The letter usually arrives as a PDF attached to an email from a law firm you have never heard of. It names a person who is blind and uses a screen reader. It says that person visited your store, tried to buy something, and could not, because buttons had no names, product photos had no descriptions, or the cart could not be reached without a mouse. It cites the Americans with Disabilities Act and a set of guidelines called WCAG. It offers to settle before a lawsuit is filed.
Most owners who get one assume it is a scam, a mistake, or a problem only big retailers have. It is usually none of those. Online stores are the single most sued kind of business in website accessibility cases, and most of the companies sued are not large.
So here is the direct answer to "what does ADA website compliance mean for my store?" There is no federal checklist for a business website. What letters and courts measure you against, in practice, is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) at Level AA, and the real test underneath is simple: can a shopper using a screen reader or a keyboard find a product, choose it and pay for it? An accessibility widget pasted onto your theme does not make that true, and the federal government has said so in writing.
This piece covers why stores are the target, what the law does and does not require, why the overlay apps are not the answer, and the 20-minute test that will show you where your own store stands. It is not legal advice. If a letter is already on your desk, the last section is for you.
Seven in Ten Website Accessibility Lawsuits Are Aimed at Online Stores
There are two counts of these lawsuits, and they get mixed up constantly, so it is worth being clear which is which.
The narrower one comes from Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that defends businesses in these cases and counts every federal filing. Plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025, up 27% from 2,452 in 2024. Those cases made up 36% of every ADA lawsuit against businesses in federal court that year, accessibility of buildings included.
The wider count comes from UsableNet, a company that sells accessibility testing and remediation, so read its numbers knowing it has something to sell. It adds New York and California state courts plus apps and video, and it put 2025 at more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits. Within that, it found:
- About 70% of the 2025 cases were against ecommerce businesses, rising to 79% in the first half of 2026.
- 64% of the companies sued in 2025 had annual revenue under $25 million.
- 46% of federal cases were against companies that had already been sued before.
The reason stores sit at the top is not mysterious. For an online store, the website is not a brochure about the business. It is the business. A restaurant's inaccessible menu page is a problem; an online store's inaccessible checkout is the whole service denied. That is exactly the argument a complaint makes.
The other reason is volume. A small number of plaintiff firms file most of these cases, and their complaints are close to templates. A firm does not need to find a store that is unusually bad. It needs stores that fail in the ordinary ways, and the ordinary failures are everywhere. The repeat-defendant figure tells you something else: a settlement followed by a light patch job is an invitation for the next plaintiff, because the same barriers are still sitting there.
The Law Never Wrote a Checklist. The Lawsuits Use WCAG Anyway.
The ADA says businesses open to the public must give people with disabilities full and equal enjoyment of their goods and services. It was written in 1990, before anyone shopped online, and Congress has never added a technical rule for business websites.
The Department of Justice has filled the gap with a position rather than a regulation. Its 2022 guidance, still live on ada.gov, says the department has held since 1996 that the ADA applies to web content, and that businesses "have flexibility in how they comply" but "must comply." It points to WCAG and the federal government's Section 508 standards as helpful technical guides. In 2024 the department did adopt a hard technical rule, WCAG 2.1 Level AA, but that rule covers state and local governments, not stores. If you read a headline about a new web accessibility deadline, check who it applies to before you panic.
The gap is where WCAG comes in. WCAG is published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the body that sets web standards. Version 2.2, the current one, was finalized in October 2023. Demand letters and complaints usually cite version 2.0 or 2.1 at Level AA, and when courts order a business to fix its site, WCAG is the yardstick they use. In the best-known case, Robles v. Domino's Pizza, a federal court in 2021 ordered the pizza chain to make its website conform to WCAG 2.0. That came two years after the Ninth Circuit ruled that the ADA covered the website because it connected customers to the chain's physical restaurants.
That last detail matters for an online-only store, because courts disagree about whether you are covered at all:
- California appeals courts ruled in 2022 (Martinez v. Cot'n Wash) that a website standing alone is not a place of public accommodation under the ADA. Federal website lawsuits in California fell to four in 2025.
- New York federal courts have been more willing to let cases against online-only businesses proceed. New York had 1,021 federal website cases in 2025, more than any other state.
- Florida nearly doubled to 961, and Illinois had 585 and kept climbing into 2026.
Here is the part owners miss: your exposure follows your customers, not your address. A store run from a garage in Arizona that ships to New York shoppers can be sued in New York. The federal ADA itself only lets a private plaintiff win an order to fix the site plus legal fees, but several states add money damages on top. California's Unruh Act carries a minimum of $4,000 per violation, which is why so many complaints pair a federal claim with a state one.
