A client of mine came back from a networking event with a question she was hoping I would talk her out of.

She had been chatting with an intellectual property lawyer, the way you do at those things, and he told her something that alarmed her: law firms in New York are going after small business websites over accessibility. Not corporations. Small businesses. Fines in the ten-thousand-dollar range.

She forwarded it to me more or less as, “this can’t be right, can it?”

Honestly, I wasn’t sure either.

I built her site. I knew it was fast, clean, well structured. Accessibility was something I understood the way most web people understand it, as a thing on the someday list, filed next to “add alt text to everything.” So before I answered her, I went and looked properly.

Then I had to go back and tell her the lawyer was right.

The practice that paid for protection and got sued anyway

In August 2022, a small dermatology practice in New York City bought an accessibility widget for its website. You have seen these: the little icon in the corner that opens a popup overlay where visitors can bump up the text size or switch on high contrast. This one cost $490 a year. The company selling it said it would make the site compliant.

In January 2024, the practice was sued for having an inaccessible website.

The widget was installed and running the whole time.

That June, the practice turned around and filed its own class action against the widget company, accessiBe, in the Southern District of New York. The complaint is public, and the numbers are real: $4,000 to an attorney, and another $3,500 to a firm that came in and fixed the site by hand. The way it should have been fixed in the first place.

They didn’t get sued because they ignored the problem. They got sued because they paid someone to solve it, and it didn’t.

Why the widget didn’t work

So how do accessibility overlays work?

An overlay sits on top of your website. It gives a visitor some controls to adjust what they see: bigger text, more contrast, maybe a reading guide. However, it does not do is change the code underneath, and the code underneath is what assistive technology (like screen readers for blind people) reads.

A screen reader cares whether your image has alt text, whether your form field has a label attached to it, whether your buttons announce themselves as buttons. Someone navigating by keyboard needs to reach every link in a sensible order. All of that lives in the code markup, not in the accessibility overlay widget.

In January 2025, the FTC reached the same conclusion in more formal language. It ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million over claims that its product would “automatically comply” with accessibility guidelines, calling those claims false, misleading, or unsubstantiated. (The order also covered something worse: the company had been presenting reviews as independent when it had undisclosed connections to the reviewers.) The order was finalized that April.

This is not a one-off case

Website accessibility lawsuits are not rare, and they are not slowing down. In 2025 there were 3,948 of them, up about 24% over the year before. Count state courts alongside federal and the number clears 5,000.

Here is the stat you should pay attention if you have an accessibility widget installed:

456 of those lawsuits, roughly one in five, were filed against websites that were running an accessibility widget at the time.

New York led 2025 with 1,108 filings. Texas had 224 in 2024, fourth in the country. I was born and raised in Syracuse, NY and I spent eight years in Texas. Those are are the places where the people I know and grew up around run their businesses.

Brutal facts about the money involved, $52,000 is the average settlement figure in Texas. To be fair, that average is pulled upward by cases involving large organizations and county governments. A typical small business case tends to land somewhere between $5,000 and $20,000 once you add up the settlement and the legal fees. Still a number that ruins a quarter for many small business owners.

So what actually works

Short version, covered more completely in the next article: the fix happens in the code.

Real alt text on images. Labels attached to form fields. Contrast on element colors for optimum readability. A text heading structure that describes the page instead of just styling it. Keyboard navigation. Captions on video.

None of it can be bolted on from the outside with a website plugin, which is exactly why the bolt-on version keeps losing in court.

What I did for my client

I told her the lawyer was right, and that I had already started.

I ran an audit on her site that same night, sent her the findings, and published an accessibility statement as the first visible step while we scoped the rest. Then we worked through the actual fixes, in the actual code, in priority order.

She came to me with “this can’t be right, can it?” and the answer was: it is right, and also you are fine, because someone checked.

She only found out because she happened to stand next to a lawyer at a networking event, and happened to have someone she could ask. Most business owners have neither.

If you have been assuming your site is fine, that assumption is worth about twenty minutes of somebody’s attention.

Get a free accessibility scan of your site →

(And if there is a little icon sitting in the corner of your website right now that you are paying for, that is the first thing I would look at.)