Website accessibility just became a legal deadline, not a nice-to-have

We used to pitch accessibility work as a nice-to-have — a few extra hours to make a site more inclusive, easy to defer if the budget was tight. That pitch stopped working in 2025, and not because clients suddenly cared more about ethics. Two separate enforcement waves turned it into a compliance question with real deadlines and real numbers attached.

Two deadlines converged in one year

In the EU, the European Accessibility Act became enforceable on June 28, 2025 across all 27 member states. Any business selling products or services to EU consumers through a website now has to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a legal requirement, not a best practice — and fines for non-compliance range from roughly €60,000 in Ireland up toward €900,000 in Sweden, depending on the country.

In the US, there's no equivalent statute written specifically for websites, but ADA Title III litigation filled the gap anyway. A total of 3,948 ADA website accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 — up 23.84% from 3,188 in 2024, according to EcomBack's annual lawsuit report. Neither number includes the cases settled quietly before they ever reached a docket.

The litigation isn't random

The detail that changes how we advise clients: just 33 plaintiffs filed 50.10% of all 2025 ADA website lawsuits in the US. This isn't a broad wave of individual complaints — it's a small number of repeat filers and their attorneys running automated scans against thousands of sites and filing near-identical suits against whichever ones fail. Site size or industry barely matters; scan results do. A five-person local business with an inaccessible contact form is exactly as easy a target as a national retailer.

The six errors that show up on almost every site

WebAIM's 2025 Million report — an automated scan of the top one million home pages — found the average page still carries 51 detectable accessibility errors, and just six recurring issue types account for 96% of them:

• Low-contrast text — present on 79.1% of home pages, the single most common failure.
• Missing alt text on images — 55.5% of home pages.
• Missing form input labels — 48.2% of home pages.
• Empty or broken links — 45.4% of home pages.
• Skipped heading levels — present on 39% of pages.
• Empty buttons with no descriptive text — 29.6% of home pages.

These same six issues have topped WebAIM's list for five years running. That consistency is actually good news for a small business: it means the fixes are well understood, mechanical in most cases, and don't require a full redesign to close.

What we build in now, not bolt on later

We already folded a first pass of this into our 12-point pre-launch checklist — the keyboard pass, the contrast check on real components instead of just the palette, and the alt-text review are points 9 through 11. What changed this year is how seriously we treat those three points: they're no longer a nice finishing touch before launch, they're a gate a site doesn't pass without.

In practice that means checking contrast on text sitting over photos and gradients (where it fails most often), writing real alt text instead of leaving it blank or stuffing it with keywords, labelling every form field explicitly rather than relying on a placeholder that disappears the moment someone starts typing, and never skipping a heading level just because a smaller font looked better in the design file. None of it is expensive to fix during a build. All of it is expensive to fix after a demand letter arrives.

If your site hasn't had a real accessibility pass since it launched, that's the first thing we check in our web design and build service — before we talk about anything else.