New York is the single most active state for web accessibility litigation in the United States, and its distinct edge is money damages: while the federal ADA usually offers a plaintiff only an injunction, New York’s state and city human rights laws let plaintiffs recover compensatory and punitive damages — so cases are increasingly filed under those laws instead.

New York’s distinct angle: state law pays plaintiffs

Most states’ website accessibility suits live and die in federal court under Title III of the ADA, where a winning plaintiff gets a court order to fix the site plus attorney’s fees — but no money for themselves. New York is different. Two overlapping statutes change the math:

  • The New York State Human Rights Law (NYSHRL), codified in N.Y. Executive Law § 296, bars disability discrimination by places of public accommodation, with remedies under § 297 that include compensatory damages, punitive damages, and civil penalties of up to $50,000 — or $100,000 where the conduct is willful.
  • The New York City Human Rights Law (NYCHRL), under NYC Administrative Code § 8-502, gives an aggrieved person a private right of action for uncapped compensatory and punitive damages, injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees.

That damages exposure — absent from the federal ADA, which the U.S. Department of Justice administers as an injunctive-relief statute — is why a New York demand letter carries more financial leverage than a comparable claim filed in, say, Texas or Ohio. It is also why plaintiffs’ firms have a strong incentive to plead state and city law.

This page is general information, not legal advice. New York’s case law is unsettled and moving quickly — talk to a qualified New York attorney about your specific situation.

The Second Circuit and the federal-to-state shift

New York sits in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which also covers Connecticut and Vermont and hears appeals from the four New York federal districts: the Southern (SDNY), Eastern (EDNY), Northern, and Western districts.

For years, SDNY and EDNY were the friendliest federal forums in the country for website plaintiffs. That has changed in two ways:

  1. Standing got harder. In Calcano v. Swarovski North America Ltd. (2d Cir. 2022), the Second Circuit blasted “Mad-Libs-style” boilerplate complaints and held that a plaintiff must plausibly allege a concrete intent to return to the business. That gave defendants a real tool to dismiss cookie-cutter filings.
  2. Coverage got narrower. On September 30, 2024, SDNY Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled in Mejia v. High Brew Coffee, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-3667, 2024 WL 4350912 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 2024) that a standalone, online-only website is not a “place of public accommodation” under Title III. Interpreting the statute’s text and structure in the absence of binding Second Circuit precedent, she dismissed the ADA claim against an online coffee retailer and declined supplemental jurisdiction over the NYCHRL claim (Seyfarth ADA Title III analysis). Other New York federal judges reached similar conclusions in 2024.

The net effect, documented by Seyfarth Shaw’s ADA Title III blog, is a measurable drop in New York federal filings and a corresponding migration of cases into New York State Supreme Court, where there is no Article III standing hurdle and where NYSHRL and NYCHRL damages are available. Businesses with a physical New York presence remain clearly covered by the ADA — the Mejia line mostly helps web-only sellers. For everyone else, the action is moving to state court.

Who is getting sued in New York

According to UsableNet’s 2024 year-end report, more than 4,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed nationwide in 2024 — roughly 60% in federal court and 40% in state court — and New York was the highest-volume jurisdiction, outpacing California and Florida. It held that lead in 2025 with roughly 1,021 federal filings — more than any other state, and over 1,100 cases once state-court filings are counted. New York’s profile has a few consistent features:

  • Serial plaintiffs and a handful of firms drive the volume. The same individuals appear across dozens of complaints, which is exactly why Calcano’s “intent to return” requirement matters. Our explainer on serial ADA plaintiffs breaks down the pattern.
  • Consumer-facing retail, restaurants, and e-commerce are the usual targets — any New York business selling to the public online. If you run a shop, see our notes for restaurants and e-commerce stores.
  • Overlay users are not spared. UsableNet reported that over 1,000 businesses were sued in 2024 despite running an accessibility widget — about a quarter of all cases. The widget didn’t fix the code, so the barrier (and the lawsuit) remained.
  • Repeat targets. Roughly one in four 2024 suits named a company that had already been sued before — UsableNet counted 961 repeat lawsuits, over 40% of all cases — showing that a quick settlement without real remediation invites a second filing.