An Accessibility Overlay Is a Ramp Painted on the Stairs
You have seen the pitch. Paste one line of code into your theme, a little wheelchair icon appears in the corner, and the app promises compliance, often for a monthly fee that sounds cheap next to a lawsuit.
What that widget actually does is add a toolbar. A shopper can make text bigger, turn up contrast, pause animations, and maybe hear the page read aloud. Some versions also try to guess descriptions for unlabeled images and patch code on the fly. All of that changes how the page looks. Very little of it changes how the page works for someone who never sees it.
A blind shopper already has a screen reader, and it is far better than any toolbar. What stops them is underneath: an add-to-cart button the screen reader announces only as "button," a size picker built from colored squares that cannot be selected from a keyboard, a cart drawer that slides open while the keyboard focus stays behind on the page, a popup that cannot be closed. Those are the barriers complaints describe, and an overlay does not reach them.
Three pieces of evidence, from three directions:
- The FTC. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalized an order requiring accessiBe, one of the best-known overlay vendors, to pay $1 million. The order bars it from claiming its automated product can make any website WCAG compliant, or keep one compliant, unless it has evidence to back that up. The FTC's complaint also alleged it had dressed up paid endorsements as independent reviews.
- The Department of Justice. Its own guidance says automated checkers and overlays "need to be used carefully" and that "a 'clean' report does not necessarily mean everything is accessible."
- The lawsuits. UsableNet counted between 95 and 155 lawsuits a month in 2025 against companies that already had a widget installed. Some complaints now name the widget itself as a barrier, because a toolbar that injects its own controls can get in the way of the screen reader the shopper already uses.
None of this means the tools are evil or that larger text is useless. It means the widget is not a defense, and paying for one can buy you the feeling of having dealt with the problem while every barrier a plaintiff would cite stays exactly where it was.
Your Shopify Theme Shipped Accessible. Your Store Probably Isn't.
If you run on Shopify, there is good news and a catch. The good news is that Shopify takes this seriously at the platform level. Its free Dawn theme and its hosted checkout both have published accessibility conformance reports, and themes sold in the Shopify Theme Store have to meet accessibility requirements before they are listed. The catch is in Shopify's own help page on theme accessibility: following its guidelines "doesn't guarantee that your online store is fully accessible."
That is because most of what breaks a store is not the theme. It is what the owner added on top. WebAIM, a nonprofit at Utah State University, scans the home pages of the top million websites every year. Its 2026 report found detectable failures on the vast majority of them, and the most common ones map almost one to one onto parts of a typical store:
- Low-contrast text, on 83.9% of home pages. In a store this is the pale gray price, the light sale badge, the white text on a pastel banner. Shopify lets you set these colors in theme settings, which also means you are the one who picked them.
- Images missing alternative text, on 53.1%. Every product photo you upload without filling in the alt text field is one a screen reader either skips or announces as a file name.
- Form fields with no labels, on 51%. The email signup popup that relies on faded placeholder text inside the box, which disappears the moment someone starts typing.
- Empty links and empty buttons, on 46.3% and 30.6%. The icon-only cart, search and account buttons in your header, and the plus and minus quantity buttons, if they carry no text a screen reader can announce.
Then come the apps. Review widgets, size-chart popups, upsell drawers, email capture modals, chat bubbles and countdown banners each bring their own code, and each one can add a barrier your theme never had. The text you put inside images matters too. A banner that says "40% off everything this weekend" as part of the picture is invisible to a screen reader unless you write it into the alt text.
Twenty Minutes With a Keyboard Finds What a Scanner Misses
Automated scanners are a good start and a bad finish. When the UK government's digital service built a test page with 142 deliberate barriers and ran the popular checkers against it, the best single tool found about 40% of them and the worst found 13%. The rest needed a person. So test in three passes.
Pass one: a free scanner, ten minutes. Run WebAIM's free WAVE tool, or the Lighthouse report built into Chrome, on your homepage, one collection page, one product page and your cart. You are looking for the easy wins: missing alt text, contrast failures, unlabeled form fields, empty buttons. Write them down. Do not treat a good score as a pass.
Pass two: put the mouse away, ten minutes. Start on your homepage and use only the Tab key to move, Shift and Tab to go back, Enter to click, and the arrow keys and space bar inside menus. Try to buy something. At every step ask two questions: can I see where I am, and can I do the thing?
The places stores fail most often on this pass are predictable. The focus outline is invisible, because someone removed it for looks. The size or color swatches are not reachable. The cart drawer opens visually while the keyboard focus stays on the page behind it. An email popup appears and cannot be closed without a mouse, which means a keyboard user's visit ends right there.
