Fashion E-Commerce Accessibility: Why Apparel Sites Get Sued Most and How to Fix It

Fashion e-commerce has the largest accessibility surface area of any vertical. Apparel sites account for a significant share of all Americans with Disabilities Act(opens in a new tab) (ADA) website lawsuits, more than any other category, and the reason is built into how these stores operate.

A clothing site is image-heavy, mobile-first, and stacked with thousands of product pages, each carrying color swatches, size selectors, sizing charts, and zoomable photography. Each element is a place where accessibility can break. 

Below, we’ll explain why the fashion industry draws so much legal fire, the failures that trigger it, and what fixes the problem. 

Why Fashion Gets Sued Most

Online retailers are the single most-targeted group in web accessibility litigation. In 2025, 78% of web accessibility lawsuits were filed against online retailers, and fashion is one of the biggest slices of that. 

It isn't bad luck. A clothing store asks more of a shopper than almost any other kind of site: pick a color, pick a size, read the fit chart, zoom in on the fabric, check the model's measurements, then check out. Every one of those steps is an interactive, image-dependent moment, and every one is a place where the experience can fail for someone using a screen reader or a keyboard. More steps mean more failure points, and more failure points mean more exposure.

The cases are not hypothetical. They are named, settled — and expensive.

• Fashion Nova(opens in a new tab) is the cautionary tale. What started as a single accessibility claim in 2020 turned into a five-year battle with over 200 court filings and a $5.15 million price tag, the second-largest accessibility settlement on record. Most accessibility cases settle for five figures in a matter of months; this one didn’t.

• Target(opens in a new tab) set the precedent two decades ago. The National Federation of the Blind sued in 2006 over a website that blind customers could not use, and Target settled for $6 million, plus a commitment to resolve errors. This is still one of the most cited cases in court.

• Walmart shows it doesn’t stop with one filing. The retailer has faced repeated website accessibility complaints over poor navigation, weak link text, and other Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(opens in a new tab) (WCAG) failures that blocked visually impaired shoppers from completing basic tasks, a reminder that an inaccessible site invites not one lawsuit, but a pattern of them.

The pattern is consistent. A blind or low-vision shopper tries to browse, pick a size, and check out. Something along the way is invisible to a screen reader or impossible to operate by keyboard, preventing users from shopping. That’s the whole case. 

These are website accessibility claims brought under ADA Title III, which courts widely apply to retail sites as places of public accommodation. 

For a broader picture of lawsuit volume and settlement costs across all industries, see our ADA lawsuits guide.

The Apparel-Specific Features

Most accessibility coverage stops at generic advice. Fashion sites break in specific, repeatable ways, and these are the places where lawsuits occur:

Missing Alt Text on Product Images

A fashion catalog can include tens of thousands of images, and most carry no useful alt text or none at all. A screen reader user lands on a product and hears “image” or a filename, not “black ribbed midi dress, front view.” This fails WCAG 1.1.1: Non-Text Content(opens in a new tab), and at fashion scale, it fails thousands of times over.

Broken Color and Size Variant Selectors

Swatches and size buttons are often built as plain clickable <div>s instead of real buttons. That single shortcut causes two failures. A keyboard user can’t reach the control at all, as only true interactive elements stop in the tab order, so they can’t pick a color or size without a mouse. And a screen reader has nothing to announce, so the user can’t tell which color is selected, which size they’re on, or which sizes are sold out. It’s one of the most common apparel failures, and the most damaging, because it sits directly in the purchase path. If a shopper can’t choose what they want, they can’t buy.

Unreadable Sizing Tables and Charts

Size guides are frequently shipped as flat images or as tables with no proper headers. This prevents screen readers from reading the rows and columns back in any order that makes sense, so a shopper can’t tell whether a medium fits a 32-inch waist. Additionally, when a chart is an image, there is no text to read, so the information is simply unavailable to anyone unable to see the screen.

Poorly Described Lookbooks and Editorial Content

Lookbooks and campaign pages are the most visual part of a fashion site and often the least described. Built as untagged image galleries, they communicate nothing to a screen reader user, who gets a wall of “image, image, image.” A shopper who’s unable to access the editorial can’t reach the products inside it, preventing them from purchasing and businesses from making a sale. 

Each of these errors maps to a specific WCAG criterion, and none of them is difficult to spot. That’s the problem: if a plaintiff's tester can document them in a single browsing session, so can the next one, which is exactly why they show up in so many complaints.

Product Detail Page (PDP) Patterns

The product page is the highest-risk surface on a fashion site because it’s where shopping happens. A few patterns carry most of the weight:

• Variant state changes must be announced: When a shopper picks a color or size, the change must be communicated to a screen reader, not just shown visually. Silent updates leave the user unsure what they selected.

• Focus is managed on add-to-cart: After a shopper adds an item, focus should move to a meaningful destination, such as the cart confirmation, rather than vanishing back to the top of the page.

• Swatches are labeled programmatically: Color and size controls need real, descriptive labels, so a screen reader reads “Color: navy, selected” rather than nothing. 

• Image galleries and zoom are keyboard-operable: Carousels and zoom views have to work without a mouse, with reachable controls and described images. 

Get the PDP right, and you significantly reduce the gap where most shoppers with disabilities abandon a purchase.

Mobile Commerce Considerations

Fashion shopping skews heavily mobile, which raises the stakes on a whole other set of patterns: 

• Touch targets have to be large enough to hit reliably, so a shopper isn’t fighting to tap a swatch or a size.

• Mobile filtering and faceted navigation, the way shoppers narrow choices down by size, color, and price, have to be fully operable with assistive technology.

• Swatches and controls have to stay reachable on a small screen, not buried or clipped by a cramped layout. 

• Mobile-desktop parity matters most of all: the mobile experience has to offer the same paths to purchase as the desktop one, not a stripped-down version.

A site that's accessible on a laptop but broken on a phone is still broken for most of its fashion traffic, not a small corner of it.

Stylized e-commerce browser with various pop-ups highlighting accessibility errors.

How to Fix It at Catalog Scale

Here’s what trips up fashion brands specifically: scale. 

A site with thousands of product images, each updated every season, can’t be fixed by a one-time audit, and it can’t be patched by an overlay widget promising instant compliance. Overlays don’t fix unlabeled variant selectors, undescribed product images, or inaccessible sizing tables. They sit on top of the problem and leave the real failures in place, which is exactly what plaintiffs document. The lawsuit data proves it: 38% of businesses sued in 2025 already had an accessibility tool in place, and it gave them a false sense of protection. 

This is what AudioEye was built for. AudioEye combines AI-powered automation that detects up to 2.5x more issues than competitors and fixes them in real time, with Expert Audits and expert-written Custom Fixes that close the high-risk gaps automation cannot. Together, they resolve roughly 97% of issues across your entire catalog, delivering 400% more legal protection, all while giving shoppers an online experience that actually works. 

Don’t wait for the demand letter. Most fashion accessibility lawsuits start with one shopper who couldn’t buy. Find those barriers before a plaintiff does. Scan your site with our free Website Accessibility Checker.

Want more information on how AudioEye lowers legal risk for retailers? Schedule a demo today.