Why Retail Gets the Most Website Accessibility Lawsuits

Ask most retail executives which industry faces the most website accessibility lawsuits, and healthcare or finance comes up first. Both handle sensitive information. Both operate under close regulatory watch. Neither comes close to retail.

Retail and e-commerce account for the largest share of website accessibility lawsuits filed under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act(opens in a new tab) (ADA), more than any other industry, according to AudioEye’s 2026 Web Accessibility Litigation Report. And that blind spot is expensive. 

Here's where retail actually stands, why its websites are such an easy target, and what it costs to find out the hard way.

How Big is Retail’s Lawsuit Problem, Really?

E-commerce and retail businesses accounted for 78% of all website accessibility lawsuits in 2025. No other industry comes close.

That share isn’t a one-year spike. Total accessibility lawsuit filings, federal and state combined, have more than doubled since 2020, climbing from 12,980 to 26,253 in five years. Federal filings alone reached 3,117 in 2025(opens in a new tab), a 27% increase over 2024’s 2,452. Website-specific claims are also becoming a larger share of all ADA Title III litigation: they accounted for 36% of federal ADA Title III filings in 2025, up from 28% the year before. Retail has driven a disproportionate share of that growth every year.

The risk isn’t limited to federal court, either. Nearly 8 in 10 lawsuits are now filed in state courts, and the exposure isn’t evenly spread. New York accounts for 43% of state filings, followed by Florida at 19% and Illinois at 17%. A retailer doesn’t need a physical presence in any of those states to get sued there. It just needs a customer.

Why Retail Gets Sued More Than Any Other Industry

Retail websites get sued most often because they carry more accessibility surface area than any other vertical. Every product image, every cart function, every step in a multi-step checkout flow is a separate place where a site can fail a WCAG 2.1 Level AA check, and each failure is something a plaintiff’s attorney can point to directly. 

The data backs up exactly where these failures happen. 64% of accessibility lawsuits cite violations on interior pages, such as product pages or account dashboards, not just the homepage. Only a handful of cases limit their claims to a homepage scan alone. Plaintiffs test the full customer journey, and retail sites simply have more of that journey to test.

The specific barriers driving these claims are also consistent and fixable. Across lawsuits reviewed in the report, keyboard navigation issues appeared in 88% of cases, missing structural landmarks in 88%, screen reader incompatibility in 74%, vague button and link descriptions in 63%, and missing alt text in 39%. Every one of those failures maps directly to a step in an online purchase: finding a product, reading its description, adding it to a cart, and checking out.

Document reading 'Lawsuit Settlement' with the accessibility symbol on the right-hand side and a raised gavel with a price tag attached on the left-hand side.

What Does a Retail Accessibility Lawsuit Cost to Settle?

Most website accessibility lawsuits settle privately, and the costs add up quickly once legal fees and fixes are factored in. According to our 2026 litigation research, settlements for accessibility claims commonly range from $15,000 to $75,000, with legal fines or fees adding roughly $20,000 more, and costs climbing further for businesses with repeat claims.

Those settlements also don’t tell the whole story. 38.5% of businesses sued in 2025 already had some form of accessibility solution in place, typically a widget or toolbar. But that quick-fix tool didn’t protect them, because underlying barriers, like broken checkout flows and unlabeled buttons, are still there. 

Retail Doesn’t Have to Be the Easiest Target

The barriers that draw these lawsuits (keyboard traps, unlabeled buttons, broken checkout flows, etc.) don't announce themselves. They sit quietly in the buying flow, blocking real customers and stacking legal exposure, until a demand letter makes them impossible to ignore or someone actually fixes them.

That’s the gap AudioEye closes. Our AI-powered automation detects and fixes common issues in real time across every product page, cart, and checkout step, while our accessibility experts resolve complex, high-impact issues that attract plaintiffs’ attorneys. Together, that reaches roughly 97% issue coverage at 70-80% less than traditional fix-at-source consulting, with far stronger legal protection. And if a claim comes, AudioEye Assurance backs you in court. 

Retail will keep leading the litigation numbers for as long as its sites stay the easiest to file against. The retailers who get ahead of it will have sites that actually work, for every customer, on every page. AudioEye helps you build that.

Find out how by scheduling a demo. 

Curious how accessible your existing site is? Use our free Website Accessibility Checker to find out.