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The real cost of non-compliance

9 min read

  • Legal
  • Business
  • EAA
  • WCAG
Table of contents

3,117 lawsuits

In 2025, 3,117 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in US federal courts. 27% more than in 2024. Not warnings. Not recommendations. Lawsuits.

And for the first time, this is no longer a US-only phenomenon. On June 28, 2025, the EAA became applicable across the entire European Union. Italy is threatening fines of up to 5% of annual revenue. Sweden has launched its first e-commerce inspections.

Digital accessibility is no longer a technical topic reserved for developers. It's a legal risk, a $13 trillion market being ignored, and for those who invest, a documented growth lever.

This article isn't about code. It's about money.

United States: the machine is running

The US didn't wait for 2025 to start suing. The ADA, signed into law in 1990, has applied to websites since courts extended the concept of "place of public accommodation" to digital services.

The numbers speak for themselves:

Federal web accessibility lawsuits in the US (2023-2025)
YearFederal web lawsuitsChange
20232,794—
20242,452− 12%
20253,117+ 27%

70% of lawsuits target e-commerce. The average settlement cost: $5,000 to $20,000 for a small business, up to $350,000 for a large corporation. And those are just the settlements. Not the legal fees, not the remediation audits, not the brand damage.

New York and Florida alone account for more than half of all filings. In 2026, ADA Title II requires public entities serving populations over 50,000 to have WCAG 2.1 AA compliant websites by April 24. After that date, plaintiff attorneys will have a clear path.

Europe: the EAA changes everything

Since June 28, 2025, the European accessibility directive applies across all 27 member states. Each country transposes it differently, but the direction is clear: obligations, audits, and penalties.

  • Italy: 90-day remediation notices. After that, fines of up to 5% of annual revenue.
  • Sweden: the telecom authority opened its first e-commerce inspections in late 2025.
  • Netherlands: companies that failed to submit compliance reports will be audited first in spring 2026.

Maximum penalties vary by country but can reach €3 million, not counting product or service withdrawal from the market.

Asia: slower, but moving

Japan amended its anti-discrimination law in April 2024 to make reasonable accommodations mandatory in the private sector, including digital ones. The law doesn't yet include direct penalties: victims must file individual lawsuits. And 40% of the people concerned don't even know the law exists.

That's a delay, not an exemption. The global movement is underway.

The shortcut trap

Faced with this legal landscape, an industry saw an opportunity: accessibility overlays. The pitch: a JavaScript snippet that promises to make any website compliant in a few lines of code. No audit, no redesign, no training. Just a widget.

The problem: it doesn't work. And the courts know it.

In January 2025, the US FTC fined accessiBe, the market leader, $1 million for deceptive advertising. The company claimed its tool would automatically make websites WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. The FTC found that claim to be false and barred accessiBe from repeating it, unless it could provide evidence.

Its competitor UserWay has been facing a class-action lawsuit since July 2024. The case is telling: Bloomsybox, an online flower delivery service, installed the UserWay overlay in 2023. Six months later, the site was sued for accessibility violations. The overlay had fixed nothing, but it had given the company a false sense of compliance.

The most telling number: in the first half of 2025, 22.64% of web accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that already had an overlay installed. Nearly one in four.

An overlay is a bandage on an open fracture. The bandage costs a few hundred dollars a year. The fracture ends up in court.

The invisible market

The previous three sections are about what you lose. This one is about what you're missing.

1.85 billion people worldwide live with a disability. More inhabitants than China. Their combined disposable income: $1.9 trillion per year.

But that number only tells part of the story. People with disabilities don't live in isolation. They have spouses, children, parents, friends. Who choose where to spend based on what's accessible to the people they care about. Add this circle of influence and you reach 3.4 billion people and $13 trillion in annual disposable income, whose purchasing decisions are shaped by accessibility. Nearly half the planet.

In the UK, they call it the Purple Pound: £274 billion in annual spending power. In the US, working-age adults with disabilities hold $490 billion in disposable income. A segment comparable to the African American or Hispanic population, which no business would dream of ignoring.

And everyone else

Permanent disability is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever squinted at your phone in bright sunlight? Held a baby in one arm while trying to fill out a form with the other? Watched a video in an open office without being able to turn the sound on?

A broken arm. A migraine. A noisy environment. A slow connection. A tiny screen. Situational disability affects everyone, all the time. Captions serve deaf and hard of hearing users. And everyone watching a video on the train. High contrast helps people with low vision. And everyone working on a terrace in July.

An accessible website isn't a website "for disabled people". It's a website that works for everyone, including the customers you're losing today without knowing it.

The proven ROI

The numbers below aren't projections. They're measured results.

Tesco (UK): in 2001, the supermarket chain invested £35,000 to build an accessible version of its online grocery site, in partnership with the RNIB. Result: £13 million in annual revenue generated by that site. A return on investment of 37,000%, documented by the W3C. And a detail no one had predicted: the majority of users on the accessible site were sighted people who found it easier to use.

Accenture: two successive studies confirm the link. In 2018, across 140 companies, disability inclusion leaders showed 28% higher revenue. In 2023, across 346 companies, the gap widened: 1.6x more revenue and 2.6x more net income than their peers.

Forrester Research (2016): every dollar invested in user experience improvements, of which accessibility is a pillar, returns $100.

Semrush (2025): a study conducted with AccessibilityChecker.org and BuiltWith, covering 10,000 websites, measured a 23% increase in organic traffic correlated with accessibility compliance, a direct echo of what I detailed in Three bills, one codebase, zero overhead: the same practices that make a site accessible make it indexable.

The benefits don't stop at revenue. An accessible site also means fewer support tickets and less friction at conversion.

What your customers see

The previous sections talk about courts, markets, and ROI. This one talks about trust.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2019, 81% of consumers say they need to trust a brand before buying. And companies that walk the talk measure it: customers whose values align with a brand's are 35% more likely to recommend it.

Accessibility is a signal. When a website works for a blind user, it says something about the company that built it. When a form is usable with one hand, it says something about the care given to every customer. When a video is captioned, it says something about who's welcome and who isn't.

Your competitors doing this work aren't doing it out of charity. They're capturing the customers you're losing.

So now what

You have the numbers. 3,117 lawsuits. A $13 trillion market. A documented 37,000% ROI. Fines that stack up. Overlays that make things worse.

The question is no longer "should I make my website accessible". The question is "how long can I afford not to".

Accessibility isn't a cost. It's the cost of not doing it that's exorbitant.

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