Ecommerce

Your Website Could Be the Next ADA Lawsuit. Here’s What We’re Doing About It.

By Sleepless MediaOctober 14, 2026

We're going to be straight with you: over the last few years, we've watched a steady stream of website accessibility demand letters land in our clients' inboxes. Not one or two. Enough that it stopped feeling random and started looking like a pattern.

So we did what we always do when something starts bothering us: we dug in. What we found wasn't great. Ecommerce sites are getting hit hard, and a lot of the firms sending these letters aren't primarily motivated by improving access for screen-reader users. They're running a volume play, and right now the math is working in their favor.

We wanted to get in front of this before one of our clients (or, honestly, us) got caught off guard. This post is that.

The letters are already showing up

If you haven't received one yet, they tend to follow a pretty consistent structure. A form letter cites Title III of the ADA, names a plaintiff who uses assistive technology, lists common barriers (missing alt text, unlabeled forms, low contrast, keyboard issues), gives a short response window, and floats a settlement number that feels cheaper than fighting it out in court. View example complaint letter.

That "cheaper than court" number is still expensive. Settlements can range from a few thousand dollars for a quick, quiet resolution to tens of thousands once both sides have attorneys involved — and that doesn't include the cost of actually fixing the site under pressure. When you multiply that across the number of ecommerce brands getting the same letter in a given week, you can see why this has become a business model for certain firms rather than an occasional accessibility complaint.

This isn’t a hunch, the numbers back it up

We're not just going off the letters landing in our clients' inboxes. The data lines up with what we're seeing:

Federal website accessibility lawsuits reached *3,117 cases in 2025, a 27% increase from 2024*, after two years of decline. Website cases now account for more than a third of all ADA Title III filings.
That figure doesn't include demand letters or state-court cases that never reach federal dockets — which is most of them.
95.9% of homepages tested in the 2026 WebAIM Million report had detectable WCAG accessibility failures (up from 94.8% the year before). The average home page now shows 56 detected errors.
The most common issues (low-contrast text, missing image descriptions, unlabeled form fields, empty links and buttons) are exactly the kinds of problems a plaintiff's attorney can flag with an automated scan in under a minute.

In short: most sites have vulnerabilities, the tools to find them are cheap and automated, and lawsuit volume is rising rather than falling. That combination doesn't resolve itself.

Overlay widgets were never the real fix, and the courts are catching on

If you've looked into this before, you've probably been pitched an accessibility "overlay.” These third party Javascript add-ons promise instant ADA compliance with no development work. We understand the appeal. We also have to be direct: it doesn't hold up.

Overlays sit on top of your site and try to paper over problems in the browser. They don't fix the underlying code. They can't restructure poor markup, they often conflict with the assistive technology they're supposed to support, and in a growing number of cases sites running an overlay have still been sued — sometimes specifically because the overlay created new barriers. Disability advocates and accessibility professionals have been saying this for years. Plaintiffs' attorneys have figured it out too. A widget in the footer is no longer the shield it was marketed as.

If your current accessibility strategy rests entirely on one of these tools, it's worth treating that as a gap rather than a solution.

What we’re actually doing about it

We're not interested in scaring people and stopping there. Real progress requires code-level work: proper semantic HTML, labeled forms, reliable keyboard navigation, contrast that actually passes, and alt text that means something. That's development work, and it's ongoing. Accessibility isn't a one-time checkbox — it's closer to regular maintenance.

Our team has spent the last several months evaluating tools and platforms that address issues at the source rather than covering them up. We're already piloting a couple of strong options with select clients and will have more concrete details to share soon. In the meantime, we'd rather talk through this directly with each of you than try to cover every scenario in a blog post. Every site starts from a different place, and the right path forward does too.

If we built or currently maintain your site, this matters even more. We already know the codebase, which puts us in the best position to fix it properly — not just point out the problems.

Take the First Step: A Free Site Audit

We'd rather send you this post than have you forward us a demand letter. If you want a clear picture of where your site stands, get in touch and we'll run a free accessibility audit. No pressure and no obligation; just an honest look at what's exposed and what it would take to close the gaps.