The Demand Letter in Your Inbox: Why ADA Website Lawsuits Happen and the Fixes That Stop Them
Website accessibility lawsuits rarely revolve around obscure technical problems. Again and again, the same barriers appear: unlabeled controls, inaccessible forms, missing text alternatives, keyboard failures, and checkout flows that some users cannot complete.
This article is general information, not legal advice. If you have received a demand letter or complaint, talk to a qualified attorney.
The lawsuit nobody saw coming
Picture a small business owner who sells handmade candles online. The site looks good, the photos are polished, and sales are steady. Then a letter arrives from a law firm claiming the website is inaccessible to people with disabilities and demanding payment to avoid a lawsuit.
The owner is baffled. Nobody complained. Nobody called. Yet the claim is specific: a button with no label, product images without useful descriptions, and a checkout form that cannot be completed without a mouse.
This is not a hypothetical risk. In 2025 alone, researchers identified 3,117 federal lawsuits alleging inaccessible websites, a 27 percent increase from the previous year.
Understanding why these claims happen is the first step toward reducing the barriers that give them something to point to.
Why the ADA applies to websites
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990, long before modern online shopping existed. Title III prohibits disability discrimination by places of public accommodation, including stores, restaurants, hotels, medical offices, and many other businesses open to the public.
Today, much of what those businesses offer is accessed online. The U.S. Department of Justice has consistently taken the position that ADA requirements apply to the goods, services, privileges, and activities public accommodations provide through the web.
The legal picture is less uniform for online-only businesses, and the exact analysis can vary by jurisdiction. There is also no single detailed technical checklist in Title III requiring every private-sector website to conform to one specific version of WCAG.
Even so, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have become the dominant technical benchmark used across accessibility programs, remediation work, settlements, and industry practice.
The legal framework may be complicated. The barriers users experience usually are not.
Why the same problems keep showing up
Automated testing tools can identify many common accessibility problems quickly. They cannot determine whether an entire website is accessible, but they can expose issues such as missing alternative text, unlabeled form controls, empty buttons, empty links, and poor color contrast.
Those problems are extremely common. In WebAIM's 2026 analysis of one million home pages, 95.9 percent had automatically detectable WCAG failures. Even more striking, 96 percent of all detected errors fell into only six categories: low-contrast text, missing alternative text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language.
The lesson is simple: the web does not have an exotic accessibility problem. It has a repetition problem.
The usual suspects
1. Images with no text alternative
A product photo may communicate color, size, material, or style to a sighted customer. If that image has no useful text alternative, a screen reader user may receive little meaningful information.
The fix: Give meaningful images concise descriptions based on what they communicate in context. “Amber glass soy candle with wooden lid” is more useful than simply “candle.” Decorative images should be coded so assistive technology can ignore them.
2. Form fields without labels
Forms often stand between a visitor and an important action: contacting a business, creating an account, booking an appointment, or completing a purchase.
Placeholder text is not a reliable replacement for a properly implemented label. Without one, a screen reader user may not know what information a field requires.
The fix: Give every input an appropriate label and make sure it is programmatically associated with the field. Error messages should also explain what went wrong and how to correct it.
3. Low color contrast
Light gray text on a white background may look elegant, but it can be difficult to read for people with low vision or reduced contrast sensitivity.
The fix: Check text and interface elements against WCAG contrast requirements. At Level AA, the familiar benchmark is at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.
Ideally, contrast should be addressed when the design system is created, not after the same inaccessible combination has spread across hundreds of pages.
4. Links and buttons with no name
Modern websites rely heavily on icons: carts, magnifying glasses, menus, arrows, and hearts. Their purpose may be visually obvious, but assistive technology cannot rely on visual context alone.
An icon-only control without an accessible name may be announced simply as “button” or “link.”
The fix: Add visible text or an appropriate accessible name that explains what the control does. The same principle applies to vague links such as “click here” or repeated “read more” links.
5. Keyboard traps and missing focus
Many people navigate websites without a mouse. If a menu cannot be reached, a popup traps focus, or the visible focus indicator has been removed for aesthetic reasons, the site can become difficult or impossible to use.
The fix: Put your mouse aside and test your site. Can you reach the navigation, open a menu, close a modal, select a product option, complete a form, and reach checkout?
Every interactive element should be usable with a keyboard, and users should be able to tell which element currently has focus.
6. Inaccessible checkout and booking flows
This is where an accessibility issue becomes both a user barrier and a business problem.
