Episode 02 — Accessibility Lawsuits Are Becoming a Cost of Doing Business

HOST A:  Last episode we threw out a number and kept moving. I want to slow down on it today. Nearly five thousand accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025.

HOST B:  And that’s not a small uptick either — that’s a twenty percent increase year over year.

HOST A:  Twenty percent, in a single year, in an area of law that’s already been climbing for a decade. And here’s the part that should make every eCommerce leader sit up: sixty-nine percent of those lawsuits are targeting eCommerce specifically.

HOST B:  So this isn’t spread evenly across every kind of business with a website. It’s concentrated, heavily, on online retail.

HOST A:  Which makes sense if you think about it. eCommerce sites have more interactive surface area than almost any other kind of website — product catalogs, filters, image galleries, checkout flows, account portals, customer service chat. Every one of those is a place accessibility can break, and every one of those is something a plaintiff’s attorney can point to.

HOST B:  Let’s talk about the financial side, because I think people hear “lawsuit” and picture something catastrophic, like a massive jury verdict. That’s not really the typical pattern here.

HOST A:  No, and this is actually one of the more useful — and slightly unsettling — findings in the report. Most of these cases settle out of court.

HOST B:  Which sounds almost like good news, until you think about what “settle” actually means at scale.

HOST A:  Right, because the cost of legal action, according to the research, lands somewhere between five thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars per incident. That’s the range.

HOST B:  Which on its own might sound manageable for a mid-sized retailer.

HOST A:  It might, as a one-time thing. But here’s the catch: these aren’t isolated, unpredictable events anymore. We’re talking about forty-three percent of surveyed eCommerce leaders who say they’ve already faced a claim or lawsuit. So the real question isn’t “can I absorb one settlement,” it’s “what does this look like as a recurring cost of doing business, year over year, especially if the underlying accessibility issues never actually get fixed.”

HOST B:  That’s the trap, right? If you settle a claim but don’t remediate the actual barrier on your site, you haven’t removed the risk. You’ve just paid to make one specific instance of it go away.

HOST A:  Exactly. And plaintiff’s firms know this. Some of them specifically look for sites with recurring, fixable patterns of inaccessibility, because it’s a pattern that’s going to keep generating claims as long as the underlying problem exists.

HOST B:  Let’s talk about reputational cost too, because the dollar figures are only part of the picture. The report specifically calls out that there’s damage a legal battle can inflict on a brand’s reputation, not just the line-item settlement cost.

HOST A:  Yeah, and I think this is underrated. A lawsuit becoming public — especially one alleging that a company excluded people with disabilities from being able to shop — that’s not a great headline for any consumer-facing brand. It cuts against whatever inclusive, customer-first brand positioning a company has spent years building.

HOST B:  So you’ve got direct settlement costs, you’ve got legal fees on top of that even when you settle quickly, and you’ve got reputational exposure that’s harder to quantify but very real.

HOST A:  And I want to bring in one more piece, because I think it’s the most practically useful part of this whole topic for anyone listening who’s thinking, “okay, so what do I actually do.” The report points to WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard regulators most frequently reference in audits and rulings.

HOST B:  WCAG being the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

HOST A:  Right, the internationally recognized standard for what makes a website accessible. And the reason WCAG 2.1 AA specifically matters here is that when regulators and courts are evaluating whether a website met a reasonable bar, that’s the bar they keep coming back to.

HOST B:  So if a company treats WCAG 2.1 AA as their guiding framework — not a one-time audit they did three years ago, but an ongoing standard they’re actually building toward — that’s a meaningful form of protection.

HOST A:  It’s not a guarantee you’ll never get a demand letter. But it does a few things. It demonstrates good faith if you do end up in a dispute. It reduces your actual exposure, because you’re closing the real barriers that generate claims in the first place. And it future-proofs you somewhat against requirements that keep evolving — because regulation in this space is not static, it’s getting more specific and more enforced over time, not less.

HOST B:  I want to come back to something you said earlier — that some of these firms are specifically looking for recurring, fixable patterns. Can we talk about what those patterns actually look like in practice? Because I think it helps to make this concrete instead of abstract.

HOST A:  Sure. Some of the most common ones: images without alt text, so a screen reader user has no idea what they’re looking at on a product page. Forms — especially checkout forms — with fields that aren’t properly labeled, so someone using assistive technology can’t tell what information goes where. Sites that can’t be navigated by keyboard alone, which matters enormously for people with motor impairments who can’t use a mouse. Color contrast that’s too low to be read by people with low vision. Pop-ups and modals that trap keyboard users because there’s no accessible way to close them.

HOST B:  None of those sound exotic. They sound like things that could be present on almost any eCommerce site that hasn’t specifically audited for them.

HOST A:  That’s the point. These aren’t edge-case technical failures. They’re common, default outcomes of building a website without accessibility specifically built into the process. Which is exactly why the lawsuit numbers are what they are — the underlying problem is genuinely widespread.

HOST B:  So if someone’s listening to this and thinking, “I don’t think we’ve ever actually audited for this” — what’s the realistic next step? Because I imagine “go become WCAG 2.1 AA compliant overnight” is not actually achievable for most teams.

HOST A:  No, and I don’t think that’s the right frame anyway. This isn’t about flipping a switch. It’s closer to an ongoing practice — similar to how companies treat security or performance. You start with an audit to understand where you actually stand. You prioritize the highest-impact, highest-risk issues first — usually checkout and core navigation, since that’s both where lawsuits concentrate and where cart abandonment concentrates, which we’re getting into next episode. And then you build accessibility into your ongoing process, so new pages and new features aren’t quietly reintroducing the same problems.

HOST B:  Which also lines up with something from episode one — the idea that this isn’t a one-time compliance project, it’s infrastructure.

HOST A:  Exactly the same logic. You don’t secure your site once and call it done forever. You don’t optimize site speed once and never look at it again. Accessibility works the same way.

HOST B:  Let’s close with the big-picture framing, because I think it’s worth restating plainly. For eCommerce brands, the message here is simple: accessibility is no longer optional risk management.

HOST A:  It’s the price of admission to compete globally. That’s almost a direct line from the report, and I think it’s the right way to think about it. This isn’t really a “legal team versus everyone else” issue anymore. With nearly five thousand lawsuits in a single year, a twenty percent year-over-year increase, and sixty-nine percent of them landing specifically on eCommerce, this has moved from “rare legal exposure” to “predictable operating cost for an entire industry that hasn’t addressed its accessibility gaps.”

HOST B:  And the flip side of that, which I think is actually the more useful way to leave this episode — every dollar and every hour spent closing those gaps isn’t just defensive. It’s also revenue recovery, which is exactly where we’re headed next.

HOST A:  Right — next episode we’re getting into cart abandonment, and a specific number that I think is going to surprise people: 260 billion dollars in recoverable sales sitting behind accessibility failures at checkout.

HOST B:  That’s a big number to end on. See everyone there.

HOST A:  Thanks for listening.