AI found your website, wrote the lawsuit, and sold you the cure
Accessibility claims rose 37% last year, and 64% of the businesses sued turn over under $25m. AI is on both sides of this — it finds the faults and drafts the complaint, and the widget sold to prevent it just cost its maker a million dollars.
Every shopkeeper understands the physical version of this. A step up to the door and a certain number of people simply never come in. You might not ever learn their names, or that they tried.
The web version of that step is invisible to the person who built it, and for about twenty years it carried no consequence at all.
That has changed, fast, and AI changed it.
The numbers
More than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the United States last year. In the first half of 2025 alone there were over 2,000 — a 37% rise on the same period the year before. This year is projected to pass 5,500 federal filings.
The part that matters for anyone reading this: 64% of the businesses sued turn over less than $25 million a year. Around 70% of the claims hit online retail, with food and service businesses making up roughly a fifth.
This is not a thing that happens to large corporations. It is overwhelmingly a thing that happens to small ones.
Why now, and why it is AI’s doing
Filing one of these used to require a lawyer, which meant it required a case worth a lawyer’s time.
Both halves of that have collapsed. Automated scanners find the faults on thousands of sites at once, and generative tools draft the complaint. Federal self-represented accessibility filings rose 40% year on year in 2025 — people filing without a solicitor at all, at a speed no human drafting process would produce.
A machine can now notice your website, decide it is non-compliant, and generate the paperwork, without any person having visited your shop or wanted anything from you.
Whatever you think about that, it is the environment your website now lives in.
The widget does not save you
Here is where it gets genuinely dark.
An industry grew up selling a one-line fix: paste in a script, get an overlay that promises to make your site compliant. It is sold hard to exactly the kind of business that gets sued.
In early 2025, 456 lawsuits — nearly 23% of all filings — were against websites that already had one of these widgets installed. Roughly one sued site in four had already bought the cure.
Then, in April 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission approved a final order requiring the largest overlay vendor to pay $1 million, having found it misrepresented that its AI tool could make any website compliant. The order runs for twenty years. It also bars the company from passing off reviews and articles about its own product as independent opinion.
So: AI scanned your site, AI wrote the claim against you, and the AI product sold to protect you was itself fined for the promise it made.
What actually works is boring and free
The genuinely good news, and the reason this is not a counsel of despair: the things that make a website usable are mostly not technical, not expensive, and not new.
- Real headings, in order — not just text made big and bold.
- Alt text on images that carry meaning, describing what is actually in them.
- Labelled form fields, so a field announces what it wants.
- Enough colour contrast that text is readable in sunlight, which also helps every customer squinting at a phone outside your shop.
- Keyboard access — everything reachable and operable without a mouse.
- Link text that says where it goes, rather than “click here”.
None of that is a project. It is a tidy-up, and it is the same list that makes a site work better for older customers, for anyone on a cracked screen, and for the machines from the previous articles on this blog.
If you are outside the US
Two things worth knowing, because most coverage of this is American.
The European Accessibility Act came into force on 28 June 2025 across all 27 member states, and it reaches any business selling products or services to consumers in the EU — including businesses based outside it.
But there is an exemption that scare pieces leave out, and it covers a great many readers of this: microenterprises providing services — fewer than 10 staff and turnover or balance sheet no more than €2 million — are outside the service requirements. It applies to services, not products. It disappears the moment you cross the threshold, with no grace period, and it does not apply if you took funding specifically for accessibility.
So a six-person salon selling to EU customers is very likely exempt today, and should still fix the list above, because the list is cheap and the exemption is not permanent.
(General information, not legal advice. Rules differ by country and are moving. If you think you have a real exposure, ask someone qualified.)
The fair question
devkoi builds plain pages: real headings, real links, real form fields, no overlay, no widget soup. Most of the list above is what you get by default from a page that is simply a page — not through cleverness, but because the usual causes are the things that were never added.
Now the honest part, and it is the whole point of this article: devkoi cannot promise you are compliant, and neither can anybody else. Accessibility depends on your actual content — whether your alt text describes your actual photo, whether your own wording makes sense, whether the colours you chose have enough contrast. No tool can know that for you.
The last company that promised otherwise paid a million dollars for the sentence. Treat anyone still making that promise accordingly.
What to do this week
1. Do the keyboard test. Five minutes, free, today. Open your own site and put the mouse down. Press Tab repeatedly. Can you reach every link, every form field, the menu, the booking button? Can you see where you are as you go? If you get stranded, so does a real person every day.
2. Describe your images properly. Tell us what is in the photo and it goes in as the description. “Our shopfront on Mill Road with the bikes outside” is useful; an empty description is not.
“Here’s what’s in each of the photos I sent — use these as the image descriptions.”
3. Check your contrast. Pale grey text on white is the most common failure on small business sites and also the most common complaint from customers over fifty.
“Is the text on our site dark enough to read in sunlight? Darken it if not.”
4. Make the links say where they go. Replace every “click here” and “read more” with the actual destination.
“Change the ‘read more’ links to say what they link to.”
5. Do not buy an overlay widget expecting protection. Nearly a quarter of sued sites had one. If someone sells you one as legal cover, that is the claim the regulator fined.
6. If you sell into the EU, check which side of the threshold you are on. Fewer than 10 staff and under €2m turnover, selling services: likely exempt for now. Over it, or selling products: not.
7. Then stop worrying and fix the boring list. Headings, alt text, labels, contrast, keyboard. It is an afternoon, not a retainer.
There is a bleak symmetry to all of this. The same technology that let someone generate a website in a minute also lets someone generate a complaint about it in a minute — and a third party sold both of them a product in between.
The way out is the same as it has been in every one of these stories: the plain, well-made, honest version of the thing. A door people can actually get through was never a legal strategy. It was just a decent way to run a shop.