Study: AudioEye detects up to 2.5x more issues than other tools
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The accessibility issues getting retailers sued are also costing them sales
An analysis of the latest litigation trends, scan data from 2,500+ retail brands, and survey responses from 500+ business leaders
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KEY INSIGHTS
E-commerce has an accessibility problem. It's also a revenue problem.
The legal risk. Accessibility lawsuits have doubled since 2020, with e-commerce as the primary target. Seventy-eight percent of claims are filed against online retailers, and state courts now handle 77% of all filings. More on legal risk.
The readiness gap. Most organizations have the intent. Fewer have the systems to execute on it. Fifty-nine percent say they'd be at legal risk if audited today, and 38.5% of companies that faced lawsuits already had an accessibility solution in place. More on the readiness gap.
The market. An estimated 1.3 billion people globally live with a disability, representing trillions in purchasing power. More than half report having trouble completing purchases online. More on the disability market.
The opportunity. The organizations getting it right are seeing measurable returns and an AI search advantage they didn't expect. Sixty-one percent say accessibility gives their brand a competitive edge, and accessible sites are already structured the way AI search rewards. More on the market opportunity.
PART 1: THE LEGAL RISK
Web accessibility litigation is targeting e-commerce
Claims have more than doubled since 2020. And e-commerce is where they're landing.
What started as a quiet corner of the legal landscape has become a predictable, repeatable playbook for a small group of specialized plaintiff firms.
The approach is simple: identify a few common accessibility issues, file in favorable court systems, and rely on the fact that most companies will settle rather than fight. It's low-effort for the firms and high-cost for the brands on the receiving end.
E-commerce sits at the center of this playbook. Seventy-eight percent of web accessibility lawsuits target online retailers, and the same issues come up in filing after filing. Broken keyboard navigation. Unlabeled buttons and links. Missing image alt text.
78%
of web accessibility lawsuits in 2025 were filed against online retailers (Web Accessibility Litigation Report)
+102%
increase in the total number of web accessibility lawsuits, 2020 to 2025 (Web Accessibility Litigation Report)
The $5 Million Accessibility Lesson
What began as a routine accessibility lawsuit in 2020 became a five-year legal battle with more than 200 court filings, ultimately costing Fashion Nova $5.15 million, the second-largest accessibility settlement on record. A single-plaintiff case became a class action because the underlying issues were never fixed. Proactive accessibility costs a fraction of reactive legal defense.
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PART 2: THE LATEST FRONTIER
State courts are the new litigation hotbed
The biggest shift isn't the volume of claims, or even the focus on retail. It's where cases are landing.
State courts now account for 77% of all web accessibility claims. The plaintiff firms driving the majority of this litigation have identified a handful of state courts as favorable ground and concentrated their filings there.
These state laws apply wherever your customers are. If someone shops your site from New York, Florida, or California, you're subject to that state's accessibility laws and potential penalties. Your customers are everywhere. So is your exposure.
77%
of web accessibility lawsuits in 2025 were filed in state courts (Web Accessibility Litigation Report)
3,376
web accessibility claims filed by just four plaintiff firms in 2024 (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)
What a lawsuit actually costs
Settlements: $25,000–$50,000 per case, rising with each recurrence
Legal fees, executive time, and issue remediation: an additional $40,000–$60,000
State penalties: CA minimum $4,000 per violation / NY up to $100,000 for repeat offenses
Fixing issues is required as part of any settlement. You pay to fix it either way.
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WEB ACCESSIBILITY LEGAL REPORT
See the full filing data behind these numbers
View the 2026 Web Accessibility Litigation Report.
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PART 3: TOP ACCESSIBILITY ISSUES
What's getting brands sued?
The issues showing up in lawsuits are the same ones blocking purchases across retail sites.
Accessibility lawsuits don't target obscure technical failures. They target the most common ones.
Plaintiff firms pick these issues because they appear on nearly every retail site. The 2025 Digital Accessibility Index confirms just how reliably: 80% of retail pages have non-descriptive links, 75% are missing alt text, and 62% have unlabeled form fields. The firms filing these claims know those numbers. They're counting on them.
What makes this harder to ignore is that each of these isn't just a lawsuit target. It's a real issue that stops real customers from completing a purchase.
“It’s genuinely disheartening. And it’s way too common. I could not tell you how many times I’ve been unable to access my cart, fill out my shipping information, or solve the CAPTCHA.”
