Accessibility demand letters: what a small business website gets sued for in the US and what the EU changed in June 2025

In July 2023 a home decor shop and a clothing shop, both in Oklahoma, were sued in federal court in Manhattan over websites that the suits said weren't accessible to blind customers. Neither business was anywhere near New York. For the decor shop, the figure on the table was $20,000. Cases like these are ordinary now: UsableNet counted 5,114 digital accessibility suits in the US in 2025, and by its numbers 64% were against companies with under $25 million in annual revenue.

Most owners first hear about this from a lawyer's letter, and then from someone selling a widget that promises to make the problem go away. This piece covers what the suits claim, where they are filed, what they cost to settle, why the widget isn't a defence, what the European Accessibility Act changed on 28 June 2025 and who it leaves out. It ends with a check you can run on your own site in an afternoon, including what happened when we ran it on ours.

This is a working summary, not legal advice. If a letter has already arrived, read the section near the end and then call a lawyer. Figures were checked on 3 November 2026.

The US and the EU side by side

How many suits, and where

Two trackers are worth reading. Seyfarth Shaw, a defence firm, counts federal website cases each year. UsableNet, an accessibility vendor, also counts state courts in New York and California. Both come from searches of court records, so they don't match exactly (3,117 and 3,195 federal cases for 2025). Neither includes demand letters, which are private and can settle without any filing, so the real number of businesses contacted is higher by an amount nobody knows.

Filing is concentrated, and it moves when a few law firms move. Three states took 82% of federal website suits in 2025. Florida nearly doubled in one year, from 470 to 961, and Seyfarth says new plaintiff's attorneys entering this work likely drove the national jump.

California's 4 is misleading if you read it as safety. UsableNet counts another 1,919 suits across New York and California state courts in 2025. The Oklahoma cases also show that where you are doesn't decide where you get sued.

UsableNet's breakdown says who gets named: 70% of 2025 suits were against e-commerce sites and 21% against food service, with healthcare and fitness at 2% each. And 1,427 suits, which UsableNet equates to 45% of federal filings, targeted companies that had been sued before. Settling with one plaintiff doesn't stop the next one if the site stays as it was.

What the complaint is about

The usual story is a blind or low-vision person using a screen reader who couldn't complete a purchase, booking or enquiry. The defects behind that are mundane, and they are everywhere. WebAIM tests the top million home pages every year. In its February 2026 run, 95.9% had automatically detectable WCAG failures, averaging 56.1 errors a page.

Read that list as a screen reader user would. A product photo with no description is silence. A cart icon with no name is announced only as "button". A checkout field with no label gives no clue what to type. Those barriers are why these failures matter more to you than the number on a scanner's report.

Why the law is unclear, and why that doesn't help you

Title III has no size exemption for websites. The Justice Department has no website regulation for private businesses, and its 2022 guidance says only that businesses must make online offerings accessible, that they "have flexibility in how they comply", and that WCAG is a helpful technical standard. In practice WCAG level AA is the yardstick people argue over.

Whether a website is covered at all depends on the court. The Ninth Circuit looks for a connection to a physical location (Robles v. Domino's, 2019). A California appeals court held in Martinez v. Cot'n Wash (2022) that a web-only business isn't a place of public accommodation, and Seyfarth links California's 4 federal cases to that line of rulings. In New York, one federal judge reached the same view in Winegard v. Newsday (2021), but other judges in that circuit have gone the other way, and we found no Second Circuit ruling that settles it. A shop with no premises has an argument, but making it in court costs money.

Under Title III itself a private plaintiff gets a court order and legal fees, not damages. State law can add money: California's Unruh Act sets a minimum of $4,000 per violation, and sources disagree over whether that means per visit or per person. Where a site has a real link to a physical store, that exposure comes on top.

What it costs

There is no good dataset, because settlements are private. Be wary of vendor blogs quoting $30,000 to $100,000: many of those pages sell remediation or repeat one another, and they rarely say where the number came from. The most useful figures we found come from an accessibility consultant reporting what clients told him, and even he presents them as observations, not a survey. They date from 2024.

Two costs sit outside those numbers. One is your own lawyer, for which we found no independent figure, so get a quote before you decide anything. The other is the terms attached: recurring audits, user testing and required consultants can cost more than the cheque, according to the same source. Read those lines first.

The tax credit that rarely comes up

A US small business can claim the Disabled Access Credit on IRS Form 8826. To qualify you need gross receipts of $1 million or less, or no more than 30 full-time employees, in the preceding year. The credit is 50% of eligible spending above $250, on up to $10,250 a year, so it tops out at $5,000.

One honest caveat. The form lists removing barriers and making visual materials available to people with visual impairments, but it doesn't mention websites, and a settlement payment isn't on the list at all. Ask your accountant whether your remediation bill qualifies. Whatever you claim as a credit can't also be deducted.