A date picker that requires a mouse can block a booking. A CAPTCHA without a usable alternative can prevent account creation. An unlabeled payment field can stop a purchase.
The fix: Test the most important task on your site from start to finish. For ecommerce brands, that means testing the full purchasing journey rather than checking individual pages in isolation.
Accessibility and conversion optimization often meet in the same place: the customer journey. A checkout that is easier to navigate, understand, and complete is simply a better checkout.
The key question is not whether the page passes a scanner. It is whether a person can finish what they came to do.
7. Missing captions
Videos without captions can exclude people who are deaf or hard of hearing from information delivered through audio.
The fix: Add accurate captions to meaningful video content. Auto-generated captions can be a useful starting point, but names, technical terms, and unusual speech still need human review.
Why the overlay shortcut can backfire
Some accessibility products are marketed as a fast solution that works by adding a script, widget, or overlay to an existing site.
The idea is attractive because it sounds simple. But an overlay cannot automatically repair every structural problem, understand the purpose of every image, redesign every inaccessible interaction, or guarantee that custom components work correctly with assistive technology.
Having a widget installed also does not make a business immune from litigation. In EcomBack's dataset for the first half of 2026, 496 website accessibility lawsuits — 24.25 percent of the filings it tracked — involved websites that already had an accessibility widget or overlay installed.
That does not mean widgets caused the lawsuits. It means having one installed did not prevent them.
Regulators have also challenged broad compliance claims. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission finalized an order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million after alleging that claims about its automated product making websites WCAG-compliant were false, misleading, or unsupported.
Automated tools still have a role. Scanning and monitoring are useful. The mistake is treating a tool as a substitute for fixing the website itself.
A practical prevention plan
Reducing accessibility risk does not necessarily require a massive budget. It requires a repeatable process.
Step one: scan strategically. Use a reputable automated tool on your most important pages. Treat the results as a starting point, not a certificate of compliance.
Step two: test manually. Navigate key pages using only a keyboard. Test menus, forms, dialogs, and important workflows. Zoom the browser and check whether content remains usable.
Step three: prioritize critical journeys. Start with purchasing, booking, registration, payment, account login, and contact forms.
Step four: fix problems at the source. If the same inaccessible component appears on 200 pages, repair the component or template instead of fixing every page individually.
Step five: build accessibility into the workflow. Add accessibility checks to design reviews, development QA, and publishing guidelines so new work does not continually reintroduce old problems.
This is where accessibility becomes part of website quality rather than a separate project. At Positron, we design, develop, optimize, and maintain Shopify stores with the complete customer journey in mind. That means looking beyond how a page appears and paying attention to how navigation, product pages, forms, and checkout experiences actually function for users.
When a problem is buried in a theme, component, or customer journey, the better long-term solution is usually not another layer on top of the site. It is better design, cleaner development, thoughtful testing, and ongoing maintenance.
Step six: publish an accessibility statement. Explain your accessibility commitment, the standard you are working toward, and how users can report barriers or request assistance. An accessibility statement is not a legal shield, but it gives users a clear communication path.
Step seven: keep records. Maintain audits, remediation logs, testing notes, and training records so your team knows what was tested, what was fixed, and what still needs attention.
The bigger point
It is easy to read all of this as a story about legal risk. The risk is real, but the lawsuit is usually the end of the story, not the beginning.
The beginning is often much smaller: a button that was never labeled, a product image without useful alternative text, a form nobody tested with a screen reader, a redesign that removed visible focus, or a checkout step nobody tried to complete using only a keyboard.
Each decision may seem insignificant on its own. Together, they determine who gets to use the website.
Many of the most important fixes are straightforward: describe meaningful images, label forms properly, use readable contrast, make controls work from the keyboard, give buttons meaningful names, caption videos, and test the journeys that actually matter.
Accessibility is not a one-time purchase or a badge in the footer. It is a maintenance habit. Websites change, developers ship features, marketing launches campaigns, and third-party tools get updated. Accessibility has to evolve with them.
The goal is not to predict every possible lawsuit. It is to remove barriers before a customer, complaint, or demand letter is the first thing that tells you they were there.
Not sure where your Shopify store stands?
Positron helps ecommerce brands improve the design, development, performance, and usability of their Shopify stores, from individual components to the complete customer journey.
If your store needs a closer look, we can help identify problems in the experience and build better solutions directly into the site rather than relying on temporary patches.