A typical New York complaint reads like a template: a self-described blind “tester” plaintiff alleges they visited the site intending to buy a specific product, hit barriers with their screen reader, and “intend to return” once the site is fixed — language now scrutinized in federal court under Calcano but accepted far more readily in state Supreme Court. The barriers the complaints itemize are technical, not cosmetic: images without alt text, forms and checkout flows a screen reader can’t complete, insufficient color contrast, and content that can’t be reached by keyboard navigation. What makes New York uniquely dangerous is not exotic code failures — it’s that these routine barriers carry NYSHRL and NYCHRL money damages and sit in the country’s highest-volume docket, so the same boilerplate scales into hundreds of filings a year.

How a New York business reduces its exposure

In New York the threat model is specific: a damages-seeking NYSHRL or NYCHRL complaint, increasingly filed in New York State Supreme Court where there is no Article III standing screen, naming the exact screen-reader barriers a tester hit. You can’t litigate that away in a forum built for plaintiffs, and you can’t buy your way out with a widget. The defensible path targets what a New York complaint actually quotes — and what a New York court treats as good faith: audit to the standard New York pleadings cite, remediate the code a plaintiff’s expert will retest, and document the effort a state judge will weigh.

1. Audit against WCAG 2.1 AA — the standard New York complaints recite

No New York statute (NYSHRL, NYCHRL, or Civil Rights Law § 40-c) names a technical standard, so plaintiffs’ firms borrow one: nearly every New York complaint pleads specific WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria by number — 1.1.1 (non-text content), 1.4.3 (contrast), 2.1.1 (keyboard), 4.1.2 (name, role, value). Audit to those criteria first. Start with a manual accessibility audit that pairs automated scanning with a human driving your real New York revenue flows — checkout, reservations, store locator — by keyboard and screen reader. Automated tools alone catch only a fraction of WCAG failures, and the ones they miss (illogical focus order, mislabeled custom controls, bad ARIA) are precisely the criteria a New York tester pleads with specificity.

2. Remediate the real code — because a New York plaintiff retests it

This is the step a New York overlay buyer skips and then regrets when the same firm re-tests the site for a second filing. Because NYCHRL and NYSHRL put uncapped or five-figure damages on the table, plaintiffs here have every incentive to verify the fix actually works, not just accept a settlement promise. Accessibility remediation means editing the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so the pleaded barriers are genuinely gone — real alt text, contrast meeting 4.5:1, keyboard operability with a visible focus state, correctly labeled forms, and ARIA used only where native HTML falls short. Curbcut does this manually, file by file, because that is what survives a plaintiff’s expert re-test in a New York damages case. If you’re weighing the approaches, read overlay vs. manual remediation.

3. Document good faith and monitor — for a New York state-court record

In a NYCHRL or NYSHRL case, punitive damages turn on conduct, and New York courts and plaintiffs’ counsel weigh whether you made a real, dated effort once on notice. Build a record a state judge can see: a published accessibility statement naming your WCAG 2.1 AA target with a reporting channel, plus retained audit and remediation logs showing what you fixed and when. It is not immunity, but in a damages forum it is the difference between a good-faith narrative and a willful-conduct one. Pair it with ongoing accessibility monitoring so a new product page, untagged PDF, or third-party booking widget doesn’t quietly reopen your exposure to New York’s serial filers. If a demand letter has already arrived, don’t ignore it — see what to do after an ADA demand letter and loop in New York counsel fast, since the state-court clock and forum work against you.

The bottom line for New York

New York is the only major market where all three risk factors stack: the country’s highest lawsuit volume — roughly 1,021 federal filings in 2025, the most of any state, and over 1,100 once state cases are counted — state and city laws (NYSHRL, NYCHRL, Civil Rights Law) that put real money damages on the table, and an open state-court forum where Mejia and Calcano don’t help you. That combination is why a New York demand letter carries more leverage than the same claim in a nexus or injunction-only state, and why a clean WCAG 2.1 AA record matters more here. The only durable protection is a genuinely accessible website — audited to the criteria New York pleadings cite, fixed in the code a plaintiff’s expert will retest, and documented for a state-court record. Find out exactly where you stand with a free accessibility scan, then let Curbcut remediate the issues by hand.

Authoritative sources

For primary references: ADA.gov for federal Title III guidance and the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative for WCAG. For New York’s statutes, see N.Y. Executive Law § 296 and § 297 (NYSHRL), NYC Administrative Code § 8-502 (NYCHRL), and N.Y. Civil Rights Law § 40-c / § 40-d. For case law, the Mejia v. High Brew Coffee docket and Calcano v. Swarovski. For filing data, Seyfarth’s ADA Title III blog and the UsableNet lawsuit report.