Pass three: listen to one product page, a few minutes. On an iPhone, turn on VoiceOver in Settings under Accessibility, open your best-selling product page and swipe right through it. Listen for product photos announced as file names, buttons announced only as "button," and the price or the add-to-cart button being hard to find. It will feel clumsy the first time. That clumsiness is a small taste of what your store is like for someone who shops this way every day.
One note on checkout. If you use Shopify's hosted checkout, its core fields, labels and error messages are Shopify's to build and maintain. But the colors you set in the checkout editor are yours, and so is anything an app adds to checkout or the order status page. Check your brand colors there against the contrast rule too.
The Path to the Buy Button Is Where Every Complaint Starts
You will not fix everything this week, and you do not need to fix it in alphabetical order. Fix it in the order a shopper spends money: can they find it, choose it, add it and pay for it?
Product images. Fill in the alt text on every product photo, starting with your best sellers. Shopify has a field for it on each image in the product editor. Write what a sighted shopper learns from the photo, in a sentence: "Navy linen shirt, front view, worn untucked with chinos" beats "shirt" and beats "IMG_4471." Do not stuff it with keywords, and do not start with "image of." For a lifestyle shot that adds nothing beyond the main photo, a short description is fine.
Choosing and adding. Size, color and quantity controls must work from a keyboard and announce what they are and what is selected. If your theme's own pickers do this and an app replaced them with something prettier, the app is the problem. The add-to-cart button needs a visible change and a spoken confirmation when it works.
Popups and drawers. Every popup needs a close button a keyboard can reach and a screen reader can name, and should close with the Escape key. When a cart drawer or popup opens, focus should move into it, and when it closes, focus should come back to where the shopper was. Ask each app's support team directly whether their component does this. If they cannot answer, that tells you something.
Contrast. WCAG AA asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text against its background. Free contrast checkers will tell you in seconds whether your sale badge, your gray body text and your button colors pass. Fixing it is usually a change in theme settings, not a redesign.
Forms. Your email signup, contact form and any account forms need real labels a screen reader can announce, not just placeholder text, and error messages that say what went wrong. We have written about what a signup form can ask shoppers; none of it works if a screen reader user cannot tell which box is which.
An accessibility page. Add a short page, linked from your footer, that says you are working to make the store usable for everyone, names the standard you are working toward, and gives a real email address or phone number to report a problem. The Department of Justice lists a way for the public to report accessibility issues as one of the things businesses should do. It also gives a frustrated shopper somewhere to go besides a lawyer.
Keep a dated log. Write down what you tested, when, what you found and what you fixed. It costs nothing, it keeps the work honest, and if a letter ever arrives, a record of real fixes made before it is worth far more than a widget installed after it.
An Overlay Installed After a Demand Letter Fixes Nothing the Letter Describes
If you are reading this with a letter open in another tab, four things.
Do not ignore it, and do not argue with it yourself. Letters and complaints carry deadlines, and a missed deadline makes everything harder. Call a lawyer who defends ADA Title III cases. This is a specialty, and an attorney who handles these every month will know the plaintiff firm, the court and what a reasonable outcome looks like far better than a general business lawyer will.
Do not install an overlay as your response. It will not fix the barriers the letter describes, some complaints now cite the widget itself, and it can make it look as though you knew about the problem and reached for the cheapest patch.
Check your insurance. Some business policies cover part of the cost of defending these claims and some exclude them. Ask your agent before you assume either way.
Start real fixes now, and document them. Whatever your lawyer negotiates will almost certainly include fixing the site. Starting with the buy path, using the steps above, is time you would have to spend anyway. And because so many cases are against companies sued before, a real fix is also the best protection against the second letter.
Every Accessibility Fix on the Buy Path Is Also a Conversion Fix
The legal risk is the reason most owners start on this, but it is not the best reason to finish. Nearly every fix in this piece is also a conversion fix. Labeled form fields are easier for everyone to fill in. Higher-contrast prices are easier to read on a phone in sunlight. Buttons with clear names and big enough tap targets are the same things we push for on every mobile store, and a checkout that works from a keyboard is a checkout with less friction for every shopper. A product page that describes its photos in words sells better to the shopper who is skimming too.
It is the same lesson as the one in our piece on green claims on product pages: what is on your store is your responsibility, whether you wrote it, a theme did or an app did. The difference here is that the fix also opens your store to customers who could not buy from you yesterday.
If you would rather have someone go through your store's buy path with you, find what is blocking shoppers and fix it in the right order, that is the kind of work we do for online stores every week. If you would rather do it yourself, put the mouse in a drawer tonight and try to buy something from your own store. You will know within ten minutes.
