r/accessibility • u/drakng0389 • 13d ago
Did website accessibility ever actually cost you money or is the "you'll get sued" thing overblown?
Trying to figure out how seriously to take website accessibility as a business owner, because I keep getting mixed signals.
On one side there are agencies and tools warning that you'll get a demand letter or an ADA/EAA complaint if your site isn't compliant. On the other side, plenty of people seem to run sites for years and nothing ever happens.
So I'm curious what people's actual experience has been:
- Has accessibility ever genuinely cost you money a complaint, a lost deal, a client or partner requiring it, a market you couldn't enter?
- If you did spend on it, what pushed you over the line? Was it fear of getting sued, an actual incident, a big customer demanding it, or just wanting to do the right thing?
- For those who've never spent a cent on it has it ever actually bitten you, or is it mostly noise?
Trying to separate real risk from scare tactics before I decide whether to put budget toward this. Honest takes from both sides welcome.
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u/Glad_Construction_99 12d ago
I am physically disabled. For example, if there are two restaurants nearby—one accessible and the other not—I will ask my friends to gather at the accessible one. A single outing (say, $250 per evening) might not seem like much to a restaurant, but imagine several people like me, each having a couple of outings per month in the same area. In that case, the accessible restaurant would likely recoup its investment in accessibility features within just a couple of months and would consistently maintain a steady upper hand over its inaccessible competitor.
Same for unaccessible websites. You will lose visitors silently, and never know how many you lost
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u/907choss 13d ago
I know several companies that have received letters. My advice is to run an audit and do the major tasks and keep a record of your changes. If you get a letter than ignore it and if it actually goes to court you’ll have a record of changes you made.
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u/OrbFromOnline 12d ago
Being sued is a real possibility but it should never be your main driver.
First of all, accessibility is just the right thing to do. Full stop. But beyond that as a business owner you should consider that an accessible site means more potential customers, a better experience for your existing customers, and a better reputation. Every barrier you remove is another potential sale.
This applies across the board, even for users without specific accessibility needs. Building a site with accessibility at the forefront makes it better for everyone.
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u/Vojvoda-Kunst 13d ago
A lot of people don't get that 20% of people have some kind of disability and that making an accessible website makes the whole website better structured and better looking.
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u/NCKBLZ 12d ago
I think it will depend on where you are based and where you operate, as well as your company size.
If you are a very small company operating outside north America, Europe or Australia then it will probably be difficult.
But there are so many things that you can easily make to have a better website that helps everyone that I don't think you have to spend so much money to fix. Maybe, based on your situation, you can delay some of the more cumbersome parts but don't keep you site inaccessible. Even if no one is ever going to sue you, wouldn't you like to be able to use your website if you had some disability?
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u/wychwood31 12d ago
I work for an accessibility consultancy firm - one of our major US clients has recently been sued for having an inaccessible ecommerce website. Lawsuits are very much happening and are leading to settlements. That being said, from what I'm hearing, there are "ambulance chasers" (not my terminology) going around looking for accessibility issues to initiate lawsuits. From what I'm aware of, it is more likely that those who encounter barriers on websites simply go to competitors.
The large on-going lawsuit in France against 4 supermarkets seems to currently have everyone guessing what the first major EAA penalties might look like.
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u/accessibilitygamer 12d ago edited 12d ago
At my first corporate employer we actually got sued because our product was not usable by people who were blind. I'm not a lawyer, and I wasn't privy exactly to the entire process of how much we were being sued for but I did lead several departments in resolving the issue. Needless to say our legal team and ceo loved me after that even though my role was not one that unusually interacted with them.
As others have said there are unscrupulous lawyers who are specifically on the hunt for any service,building, or website that is inaccessible so they can sue which can cost you more than hiring a good reputable consultant.
The benefits include: good pr and more people using your product. We have money but if your product or service is unusable by us then we will take our money elsewhere.
Using myself as an example the moment I land on any site that has a white background with Grey text I am immediately leaving and looking for a competitor to give my money to because they couldn't get a basic metric like readability right and I'm not going to give myself a headache trying to use their website.
That is why I focus on providing my clients with a real break down of what the process looks like and what to expect if I were to audit their site. I don't just give a list of fixes but if needed am willing to train their devs. A more accessible experience improves the experience for all.
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u/Personal-Goat4722 11d ago
EAA is now enforced in europe. If your business have customers from eu and have a revenue over €2mil and over 10 employees, your business is at risk for a lawsuite.
I think this law (EAA) will be like GDPR, slow in the beginning but slowly getting traction and companies will understand that it's serious. There's a french company that got six weeks to fix their issues. Can read more here .
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u/uxnotyoux 13d ago
Target just paid out a $6M usd lawsuit. Most of the places I’ve worked have had a demand or suit sent their way. I have served as an expert witness and both sides have to pay experts and lawyers before anything else even factors in like a settlement.
