In 2025, American courts logged 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits. That is a 27% jump over 2024, and once you add state filings the total passes 5,000. Here is the part that should get your attention: nearly 70% of those suits targeted e-commerce and retail sites, and many of the defendants were small operations running WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento stores with revenues under $25 million.
Plaintiffs’ firms are not chasing Amazon. Amazon has lawyers. They are chasing the online candle shop with a checkout form that a screen reader cannot parse. If that sounds like your store, this article is your warning shot.
Why Small Stores Became the Favorite Target
Serial plaintiffs and the firms behind them have turned accessibility litigation into a volume business. The playbook is simple: run an automated scan across thousands of sites, flag the ones with missing alt text or broken keyboard navigation, and send demand letters. Most small merchants settle for $5,000 to $25,000 because defending a federal case costs more than that before you ever see a courtroom.
Small stores are attractive precisely because they settle fast. They have no in-house counsel, no compliance team, and often no idea the ADA applies to their website at all. It does. Courts have applied Title III to online stores for years, and the filing numbers show no sign of slowing.
What to do: assume you are scannable. If a bot can find your accessibility gaps in 30 seconds, so can a plaintiff’s firm. Run the same scan on yourself first (more on how below).
The Widget Trap: Why That Overlay Won’t Save You
Thousands of store owners have bought an accessibility widget, dropped one line of JavaScript into their theme, and considered the problem solved. The lawsuit data says otherwise. Sites running overlays get sued regularly, and some complaints now cite the widget itself as an obstacle for screen reader users.
Regulators noticed too. In April 2025, the FTC finalized a $1 million order against a major overlay vendor over marketing claims that its automated tool could make websites WCAG-compliant. The message from the government was blunt: no plugin can automate its way to full compliance.
Widgets can be one small layer in a real program. They are not a shield, and treating them as one may actually paint a target on your store, since scanning tools can detect which sites rely on them.
What to do: if you pay for an overlay, keep it if you like, but do not let it replace fixing your actual code, templates, and product content.
Selling Into Europe? The EAA Just Turned One
The European Accessibility Act took effect on June 28, 2025, and it applies to businesses selling to EU consumers even if the company sits in Toronto or Texas. Only true microenterprises, meaning fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in turnover, get a limited exemption for services.
Year one has been quieter than many predicted. No monetary fines have been confirmed yet under any national EAA law. But the machinery is moving. In France, four disability organizations served formal legal notices on Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Picard in July 2025, then filed emergency injunctions in November when the responses fell short. The Netherlands and other member states have signaled enforcement activity for 2026.
The penalty ranges are not small. France can impose €5,000 to €250,000 plus ongoing penalties. Germany allows up to €100,000 per violation. Sweden’s ceiling sits near €900,000. If EU customers are more than a rounding error in your revenue, this is now a real line item of risk.
What to do: check whether you exceed the microenterprise threshold and ship to the EU. If yes, you need an accessibility statement and a WCAG 2.1 AA remediation plan, not eventually, now.
The Fix List That Actually Reduces Risk
The good news: most lawsuits cite the same handful of failures, which means a focused week of work removes most of your exposure. Start here.
1. Run a free scan today
WAVE and Lighthouse are free and take minutes. They will catch the obvious problems: missing alt text, low contrast, unlabeled form fields, missing page titles. Fix everything they flag before doing anything fancier.
2. Unplug your mouse
Try to browse, add to cart, and check out using only the Tab, Enter, and arrow keys. If you get stuck anywhere, so does a customer with a motor impairment, and so does the plaintiff’s expert witness. Checkout flows are the single most cited failure point in e-commerce suits.
3. Fix your product images and forms
Every product image needs alt text that describes the product, not “IMG_2047.jpg”. Every form field needs a visible label. These two items alone appear in the majority of complaints.
4. Test with a real screen reader
NVDA is free on Windows, VoiceOver is built into every Mac. Spend 30 minutes navigating your own store. Automated scanners catch maybe a third of real-world barriers; your ears will catch more.
5. Publish an accessibility statement
State your commitment, your target standard (WCAG 2.1 AA), and a contact channel for issues. It will not stop a lawsuit by itself, but it demonstrates good faith, gives real users a path to reach you before a lawyer does, and is required in the EU.
The Takeaway
Accessibility used to be a nice-to-have that lived at the bottom of the redesign backlog. In 2026 it is a legal exposure with a 27% annual growth rate and a European enforcement regime warming up behind it. The stores that get sued are not the worst offenders. They are simply the ones that never looked.
Spend one afternoon this week scanning your site and tabbing through your checkout. It is the cheapest legal protection you will buy all year, and unlike a settlement, it also wins you customers.