— Chris Preiman, Internet Security Professional
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DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY INDEX
See how your website stacks up
View the 2025 Digital Accessibility Index for a rundown of the most common accessibility issues across 2,500+ retail sites.
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PART 4: THE OPPORTUNITY
The customers you're leaving behind
The largest underserved consumer market in the world is already trying to shop your site.
1.3 billion people globally have a disability that can impact their ability to browse the web. Along with friends and family who factor accessibility into their purchasing decisions, the global disability market is estimated at $18.3 trillion. That's not a niche market, or the edge case accessibility is sometimes made out to be.
And they're actively trying to shop. More than half of people with disabilities report having trouble completing purchases online. The issues getting in their way are the same ones driving accessibility claims.
$18.3T
disposable income of people with disabilities, along with friends and family (Return on Disability Report, 2024)
62%
of business leaders believe customers have already abandoned transactions due to accessibility issues (2026 Accessibility Advantage Report)
Here's what makes this problem hard to solve: there's no signal. A shopper who leaves after encountering an accessibility issue looks no different in your data than anyone else who didn't convert. You don't find out your site is turning customers away until someone tells you. And in this industry, that's often a demand letter.
Most business leaders already sense it. Sixty-two percent believe customers have already abandoned transactions on their sites because of accessibility issues.
That suspicion is almost certainly correct. The gap is between knowing and measuring. Most teams aren't doing the latter.
“I’ve told companies, ‘We're consumers, too. We have money.’”
— Empish Thomas, AudioEye A11iance Member
PART 5: THE SEARCH SHIFT
AI search is changing who gets found
Accessible sites already speak the language LLMs read.
Traditional search engine volume is expected to drop by 25% by 2026, a shift retail brands are already noticing. The brands showing up in AI-generated answers share one thing: their sites are built in a way machines can actually read. Not just crawled, but understood.
Here's what most brands haven't connected yet: the requirements for that are the same ones WCAG has had for years.
When you add descriptive alt text to a product image, you're doing it for the shopper using a screen reader and for the AI that needs to understand what it's looking at. The same edit serves both.
If you're already investing in accessibility, you're already doing the AEO work. Most brands just don't realize it.
Where accessibility and AI search meet
Structure beats style for AI search
AI doesn't experience your site visually. It reads the underlying structure: headings, labels, page hierarchy. A well-structured page serves screen reader users and AI for the same reason. Both need to understand what a page is before they can use it.
Product photos should work for everyone
A product image does a lot of selling: color, style, fit, the details that help someone decide whether to buy. Alt text makes that information available to shoppers who can't see the image and AI systems that need to understand what you're selling.
Links and buttons should say where they go
"Click here" and "learn more" are invisible to screen readers and unhelpful to AI crawlers. Descriptive link and button text serves both audiences, and it's one of the most common issues showing up in accessibility claims.
Write like you're answering a question
AI search surfaces content that directly answers what people are asking. Plain, conversational language, the kind that also serves users with cognitive disabilities, is what gets cited.
PART 6: THE READINESS GAP
What business leaders know, and where they fall short
Most business leaders already know they have an accessibility problem.
Fifty-nine percent believe they would be at legal risk if audited today. Fifty-two percent have already faced a lawsuit or demand letter. But recognition isn't the same as readiness.
Most programs stall not from lack of intent, but from how they're built. Reactive processes like audits, widgets, and one-time fixes can't keep pace with the rate at which new issues are introduced. The average web page still contains 297 accessibility issues. That's not a gap you close with a quarterly review.
The organizations making real progress have moved past reactive. Among those with proactive programs, the results show up across the board: 61% say accessibility gives their brand a competitive edge, 42% report increased website traffic, and 35% report improved site navigation and user experience.
The gap between those two groups usually comes down to how accessibility is resourced. The most common gap: companies managing accessibility entirely in-house.
44%
of business leaders say their team manages accessibility entirely in-house (2026 Accessibility Advantage Report)
yet 64%
of teams who manage accessibility in-house admit they lack the necessary expertise (2026 Accessibility Advantage Report)
52%
of leaders actively champion accessibility within their organizations (2026 Accessibility Advantage Report)
yet 58%
of those champions say their budgets are inadequate to do it properly (2026 Accessibility Advantage Report)
ACCESSIBILITY ADVANTAGE REPORT
What 500+ business leaders say about their accessibility posture
There's more where this came from. The 2026 Accessibility Advantage Report goes deeper on the gap between accessibility intent and capability, across 500+ business leaders.
