The demand letter doesn't come with a warning. For most small business owners, the first thing they learn about ADA website compliance is a certified envelope asking for somewhere between five and fifteen thousand dollars, with a 30-day window to respond.
It lands on a Tuesday. You've never heard of the plaintiff. You've never heard of their law firm. And by the time you finish reading it, you've already started calculating whether it's cheaper to pay or fight.
This article is about what those two options actually cost, based on 2024 and H1 2025 numbers we could verify in public reports. It is not legal advice. If you've already received a demand letter, talk to a lawyer today, not after reading this.
The legal landscape in 60 seconds
The Americans with Disabilities Act has been interpreted by U.S. federal courts to cover commercial websites as "places of public accommodation." What that means in practice: if a blind user can't navigate your checkout with a screen reader, or a keyboard-only user can't tab through your contact form, you are exposed to a private lawsuit. There is no federal "safe harbor" standard, but courts routinely treat WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the de facto baseline.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) became enforceable on June 28, 2025, and it applies to any business selling digital products or services to EU consumers, including U.S. Shopify and WordPress operators with EU buyers. We wrote a full breakdown in our EAA compliance checklist. For the purposes of this article, just know that 2024 and 2025 are the years when "I'm a small U.S. store, this doesn't apply to me" stopped being a defensible position.
The numbers
Here is what we could source. Anything we couldn't verify, we left out.
- 2,452 federal website accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2024, down 13% from 2023's 2,794. Website cases made up 28% of all ADA Title III federal filings that year, per Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III tracker.
- Over 4,000 ADA digital accessibility cases were filed across federal and state courts in 2024, per UsableNet's 2024 Year-End Report. The gap between that number and Seyfarth's 2,452 is mostly state-court activity, which has been climbing as plaintiffs' attorneys shift venues.
- New York federal courts handled 1,564 of those federal cases — 64% of the total. Florida was second with 470. New York is where the largest share of federal filings land, by a wide margin.
- 77% of 2024 lawsuits targeted e-commerce, per UsableNet. Every other industry combined made up the remaining 23%.
- One in four 2024 lawsuits were filed against companies that had already been sued before. UsableNet counted 961 repeat lawsuits — over 40% of federal cases involved a defendant who'd been hit previously. Settling once does not make you safe.
- More than 1,000 of the 2024 defendants had an accessibility overlay widget installed when they were sued. That's over 25% of cases. Overlays are not a legal defense.
Settlement math is harder to source because most cases settle under seal, but the ranges cited in public accessibility-defense commentary give a reasonable order of magnitude:
- Typical small business pre-lawsuit demand letter settlement: $5,000 to $20,000 plus a commitment to remediate within 90–180 days, per accessible.org's public settlement-amounts explainer.
- Post-filing, pre-trial settlement: $30,000 to $150,000 plus mandatory remediation and monitoring, per ADA Scanner's cost guide.
- Defense legal fees if you choose to fight: a $10,000–$25,000 retainer plus hourly work at $250–$600, easily $50,000+ on a case that never reaches trial.
Who actually gets sued
The profile is boring, which is part of what makes it dangerous. It's a small or mid-sized business doing between $500k and $50M in annual online revenue. It's usually Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or a custom Next.js build. There's no in-house accessibility expert. There's often no developer on payroll at all — the site was built by an agency two or three years ago and touched occasionally by the marketing team.
The owner is not negligent. They've never been told this is something they need to think about. Their platform salesperson didn't mention it. Their theme vendor didn't mention it. The first time the phrase "WCAG 2.1" enters their life is the day the certified envelope arrives.
If that sounds like you, you are the target demographic for this entire litigation industry. Not because you did something wrong, but because you're easier to settle with than a Fortune 500 defendant with a legal team on retainer.
What the actual total looks like
Let's walk through a realistic small business scenario. A Shopify store doing $2M/year in revenue receives a demand letter asking for $12,000 to settle, plus remediation.
The owner calls a business lawyer. That's a $500–$1,500 initial consultation. The lawyer, if they know this area, will usually recommend settling — fighting a single-plaintiff ADA web case costs more than settling almost every time. So the owner pays the $12,000.
Now the remediation clock starts. The settlement agreement usually requires WCAG 2.1 AA conformance within 90–180 days, a VPAT or accessibility statement, and sometimes third-party verification. A real audit and remediation for a store of this size typically runs $5,000 to $20,000 depending on how much custom code exists. Ongoing monitoring and staff training add another few thousand a year.
Realistic total for a single demand letter, small business, settled pre-filing: $18,000 to $40,000 in year one, plus roughly $2,000–$5,000/year after that.
If the same owner ignores the demand letter and gets formally sued, the math gets much worse. Post-filing settlements in the $30k–$150k range, plus defense fees, plus the same remediation work that would have been required anyway. And because 40%+ of lawsuits target repeat defendants, "just settle and move on" without actually fixing the site usually means a second letter within 12–24 months from a different plaintiff.
A note on overlay widgets
We're being deliberately neutral here because the overlay category is litigious and we're not interested in a defamation claim. What the public data shows: in UsableNet's 2024 Year-End Report, more than 1,000 sued businesses had an accessibility overlay installed at the time of suit — over a quarter of all cases. If overlays prevented lawsuits, that number would be close to zero. It isn't.
We wrote a longer, architecture-level explanation of why automated widgets struggle with real-world assistive tech in accessibility overlay alternatives that actually work. Short version: the cheap monthly subscription is not a legal shield.
What you can actually do now
We've been running axe-core scans against small business sites for the last few weeks as part of our audit pipeline, and the pattern is consistent. Most sites that are "in the danger zone" have 40–80 automatically detectable violations. About 60–70% of those are things an attentive non-developer can fix in an afternoon: missing alt text, missing form labels, link text that just says "click here," color contrast below 4.5:1, and headings that skip levels.
Start there. In order:
First, scan the site yourself. Install the axe DevTools browser extension (free), open your homepage and checkout flow, and run the scan. Total time: under five minutes. We wrote a walkthrough in our five-minute accessibility audit post. If you want to make it part of your deploy pipeline, our automated accessibility testing with GitHub Actions guide covers a CI setup that runs on every push.
Then fix the obvious things. Alt text on product images. Labels on every form field. Contrast ratios on your buttons and body text. Keyboard navigation for your menu. These are hours of work, not weeks, and they eliminate the violations most demand letters specifically cite.
Then prioritize what's left by impact. Keyboard navigation failures and screen reader structure problems are higher-risk than contrast issues, because they fully block disabled users instead of making the site harder to use. Fix the blockers first.
When you hit a ceiling — usually around custom components, dynamic content, or checkout flows that were never built with keyboard users in mind — that's when you bring in a paid audit. We offer one at a11yfix.dev/audit (landing page is being built, not live yet as of this writing), but any reputable accessibility consultancy will give you a fair assessment. The point is: don't pay for an audit before you've run the free tools, because the audit will mostly find things the free tools already found.
Close
The lawsuits are real and the numbers matter, but so does the fact that basic fixes knock out the majority of real-world issues. What we keep seeing in the data is a gap — not a technical gap, but an awareness gap. Most small businesses that get sued never ran a single free tool against their site first. They weren't negligent. Nobody told them this was a thing.
If you're reading this, somebody just told you. Run axe DevTools this week, fix what it finds, and you'll have moved further than most demand-letter recipients did in the year before theirs arrived.
This article is not legal advice. If you have received a demand letter or been served with a lawsuit, contact a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction. Numbers cited are from public 2024 year-end reports by UsableNet and Seyfarth Shaw LLP and public commentary on settlement ranges; actual outcomes vary.
