one automated WCAG 2.1 AA violation - 74%. The median site had one violation; the average was 1.8, pulled up by a handful of firms with longer lists, one of them with nine.

Read that number the right way. axe-core, like every automated accessibility engine, reliably catches roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. The rest - whether focus order makes sense, whether link text describes where it goes, whether a custom menu works with a screen reader - need a person. So 74% is the share failing the part of WCAG a machine can check on one page. The share failing the full standard, across a whole site with its attorney directory, practice pages, and contact forms, is higher. We test the automated slice on purpose and say so wherever we report it.

For wider context, WebAIM's 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on about 96% of them, with low-contrast text the single most common error, on about 84% of pages. That study uses a different engine and a broader rule set, so its percentages are not directly comparable to ours. Our sample of large firms comes in below the web at large, which fits: better-resourced sites do somewhat better. But 74% is still most of them, and the item at the top of both lists is the same. Low contrast is the most common accessibility defect on the web, and law firm sites are no exception.

The most common failures on law firm home pages

These are the axe-core rules that failed on the most firm sites. Each count is the number of distinct sites where the rule failed at least once, out of 46. With a sample this size, read the top of the list as the reliable signal and the long tail as directional.

Below those, six sites had buttons with no accessible name and five had images with no alternative text. Missing alt text is less common here than in sectors built on photography, which fits a text-heavy business, but on a law firm site it usually lands on the one image that most needs describing: the headshot in an attorney's bio.

What the law and the lawsuits say

Law firms sit in an unusual spot on this topic, because they are often the ones advising other businesses on it. This section describes what the law says and what the filing data shows. It is not legal advice, and whether any particular firm is covered or liable is a question for an attorney.

The ADA names law offices by category. Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers "places of public accommodation," and the statute's own list of them includes "the office of an accountant or lawyer" (42 U.S.C. 12181(7)). The Justice Department's position is that Title III reaches the services a business offers through its website, not only its front door. The landmark case is Robles v. Domino's Pizza: in 2019 the Ninth Circuit held the ADA applied to Domino's website and app because they connect to its physical restaurants, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving that ruling in place. A firm with physical offices, themselves a listed public accommodation, sits squarely inside that theory.

There is no rulebook written for websites. What does not exist is a federal regulation naming a specific technical standard for private sites. The DOJ withdrew its Title III web rulemaking in 2017, and its 2022 guidance states the Department "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards," pointing to WCAG as helpful guidance rather than a codified rule. In practice, WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the standard plaintiffs cite and settlements adopt, the same standard a Site Brace audit measures a site's conformance against.

The volume is large, and it rose in 2025. By UsableNet's count, more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed across federal and state courts in 2025. Counting federal court alone, the law firm Seyfarth Shaw recorded 3,117 website-accessibility suits that year, up 27 percent from the year before. The two totals differ because they measure different things, UsableNet including the heavy state-court docket and Seyfarth counting federal filings, but both point the same way. Retailers draw the largest share of these cases, not law firms, so this is not about firms being singled out. The exposure is broad: any business with a public-facing website is in scope. The filings cluster in New York and Florida, with California's state civil-rights law adding statutory damages per violation in its own courts.

Overlays are a liability, not a fix. A business told it has a lawsuit problem is often sold an accessibility "overlay" widget that promises compliance in one line of JavaScript. It does not work, and it has become its own legal exposure. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission fined the overlay vendor accessiBe 1 million dollars over its claim that the product could automatically make any website conform to WCAG, a representation the FTC found false. Plaintiffs increasingly name sites that run these widgets. The honest path is the unglamorous one: find the real barriers and fix them in the code. That is what we explain in detail.

The honest read is this. A firm that counsels clients on accessibility risk is in a poor spot to ship an inaccessible home page of its own, and most of the largest firms do; that is worth fixing on its own terms, before it becomes a credibility problem. But a scan result is not a verdict. We report conformance, a measurable property of a page. Whether a firm meets its legal obligation is a determination only an attorney can make. If your firm just received a demand letter, we cover what to do in the first 72 hours separately.

What this means for smaller firms

The 46 sites here are among the largest firms in the country. A small or solo practice running an off-the-shelf theme has fewer resources for accessibility than an AmLaw firm, not more. We did not scan small firms for this report, so this is a reasoned expectation rather than a finding: if the biggest, best-resourced firms fail the automated slice 74% of the time, a smaller practice is unlikely to come out ahead. If you run a firm site of any size, you can run a free automated check on your own home page in about a minute, see what a full manual and automated audit covers, or read how we approach law firm sites in particular.

What this data is not

• Not a whole-site audit. We scan one page, the home page. Attorney bios, practice-area pages, the contact form, and any client-portal login are not tested, and those are where more barriers tend to live. The real picture per firm is very likely worse.
• Not the full WCAG standard. Automated testing covers 30 to 40 percent of success criteria. We report the automated slice and say so.
• Not a legal verdict. Conformance is a measurable property of a page against WCAG. Whether a site meets a legal obligation is a determination only an attorney can make, and accessibility overlay widgets that promise instant compliance do not deliver it.
• Not a random or complete sample. This is 46 of the largest US law firms that returned a clean scan, out of 50 drawn from the list of largest firms by revenue; the most heavily bot-defended sites blocked automated access and are excluded. The sample is small and skews toward big, well-resourced firms. We label the size, lean on the top of the list rather than the thin tail, and never count a site we could not scan as inaccessible.

How we measured this

We took the 50 largest US law firms by revenue and scanned each home page once with axe-core against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The firms were drawn on 2026-05-31 and scanned over the following day, as part of our broader State of Web Accessibility 2026 study. 46 of the 50 returned a clean automated scan and are analyzed here; the other four blocked automated access or returned an error and are excluded. We never count a site we could not scan as inaccessible.

This is the same axe-core engine and the same home-page method as the flagship study, so the law firm figures here line up with the legal row reported there. For the full standard we hold our data to, and the sources behind each industry sample, see how Site Brace Research compiles accessibility data.

Citing this report

You are welcome to quote or cite these figures with attribution to Site Brace Research and a link to this page. The same permission extends to AI assistants and search tools, consistent with the Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=no header we serve on every page: cite and summarize freely, with attribution; training use is not authorized. Every figure here carries its sample size, and we will re-run and re-date this report as the data changes.