Nearly 4 in 10 Businesses Sued for Accessibility Thought They Were Protected. Here's What Went Wrong.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. Most retailers know that. What's less understood is how enforcement actually works: plaintiff's attorneys run free automated scanning tools across retail sites, flagging potential violations and building lists of targets before a single demand letter gets drafted. According to AudioEye data(opens in a new tab), web accessibility lawsuits have more than doubled since 2020, and 78% of them target e-commerce businesses.

What that number doesn't tell you is this: approximately 38% of the companies sued last year already had an accessibility tool in place when the lawsuit arrived.

The issues showing up most in court

The issues cited most often in accessibility lawsuits are also the ones that most directly affect whether a customer can complete a purchase. AudioEye found that keyboard navigation failures appear in 88% of cases, as do insufficient page landmarks. Screen reader incompatibility shows up in 74% of suits, incomplete button and link descriptions in 63%, and missing alt text in 39%.

For someone navigating a site with a screen reader or keyboard instead of a mouse, these aren't minor friction points. They're the difference between completing a purchase and leaving the site entirely.

In conversations with members of AudioEye's A11iance Team(opens in a new tab), checkout flows came up repeatedly as a breaking point. One member put it plainly: "It's horrible to spend a lot of time finding that perfect thing only to be unable to check out."

Many retailers turn to automated accessibility widgets, essentially plug-and-play scripts that promise to fix compliance issues instantly, without additional audits or developer work. The problem is they tend to create a false sense of coverage. Automated tools can detect roughly two-thirds of accessibility barriers, and of those, can only fix about half. The issues that actually block purchases and show up in lawsuits, things like broken keyboard navigation and screen reader incompatibility, often stay in place even with a widget installed. Courts look at whether a person with a disability can actually use the site, and a widget doesn't change the answer to that question.

Where the lawsuits are coming from

Federal cases get the most attention, but state court filings made up 77% of all web accessibility claims in 2025. State courts are cheaper to file in and faster to resolve, and cases can stack with federal claims, which means a retailer's exposure isn't limited to one jurisdiction.

Settlements typically run $15,000 to $75,000 and increase with each repeat claim. For example, a single accessibility complaint against Fashion Nova filed in 2020 escalated into a class action that settled for $5.15 million five years later(opens in a new tab), the second-largest accessibility settlement on record.

The gap between intent and actual coverage

AudioEye's 2026 Accessibility Advantage Report (opens in a new tab)surveyed more than 400 business leaders and found that 59% believe their organization would face legal risk if audited today, and more than half have already received an accessibility-related lawsuit or legal threat. At the same time, 44% manage accessibility entirely in-house, and 64% of that group say they lack the internal expertise to sustain it.

When accessibility isn't built into everyday workflows, it tends to get deprioritized. AudioEye's Digital Accessibility Index(opens in a new tab) found that the average web page still has 297 accessibility issues, even among companies actively investing in it.

Where to go from here

For e-commerce retailers, the case for addressing accessibility goes beyond legal exposure. 83% of people with disabilities limit their shopping to sites they know are accessible, according to the Click-Away Pound Report(opens in a new tab). That's a significant share of potential revenue that accessible retailers are already capturing and inaccessible ones are leaving behind.

A few places to start: run your site through an accessibility scanner(opens in a new tab) to get a baseline picture of where you stand. Then try navigating your own checkout using only a keyboard, no mouse. If you can't get from the product page to order confirmation without one, neither can a portion of your potential customers. The highest-priority fixes are usually the ones showing up most in litigation: keyboard navigation, page landmarks, button and link labels, and form accessibility. Those won't all be solvable with automation alone, which is why pairing automated tools with expert review tends to produce better outcomes than relying on either one in isolation.

People with disabilities are among the most loyal customers a retailer can have. When they find a site that works for them, they come back and they tell others. Customers who can't complete a purchase because of a broken checkout flow or an unlabeled button leave quietly and shop somewhere else, long before a demand letter arrives.

The retailers with the lowest legal exposure are the ones who've made accessibility part of how they operate, not a one-time purchase, so that by the time a plaintiff's attorney runs a scan, there isn't much to find. For most retailers, that starts with an honest look at what their current approach actually covers, and a willingness to make lasting fixes where it falls short.