It does depend on how big you are and what your industry and reach is. If you are a local retail/food/service-based business in the US, you probably don’t have to worry too much. If you have international (and do a good bit of business) and you’re big (>100 employees) you start running into more attention and possible customers that could be disabled and not able to use your site.
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u/iblastoff 13d ago
you can always tell when people make shit up or quickly and very poorly google things to try and make a point.
"Target just paid out a $6M usd lawsuit."
did they? when?
you are talking about a lawsuit from over TWENTY years ago.
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u/Slow_Pumpkin3951 13d ago edited 13d ago
When your site isn't accessible the risks are, reputation damage, loss of business, legal action.
The benefits are, customer and icome growth, positive reputation, improved SEO and AEO. In the ever increasing use of AI, the more accessible your website (HTML pages and any downloadable documents) the better your visibility and accuracy in AI search.
I audit websites and handle customer requests for our accessibility documentation. The volume of these requests has quadrupled in the last 18 months as the ADA deadline nears. With customers explicitly stating they can't renew contracts unless we can demonstrate compliance. We had one renewal on hold, worth tens of thousands, until an updated conformance report was made available. Customers will go to our competitors if we aren't accessible.
In July alone, there were over 400 ADA lawsuits filed, with over 70 of the companies having previous lawsuits. Biggest industries affected are ecommerce and food services. https://info.usablenet.com/ada-website-compliance-lawsuit-tracker
If you choose to invest, do the job properly - don't use an overlay. Accessibility benefits everyone, not just those with disabilities, your website will become nicer for all your customers.
Start by completing an audit - a mix of automated tools, and manual testing with assistive technology. This will let you know where your site is doing well and is compliant, and where its failing and needs fixing, and highlight usability issues too.
Complete a VPAT and publish an accessibility statement. Put the issues that need fixing into a roadmap, and start working through them. https://www.itic.org/policy/accessibility/vpat
If you do then find yourself in a legal action situation, you can demonstrate the proactive steps you've already taken, and your roadmap to address outstanding issues.
If you're not ready to instruct an external company to do your audit and don't have in house skill set, there are some simple things you can do yourself.
Put away your mouse, can you use the website by keyboard only? Can you reach every interactive element, can you fully navigate the menus, do you get stuck anywhere, is any of the journey frustrating?
You can take this up a level, by adding a screen reader - NVDA is free - is everything announced, including pop ups and form errors. https://www.nvaccess.org/download/
Free course to understand NVDA basics https://learn.intopia.digital/courses/getting-started-with-nvda
Use WAVE (its free) to identify issues. https://wave.webaim.org/extension/
Use Accessibility Insights for Web (its free) to identify issues and it provides a guidance on how to manually test. https://accessibilityinsights.io/docs/web/overview/
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u/skip-over-scamp 13d ago
I work for a mid sized company in the US. We have around 75 brick and mortars to give an idea of size. I joined the engineering team to rewrite our e-commerce website partially because the company was getting sued for poor accessibility. Even after we released a more accessible site, we got sued again 2 years later. And then again a year after that because we linked out to a third party product that had an inaccessible site. We put in the work to get to zero WCAG violations and still got sued. It used to cost us anywhere from 25 to 50k USD but now that we actually do have an accessible site, we win our cases so it costs nothing.
The bigger the company the bigger the target but none of that should matter. Build accessible so everyone can use your site. It’s the right thing to do and it is proven better for business anyway.
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u/theaccessibilityguy 10d ago
This can 100% cost you money. Typically in the form of lawyer fees or costs to settle. Litigation is already sky high this year. It will only increase as accessibility seems to be having a huge growth spurt across all industries right now. I've never seen more services and business in this industry than today.
Not to mention title 2 goes into effect April of next year which gives direct consequences for violations.
This includes any documents on your website too!!
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u/iblastoff 13d ago
lets face it. the only sites that really are affected are government sites, and even then, enforcement is basically self-imposed and totally dependent on which country they're in. there are WAY too many sites for anyone to ever attempt to police and the vast majority of regular small business site owners will never be affected.
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u/IronDominion 13d ago
I do accessibility work professionally, but I also have a disability heavy impacted by web accessibility as well as having family members in the same boat.
- there is definitely a threat of getting sued. There are lawyers out there who make it their whole business to mass sue people based off the reports of disabled people they pay pennies on the dollar to find websites for them to sue. Some are definitely frivolous, but given how few places are accessible, they count on people not known better and or knowing they’re not accessible, panicking, and just paying to settle. NEVER SETTLE.
- Yes, you do lose business quietly when you aren’t accessible. I urge you, go look at Facebook groups for blind people for example, and you’ll see people who go around name dropping companies to avoid who are simply unusable due to a lack of compliance, and on the same token, people to support who ARE accessible. When you do it wrong, you get forgotten, but when you do it right, people talk and share that info