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PART 7: THE APPROACH
Delivering an accessible experience for every shopper
Most vendors promise to make compliance easier. Few are built to deliver it.
For a retail site that is always changing, accessibility isn't something you can knock out in a single sprint or quarterly audit. Every site update — from new products to seasonal promotions and A/B tests — is a chance to accidentally introduce new issues.
For most teams, the first move is an accessibility widget: easy to deploy, easy to justify, easy to check off. The track record tells a different story. Nearly 40% of companies that faced accessibility lawsuits had a solution in place, and even the best automated scanners catch two-thirds of issues at most.
A widget on top of your site isn't a program. It's a starting point most teams mistake for a finish line.
38.5%
of companies that faced an accessibility lawsuit in 2025 had a solution in place (2026 Web Accessibility Litigation Report)
Up to 253%
more issues detected by AudioEye in independent testing, compared to other tools (Adience)
To stay compliant and reach every customer, you need the right mix of technology and human expertise.
AI that scales with your catalog. Detection rates vary significantly between tools, and the gap matters more than it sounds. Tools that miss issues don't just leave accessibility gaps; they create a false sense of compliance. For retail sites that change constantly, point-in-time scans compound the problem. A quarterly audit only tells you where you stood the day it ran. Continuous monitoring detects issues as they're introduced, not months later.
Expert testing for high-risk issues. Expert testing covers the full WCAG criteria set, including keyboard traps, broken checkout flows, and dynamic components that automated tools can't fully evaluate. These are the exact issues driving the explosion in claims.
Custom fixes for what automation can't fix. Sixty-four percent of in-house teams say they lack the expertise to remediate what gets flagged. Routing fixes through your developers means pulling them off roadmap priorities and paying dev rates for work a managed program handles for less.
The cost argument is straightforward: a managed accessibility program typically runs 70-80% less than consulting-led remediation. For most marketing teams, that's a line item that fits without a budget battle.
What to ask any accessibility vendor
Does your solution cover both automated scanning and expert-led testing?
What's your valid claim rate?
How do you handle regressions after site updates?
What happens if a claim is filed while you're our vendor?
“We appreciate how AudioEye stepped in to stand by their work and how effective they were in resolving the claim. AudioEye was an invaluable partner throughout the entire process.”
Andrew Mirra | Babylon Marine
Zero
valid accessibility issues, after AudioEye's experts debunked each claim.
Only
vendor to get an accessibility lawsuit dismissed in court for no monetary settlement.
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"What stood out with AudioEye was the combination of advanced automation, expert audits, and custom fixes. It was the first time we felt like we had a complete solution, not just a tool we had to try to manage ourselves.”
Director, Marketing Analytics | Leading Travel Brand
90%
of issues fixed automatically
150+
sites monitored in real time
100+
developer hours saved, monthly
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THE BOTTOM LINE
One investment. Two problems solved.
The accessibility issues getting retailers sued are the same ones blocking customers from completing purchases. They also respond to the same fix, which means every dollar invested in accessibility is working on two problems at once.
Three places to start:
Understand your actual risk posture. Most teams are operating on assumptions. A scan of your current site tells you what's exposed before a plaintiff firm does.
Replace point-in-time audits with continuous monitoring. Your site changes constantly. Your compliance posture should too.
Match your program to the problem. Widgets and quarterly audits can't keep pace with a retail catalog that never stops moving. A managed program can.
SOURCES
Research cited throughout comes from the following sources
2026 Web Accessibility Litigation Report (AudioEye)
Filing trends, court venue data, industry targeting, and settlement costs across web accessibility lawsuits.2026 Accessibility Advantage Report (AudioEye)
Survey of 500+ U.S. business leaders on accessibility readiness, investment levels, and outcomes.2025 Digital Accessibility Index (AudioEye)
Automated scan data across 15,000+ websites, analyzed by industry and barrier category.Seyfarth Shaw LLP
Annual tracking of ADA Title III litigation trends, including web accessibility claim volumes and plaintiff firm activity.
Return on Disability Report (2024)
Annual analysis of the global disability market, including purchasing power estimates for people with disabilities and their networks.
Gartner
Research on AI-driven shifts in search behavior, including projected decline in traditional search engine volume.eMarketer
Forecast data on AI search advertising spend as a share of total digital ad spending through 2029.Adience
Independent comparative testing of accessibility detection rates across leading tools.