For a lot of business owners, the first time they hear the words "website accessibility" is in a letter from a lawyer. The letter says a customer with a disability could not use the site, names the law it says you broke, and asks you to respond.
That letter is far from rare. According to the count kept by the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal courts in 2025, up 27% from 2,452 the year before. That figure does not include cases filed in state courts, or the demand letters that never reach a courtroom at all.
The good news is that almost every one of those claims points at the same handful of fixable problems. Once you understand what the law asks, what actually blocks people on a website, and what a real fix looks like, you can deal with it properly instead of reacting in a panic.
The first 2 numbers come from Seyfarth Shaw's federal court count. The last 2 come from WebAIM's February 2026 scan of the home pages of the top 1 million websites. Put them together and the picture is clear: the problems are everywhere, and they are mostly the same problems.
What the Law Actually Asks of Your Website
The law behind most of these claims is the Americans with Disabilities Act. The part of it that covers businesses open to the public says you must not treat people with disabilities worse than everyone else, and that includes what you offer online.
Does that include your website? The US Justice Department says it does. Its web guidance, published in March 2022, states that the law's requirements apply to all the goods and services businesses offer, "including those offered on the web."
What the law does not give you is a checklist. The same guidance says businesses "have flexibility in how they comply," and that the department "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards" for business websites. It points instead to existing technical standards as helpful guidance.
Those guidelines come from the group that sets most of the web's core standards, and their full name is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They come in 3 levels, and the middle one, called AA, is what most organizations aim for. The latest version is 2.2, and anything meeting it also meets the 2 versions before it.
Is every business covered in the same way? Not quite. Courts do not all agree on whether the law reaches businesses that exist only online.
Seyfarth Shaw notes that appeals courts covering California have concluded it does not, and California's federal courts saw only 4 new website accessibility lawsuits in 2025. Over the same period, New York's federal courts saw 1,021 and Florida's saw 961.
This is general information about US rules, not legal advice. Whether and how this law applies to your website can depend on where you operate and whether you also have a physical location. If you have already received a demand letter, speak to a lawyer who handles these claims, usually called accessibility or disability access claims, before you reply.
For everyone else, the practical question is simpler than the legal one. Can a customer who uses a keyboard instead of a mouse, or software that reads the page aloud, actually find what they need on your site and complete what they came to do?
Your Website Works Fine, Until Someone Uses It Without a Mouse
Most business owners test their website the way they use it: on a screen, with a mouse or a thumb. By that test, the site works. Pages load, buttons click, the checkout goes through.
Now picture the same site used by someone who is blind and relies on a screen reader, software that reads each part of the page aloud and lets them move through it with the keyboard. What they get is only what the code tells the screen reader. If a button has no name in the code, the screen reader has nothing to say about it.
That is why accessibility problems survive for so long. The people who build and approve the site rarely use it the way these customers do, so the gaps stay invisible to everyone who could fix them.
It is also why a demand letter can feel like it came out of nowhere. From your side, the site works. From the side of someone moving through it by keyboard and listening to each element, it may not work at all.
Can you check this yourself? Partly, in a few minutes. Put your mouse aside and try to reach every link, menu, and button on your home page using only the Tab and Enter keys. If you get stuck, lose track of where you are, or cannot close something, a keyboard user will too.
The 6 Failures Behind Almost Every Inaccessible Site
WebAIM, a nonprofit accessibility organization, scans the home pages of the top 1 million websites each year. In its February 2026 report, 95.9% of those home pages had detected failures against the accessibility guidelines, with an average of 56.1 errors per page.
The more useful finding is how repetitive those errors are. According to the same report, 96% of all the errors it detected fall into just 6 categories. Fix those 6 across your site and you have dealt with most of what an automated check will ever find.
Notice what these 6 have in common. None of them needs a redesign. Each one is a detail in the code, and most live in shared templates like the header, the product page, or the form layout, so a single fix can clear the same error across hundreds of pages.
Does fixing these 6 make a site fully accessible? No. Automated checks are good at catching these patterns, but some problems only show up when a person tries a real task with a keyboard or a screen reader, like a menu that opens but cannot be closed, or a checkout step that loses the cursor. That is where manual testing comes in, and it is covered in the steps below.
Why an Accessibility Widget Will Not Get You Out of Trouble
Search for a quick fix and you will find accessibility widgets, sometimes called overlays. You add a line of code, a small icon appears on your site, and the product promises to make the site accessible or compliant automatically.
It is an appealing promise, because it asks nothing of your site's actual code. That is also the problem. A widget sits on top of the site. The unnamed buttons, missing labels, and keyboard traps underneath are usually still there.
The US Federal Trade Commission has already acted on claims like these. In April 2025, it approved a final order against accessiBe, a widget maker, that bars the company from claiming its automated products can make any website meet the accessibility guidelines, or keep meeting them over time, unless it has evidence to support that claim.
