Is Your Trucking Website an ADA Lawsuit Waiting to Happen?

Is this really something a trucking company's website needs to worry about?

Short answer: yes, and size doesn't protect you the way most business owners assume. Website accessibility lawsuits under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act have grown every year since 2017, and according to Seyfarth Shaw's federal tracking, which focuses specifically on website-accessibility filings, 2025 saw 3,117 such lawsuits, up 27% from 2,452 in 2024. Other trackers that include state courts and a wider set of claims report higher totals for the same period, since methodologies differ, but every tracker agrees on the direction: filings are rising, not falling.

Why are small and mid-size companies getting targeted, not just big retailers?

Because plaintiffs' attorneys don't need a household name to win a case, they need an objectively demonstrable violation on a public-facing website. Analysis by TestParty of 2024 lawsuit data found that 67% of ADA website lawsuits that year targeted companies with less than $25 million in annual revenue, meaning the bulk of this litigation already lands on businesses far smaller than the retail giants that make headlines.

A trucking company's website is a public accommodation under the same legal theory courts have applied to retail sites, and it typically has exactly the features plaintiffs' attorneys look for: image galleries of trucks and equipment, a driver application form, and content aimed at both drivers and shippers. None of that is unusual for the industry, but none of it is exempt from accessibility requirements either.

What do these lawsuits actually target on a website?

According to Seyfarth Shaw's analysis of 2025 complaints, the violations aren't obscure technical issues. The most commonly cited problems are specific and checkable:

• ★Missing or inadequate alt text on images, cited in 68% of complaints. A gallery of truck and driver photos with no descriptive alt text is exactly the kind of gap plaintiffs' attorneys' automated scanning tools are built to find.
• ★Insufficient color contrast, cited in 52% of complaints. This is an objectively measurable standard, a specific contrast ratio between text and background, which makes it easy to demonstrate in a legal filing.
• ★Missing form labels and unclear focus states, which affect anyone navigating a site by keyboard or screen reader, including a driver application form that isn't operable without a mouse.

None of these require a website redesign to identify. They're specific, fixable gaps, which is exactly why automated scanning tools can find them and why they show up repeatedly in complaints.

What does it actually cost if a company gets sued?

Estimates vary, but the pattern is consistent: this is expensive even when a case never reaches trial. Industry analysis puts total settlements and damages paid across the ecommerce and small business sector at roughly $370 million since 2019, and commonly cited figures for individual out-of-court settlements run from $25,000 to $30,000 per case, on top of legal fees. Nearly half of federal cases in recent years have named defendants who had already been sued once before over the same kind of issue, which suggests that a first lawsuit often isn't treated as a wake-up call until it's too late to avoid a second one.

Adding an accessibility overlay widget, a common quick fix marketed as a solution, hasn't reliably prevented this. Trackers have documented companies already running such widgets getting sued anyway, because a widget layered on top of an inaccessible site doesn't fix the underlying code-level issues courts and plaintiffs' scanning tools are checking for.

What should a trucking company's website actually do about this?

The fix is closer to normal web development practice than to a legal compliance project:

• ★Add real, descriptive alt text to every meaningful image, especially truck, equipment, and driver photos, not just a filename or a generic placeholder.
• ★Check color contrast on text against its background, particularly for calls to action and any text placed over photos, which is a common failure point on trucking sites built around large hero images.
• ★Make sure every form field has a proper label, including the driver application form, so it can be completed using a keyboard alone or a screen reader.
• ★Test actual keyboard navigation through the site's main paths, especially the driver application, rather than relying only on an automated scanner or an overlay widget.
• ★Build this in from the start of a new site or redesign, rather than trying to retrofit it later, since it's far cheaper to build accessible from day one than to remediate an existing site under legal pressure.