A worked example, with illustrative numbers from the ranges above: a shop with six staff settles a letter for $7,500 and pays a developer $6,000 to fix the site. That's $13,500 before its lawyer. If the $6,000 qualifies, the credit is $2,875, which brings it to $10,625. Spent before any letter arrives, the same $6,000 earns the same credit and may save the $7,500.

The widget isn't a defence

Overlay widgets are a line of script that adds an accessibility icon to your site and, in the sales pitch, makes you compliant automatically. On 22 April 2025 the FTC finalised an order requiring accessiBe, a well-known seller, to pay $1 million, by a 3-0 vote. The FTC said the claim that accessWidget could make any website WCAG-compliant was "false, misleading, or unsubstantiated", and that reviews and articles presented as independent weren't. accessiBe can't repeat the claim without evidence. The order binds that one company, not every overlay on the market, but it is a clear public finding on the promise.

Being sued while running a widget is common. UsableNet's monthly figures for suits against companies using widgets in 2025 add up to 1,416 by our count, about 28% of its total of 5,114. That doesn't show widgets attract suits, since we don't know how many sites run them. It does show that having one doesn't keep a site out of court.

What the EU changed on 28 June 2025

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) took effect through national laws on that date. Unlike the ADA, it says which services it covers, and for most small businesses the relevant word is e-commerce: services sold at a distance through a website or app "with a view to concluding a consumer contract".

The micro-enterprise exemption, worked through

Article 4(5) exempts micro-enterprises providing services from the accessibility requirements and the related duties. A micro-enterprise employs fewer than 10 people and has annual turnover of no more than EUR 2 million or a balance sheet total of no more than EUR 2 million. The "or" is worth noticing: meeting either money test is enough.

The exemption covers services only. A very small maker of covered hardware, such as an e-reader, still has to comply. Check group structures as well, because a small subsidiary of a larger company may be counted with its parent. And an EU exemption does nothing about a US plaintiff.

If you aren't exempt

Article 13 asks three things beyond making the service accessible: publish how the service meets the requirements, in your terms or an equivalent public document (Annex V); keep it conforming as the site changes; and, where the service doesn't comply, tell the national authorities in each country where you provide it, with what you are doing about it. If you think compliance would be a disproportionate burden, Article 14 lets you say so, but you must carry out an assessment against the criteria in Annex VI, document it and keep it for five years.

Some older material gets a pass. Pre-recorded audio and video and office files published before 28 June 2025 are outside the Act, as are archives that aren't updated after that date. Service contracts agreed before then can run until they expire, for five years at most.

The technical yardstick is moving up. Following EN 301 549 gives a presumption of conformity once the standard is cited in the EU Official Journal. Version 3.2.1 is built on WCAG 2.1 AA. Version 4.1.1, published on 2 September 2026, moves to WCAG 2.2 AA. We couldn't confirm that citation had happened when we checked, but if you are spending money now, test against 2.2.

Non-EU sellers

The Act covers services provided to consumers and we found no carve-out for foreign companies. Practical reach is less clear. The Dutch regulator, the ACM, has reportedly sent information requests to e-commerce operators worldwide, non-EU companies selling to Dutch consumers included. If you sell to EU consumers and don't meet the micro-enterprise test, the safer assumption is that it applies to you.

What enforcement has looked like so far

In June 2026 Level Access, an accessibility vendor, wrote that no monetary fines had been confirmed under any national EAA law. Some other vendor sites claim dozens of fines without naming a case, and we couldn't verify them. So far the public cases in Europe have mostly involved large retailers, a very different picture from the US volume of small-shop suits. Germany's warning letters are the thing to watch, since a letter costs little to send and needn't stop at large companies.

A WCAG check you can run in an afternoon

This won't make you compliant or prove anything to a court. It finds the plain failures that stop a screen reader or keyboard user. Pick five pages: the home page, a listing, one product or service page, your checkout, booking or contact form, and your login if you have one. The times below are our rough estimates.

1. Run an automatic scan (30 minutes)

Use WAVE, which needs nothing installed, or the free axe DevTools extension for Chrome. Developers can use the command line below; it needs to be pointed at your Chrome. Deal with the plain failures first: alt text, form labels, empty links and buttons, and the page language. Don't stop there. Deque, which makes axe, reported in 2021 that automated testing caught 57% of issues by volume across its own audits. That's a vendor's number, and it still leaves about four in ten for a person to find.

2. Put the mouse away (45 minutes)

Press Tab through each page. Can you see where you are at every step? Can you open the menu, dismiss the cookie banner, and get through the whole checkout using only the keyboard? Is anything you land on hidden behind a sticky header? A dead end here is the worst thing you can find, because it stops the sale outright.

