Why does my store need this?

Last checked: 24 October 2026

Most store owners have never heard of web accessibility until someone mentions it. Here's the short version: what it is, what the rules say, what it costs to ignore, and what you get from fixing it.

Most online stores have problems customers can't get past

Accessibility means people can use your store whether they see well, use a keyboard instead of a mouse, rely on a screen reader, or zoom the page to 200%.

Online stores are some of the worst offenders. In WebAIM's 2026 scan of the top one million home pages, 95.9% had detectable accessibility failures. Shopping sites averaged 71 errors per home page, and Shopify stores averaged 75. [1]

The most common problems are the boring ones: text with too little contrast, images with no description, form fields with no label, and buttons with no name. On a store, those land in the worst places: an "Add to cart" button a screen reader announces as just "button", or a checkout field nobody can tell is for the email address.

What the rules say

United States: the ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act bans discrimination by businesses open to the public. The US Department of Justice says this applies to "all the goods, services, privileges, or activities" those businesses offer, including on the web, and points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as helpful guidance. [2]

There's no deadline to wait for, because the law already applies. In practice it's enforced through private lawsuits and demand letters:

• More than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US in 2025: over 3,100 in federal courts and nearly 2,000 more in New York and California state courts. [3] [4]
• About 70% of them targeted online stores, more than any other sector. [4]
• It isn't only big brands: 64% of the companies sued had less than $25 million in annual revenue. [4]
• Demand letters that never reach a court aren't counted at all. [3]

US courts don't all agree on how the ADA applies to stores that only sell online. Federal courts in California have narrowed it, while New York is where most cases are filed. [3] That's a question for a lawyer, not us. What we can say is that the claims keep coming.

European Union: the European Accessibility Act

The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025. It covers e-commerce services sold to consumers in the EU, and each EU country sets its own penalties, which must be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive". [5]

Very small service businesses are exempt: those with fewer than 10 staff and annual turnover or balance sheet of €2 million or less. [5] If your business is bigger than that and sells to EU customers, the Act applies.

It's already being enforced. In June 2026 a French court ordered Carrefour to make its website and app fully accessible, with a €500 penalty for every day it misses the six-month deadline. [6] [12] And when the Dutch regulator tested about 100 large webshops and service sites in 2026, 61% didn't let someone place an order using assistive technology. [12]

What it costs to fix compared with what it costs to wait

These are estimates, not guarantees. Settlements are usually confidential, so nobody has complete numbers, and your situation may be very different. The point is the scale: a theme fix costs a small fraction of even the low end of a claim.

A settlement usually requires you to fix the site anyway. Fixing first just means you skip the legal bill.

Why not just install a widget?

Accessibility "overlay" widgets add a toolbar to your store but leave the underlying code unchanged. The problems a screen reader trips over are still there.

In 2025, more than 1,400 US accessibility lawsuits were filed against websites that already had a widget installed. [4] In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission fined accessiBe, one of the best-known widget makers, $1 million over allegations that it misrepresented its AI tool's ability to make websites meet WCAG. [9]

We fix your theme's code instead. Every change goes into a duplicate theme, so you check it and publish it yourself.

The upside: more people can buy from you

This isn't only about avoiding trouble.

• More customers. More than 1 in 4 US adults have some type of disability, including 5.5% with a vision disability and 12.2% with a mobility disability. [10] People with disabilities in the US have over $200 billion a year in discretionary spending. [11]
• Fewer abandoned carts. Labelled form fields, buttons that make sense, and a cart that works with a keyboard help every shopper, not only disabled ones.
• Better for search. Image descriptions, clear headings and proper link text are things search engines read too.
• Older customers. Readable contrast and pages that work when zoomed help the many shoppers whose eyesight isn't what it was.

What we do, and what we don't

We do: scan your home, collection, product and cart pages on desktop and mobile, fix the issues we find in your theme code, re-scan until they're gone, and give you a before-and-after report. Our fixes improve your store toward WCAG 2.2 AA.

We don't: promise "compliance", certify your store, or claim to make you lawsuit-proof. Nobody honestly can. Some things need a human decision, like writing good product image descriptions or fixing third-party apps we can't edit, and we list those for you clearly.

Start with a free snapshot

Send us your store's address. We'll scan your homepage and reply with your top three real issues, with screenshots. No obligation.

Request a free snapshot

Sources

1. WebAIM, The WebAIM Million: 2026 report, data collected February 2026.
2. US Department of Justice, Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA.
3. Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Federal Court Website Accessibility Lawsuit Filings Bounce Back in 2025, 27 March 2026.
4. UsableNet, ADA Web Lawsuit Trends for 2026: What 2025 Filings Reveal, 8 January 2026.
5. Directive (EU) 2019/882 (European Accessibility Act), Articles 3, 4, 30 and 31.
6. Deque, France's major court decision supporting digital accessibility under the EAA, 11 June 2026.
7. Accessible.org, ADA Website Compliance Lawsuit Settlement Amounts, updated April 2025.
8. Bureau of Internet Accessibility, Did U.S. Businesses Spend Billions on Legal Fees for Inaccessible Websites in 2020?, January 2021.
9. US Federal Trade Commission, accessiBe Inc., January 2025.
10. CDC, Disability Impacts All of Us.
11. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, The Business Case for Digital Accessibility.
12. Statutus, EAA enforcement so far: what authorities have done, 13 October 2026.