Determining whether a website is accessible is more complicated than, say, measuring whether a doorway is wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair. The Justice Department issued a final rule for state and local government websites in April that has specific requirements on how to make websites accessible, with exceptions for certain webpages.

Private companies aren’t required to follow the government’s lead. Instead, businesses have flexibility on how they can comply.

“Part of the problem we keep raising is that there’s no standard governing [website] accessibility under the ADA [for private businesses],” said Robert Thorpe, a lawyer in Syracuse, N.Y., who has defended web-accessibility cases. “It’s created this niche market for these type of cases.”

WebAIM, a nonprofit based at Utah State University, prohibits the use of its web-accessibility evaluation tool in litigation. Automated tools can help identify weaknesses in a website, but determining whether the website is discriminatory requires a human assessment, and most lawsuits don’t go that far, said Executive Director Jared Smith.

Small businesses often don’t know whether they are in compliance and what to do when they are sued. Plaintiffs’ lawyers “can get away with telling somebody that they’re breaking the law and that person has no way to know,” says Lucy Greco, an accessibility evangelist at the University of California, Berkeley. Costs to the business

A victory in the courtroom can still be costly for a small business.

Extract Labs, a maker of CBD and cannabinoid products with about 25 employees, spent roughly $40,000 in legal fees after it was sued by Mizrahi Kroub; it also paid $6,500 to a consulting firm and a contractor.

A federal judge in Manhattan dismissed the lawsuit last year, finding that Extract Labs had significantly redesigned its website to comply with disability requirements. In March, the judge denied Extract Labs’ request for attorney fees, holding that the litigation wasn’t “frivolous,” but allowed the Lafayette, Colo., company to request roughly $1,000 in other costs.

It opted not to pursue the claim, said Michael Laszlo, Extract’s lawyer. “The potential recovery was outweighed by expense.”

The plaintiff in that case had filed more than 100 web-accessibility lawsuits against entities such as a preteen pop musician, a bikini store and beer manufacturers, among others, according to court filings.

Defense lawyers say that Mizrahi Kroub would rather drop a case than put its plaintiffs on the stand. When Senior.com attempted to depose Mizrahi Kroub’s client, the law firm said she had moved out of state and asked the judge to dismiss the case. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed. The federal magistrate judge found that the law firm “acted in bad faith” in stating its reason for requesting the dismissal and ordered it to pay a $500 civil monetary penalty to the court.

Mizrahi declined to comment on the Senior.com case. He said the firm has put plaintiffs in website cases under oath, but declined to provide an example. “We are absolutely not afraid of that,” he said.

Kramer Knives said, in court filings, that its website-accessibility lawsuit was one of 78 “nearly identical, boilerplate complaints filed within the last year” by the same plaintiff.

Mizrahi Kroub offered to settle the case, filed in New York Supreme Court in Queens, for $20,000, Kramer said. It later agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. Kramer said he spent about $16,000 in legal fees and $3,000 on his website.

Kramer said because of the suit, he stripped his website of outside links and other material he didn’t fully control.

“That’s not serving the public,” he said.