3. Listen to it (45 minutes)

Turn on VoiceOver on a Mac (Command + F5), or install the free NVDA on Windows. Close your eyes on the checkout. Are the buttons named? Does each form field say what it wants? When an error appears, do you hear about it? This won't replace testing with people who use a screen reader every day, but you will learn a lot quickly.

4. Zoom and shrink (15 minutes)

Zoom the browser to 200%, then narrow the window to about 320 pixels wide. Text should stay readable and the page shouldn't need sideways scrolling. Check contrast too: WCAG AA asks for 4.5:1 on normal text and 3:1 on large text. Pale grey on white is a usual offender, and low contrast has topped WebAIM's list every year from 2019 to 2026.

5. Check what WCAG 2.2 added (30 minutes)

6. Write it down (15 minutes)

Note the date, pages, tools and what you found and fixed, and do it again after each big change. Add a real way for customers to report a barrier, and answer them. A complaint handled by email is cheaper than one handled by a lawyer, and in the EU you may need a public statement anyway.

What happened when we ran it on our own site

We ran axe-core 4.14 on five pages of biz59.net on 3 November 2026, plus a small script of ours that counts controls under 24 pixels. This covers step 1 and part of step 5 only.

Two things came out of this that you should expect on your own site. First, the same engine run through pa11y reported 59, 25 and 217 "errors" on the first three pages, and all 301 were marked in the raw output as needing further review. Axe couldn't work out the background colour because of a CSS pseudo-element on our pages, so it asked for a person to look. It hadn't found a failure. We checked our main text colours against plain backgrounds by hand: 9.88:1 for body text and 4.83:1 for muted grey on white, but only 4.51:1 for muted grey on our soft panel colour, just over the 4.5 line. We checked those colour pairs, not all the flagged elements, and not text over the tinted area at the top of the page. A big scanner number can be mostly noise, and it can also hide the one thing that matters.

Second, the real finding was small and easy to miss. Three reaction buttons under an article have visible text that doesn't appear in their accessible name, which axe reports as a Label in Name failure. Someone using voice control and saying what they see on the button could fail to trigger it. None of this tells us about keyboard or screen reader use, which is where steps 2 and 3 come in. A mostly clean automated scan isn't a claim that we conform, and it shouldn't be one for you either.

If a letter has already arrived

Don't ignore it, and don't reply yourself. Note any deadline, then speak to a lawyer who handles ADA website claims. Tell your insurer early if you hold a policy that might respond, because late notice can be a problem; our cyber insurance piece explains how to read those policies.

Save a dated copy of the pages named, then run the checks above and start fixing what's plainly broken, with a log. Don't buy a widget in a panic. When terms arrive, price the non-money parts: how many audits, for how long, by whom, and what happens if an audit finds something. Ask whether fixes you've already made count. And remember the repeat figure: 1,427 suits in 2025 went to companies already sued once. A settlement with no real fix buys you very little.

If you are setting up a site now, this is easiest to do on day one, when labels, alt text and keyboard support are just part of the build. Our afternoon setup guide covers the rest of the basics, and it's worth asking any developer or AI builder you use to test against WCAG 2.2 AA from the first screen.

Sources

US filings: Seyfarth Shaw, ADA Title III blog: Federal court website accessibility lawsuit filings bounce back in 2025 (March 2026; yearly and state counts, Florida's 470 to 961, California explanation); UsableNet 2025 year-end report (5,114 total, federal and state split, industries, revenue split, 1,427 repeat suits, monthly widget figures; the 1,416 total is our sum); BOIA on the Oklahoma suits (August 2023, reporting the Journal Record).

US law and cost: Justice Department web guidance (March 2022); ADA text (Title III remedies, sections 12188 and 12205); Morgan Lewis on Martinez v. Cot'n Wash (August 2022); Regulatory Review on Robles and the circuit split; Epstein Becker Green on Winegard v. Newsday (2021); Cozen O'Connor on California claims (2023; Unruh $4,000 and the per-visit reading); Accessible.org on settlement amounts (April 2024; client reports, not a dataset); IRS Form 8826 (revision September 2017; eligibility, limits and double-benefit rule).

Overlays: FTC final order against accessiBe (22 April 2025).

EU: Directive (EU) 2019/882 (Articles 2, 3, 4, 13, 14, 30, 31, 32 and Annexes V and VI); Level Access: EAA enforcement one year in (June 2026; enforcement timeline and national maximums; vendor source); Deque on the French rulings; Silktide on the Auchan ruling; section 37 of the German BFSG (fine caps); Davis Wright Tremaine on EN 301 549 V4.1.1 (18 September 2026).

Testing: WebAIM Million 2026 (failure rates); W3C: What's new in WCAG 2.2 (criteria, levels and exceptions); Deque's automated coverage study (2021, vendor data). Our own scan: axe-core 4.14 directly, and pa11y 10 with its axe runner, in Chrome, WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 A and AA rules, 3 November 2026.