Missing descriptions and labels. Guessed automatically, if at all, by software that does not know what your buttons do.
Keyboard problems. Menus and pop-ups that trap the keyboard usually stay exactly as they were.
Screen reader users. Many already use their own tools, which read your code, not the widget.
If you are challenged. You can show that you installed a product, not that your site works.
Missing descriptions and labels. Written by someone who knows what each image shows and each button does.
Keyboard problems. Fixed in the shared templates, so every page behaves the same way.
Screen reader users. Their own tools finally have real names and structure to read.
If you are challenged. You can show what was tested, what was fixed, and how you keep checking.
Is there any place for these tools? Some visitors like being able to enlarge text or switch colors, and there is nothing wrong with offering that. The mistake is treating a widget as the fix, and relying on it as your answer if someone says your site does not work for them.
That order concerned a single company, but the lesson carries across the whole category. No product added on top of a site can know what your images show, what your buttons do, or whether your checkout works by keyboard. Someone has to look at the site itself.
What Else Improves When Your Site Opens Up
It is easy to treat accessibility purely as legal protection. That undersells it. Most of the fixes that help customers with disabilities also make the site better for everyone else, and for the software that reads your site on their behalf.
Is accessibility only about people with disabilities? No. Good contrast helps anyone reading a phone in bright sunlight, and captions help anyone watching a video on mute in a waiting room. Clear labels and error messages help every customer finish a form on the first try, and a site that works by keyboard also works better for people who simply prefer it.
It also helps with search. Image descriptions, clear headings, named buttons, and a declared page language are exactly the structure search engines and AI assistants rely on to understand a page. A page that a screen reader can make sense of is usually a page that software can make sense of too.
If you want to see how your site reads to that software, run your site through the free AI search readiness checker. Many of the items it flags, like missing image descriptions and weak heading structure, overlap directly with the accessibility fixes above.
And then there are the customers themselves. Older buyers with fading eyesight, people with a temporary injury, customers with a disability who would happily buy from you if the site let them. Every one of them who gives up is a sale that went somewhere else.
How to Make Your Site Accessible, 1 Template at a Time
Fixing accessibility does not usually mean rebuilding your website. It means testing it the way real customers use it, fixing problems where they start, and keeping the site that way as it changes.
The order below works for most business websites, from a service company's 20 pages to an online store with thousands of products.
Do you need to fix every page by hand? Rarely. On most sites, the bulk of the errors come from a small number of shared templates. Content editors then handle the rest as they go, like writing a description for each new image they upload.
Which pages come first? The ones where a customer is trying to do something: buy, book, sign up, or contact you. Those are the pages that matter most to the people locked out, and the pages a demand letter is most likely to describe.
Whoever does this work for you, whether it is your own team, your current web developer, or an outside specialist, the same 4 questions tell you quickly whether the job will be done properly.
That last question matters more than it looks. In Jones v. Moscot.com, decided in the federal court for the Southern District of New York and reported by Seyfarth Shaw in April 2026, the business showed it had worked with an accessibility consultant, had an audit report, had fixed what the audit found, and had a plan for ongoing checks. The court dismissed the case as moot, and the plaintiff offered no evidence to the contrary.
Seyfarth Shaw notes that the dismissal was without prejudice, so the plaintiff could try again, and it does not guarantee the same result anywhere else. Its takeaway is still a useful one: businesses that invest in website accessibility are better placed to defend against copy-and-paste lawsuits.
Where the Legal Risk Does Not Fully Go Away
A properly fixed site puts you in a far stronger position. It does not make you untouchable. These are the areas worth keeping an eye on after the main work is done.
What if you simply cannot fix everything at once? Few businesses can, and nobody expects perfection in a single pass. Start with the tasks that matter most, fix the templates, publish your statement with a real contact route, and keep a record as you go. Visible, steady progress is far better than a site nobody has looked at.
If you are planning a redesign anyway, that is the ideal moment to build accessibility in from the start. A guide to what actually matters in design and usability treats accessible design as a default rather than an extra, which is exactly where it belongs.
Frequently Asked Questions
If your site is a product rather than a brochure, the design mistakes that quietly kill software products covers accessibility alongside the other quality bars users notice.
And to see where accessibility fits in the way we design and build, from the first wireframe to launch, visit how we work.
A demand letter tells you what one customer could not do on your site. The better move is finding that out first. Test your site the way these customers use it, fix the problems where they start, and you end up with a site that more people can use and a record that shows you took it seriously.
At Entexis, we test and fix websites the way real customers use them: with a keyboard, with a screen reader, and against the accessibility guidelines at level AA. We fix problems in your shared templates so every page improves at once, and we give you a clear record of what was tested, fixed, and still open. If you want to know where your site stands before a letter tells you, let us walk you through a no-pressure discovery session. Start the conversation with Entexis.
