I was pricing out a website for my own shop last year. A handful of pages, a contact form, a product gallery — nothing fancy. The vendor quoted me $1,500 for the basic build, which was already more than I wanted to spend. Then, almost as an afterthought, they said making it ADA-compliant would be a separate line item. A bigger one.
I asked what they meant. Turned out most of the templates these hosting providers sell — Wix, Squarespace, a lot of WordPress themes — aren't built in a way where you can make them accessible without rebuilding chunks of them from scratch. Headings in the wrong order. Form fields with no labels. Buttons the size of postage stamps. Light gray text on white because someone thought it looked "modern." The "accessibility" toggle in the site builder? Mostly cosmetic. Doesn't touch the code underneath.
I closed the tab. Figured I'd deal with it later.
Then I started reading. That's the part of this story I want you to hear.
What's actually happening out there
Over 5,000 federal ADA website lawsuits were filed in 2025 — a 37% jump over 2024. Nearly 70% of the targets were e-commerce and retail sites. Most defendants were small businesses, under $25M in annual revenue. About 46% of 2025 cases involved repeat defendants — companies being sued a second, third, or fourth time because they never actually fixed the original issues. Projections for 2026 suggest we'll clear 5,500 federal filings, and AI tools are making it easier for individual plaintiffs to file without even hiring an attorney.
One law firm — Mizrahi Kroub LLP — filed over 1,100 of those cases in a single year. They use a standardized complaint and a small stable of repeat plaintiffs. They're not looking for a trial. They're looking for a quick settlement, typically $5,000 to $25,000. New York, Florida, California, and Illinois account for over 74% of all filings, but if your site is reachable from any of those states (and it is, because it's on the internet), you're in range.
The one that stuck with me was a yoga studio in Portland that paid $11,500 in settlement and attorney fees for an accessibility problem that takes about two hours to fix. Two hours. Eleven thousand five hundred dollars. That's the math that made me sit up.
The part nobody tells small business owners
About 61 million Americans — 26% of adults — have some form of disability, per the CDC. If your site doesn't work with a screen reader, a keyboard-only user, or someone with low vision or a hand tremor, you're not just legally exposed. You're turning away roughly one in four people who try to buy from you.
A blind visitor hitting your product page shouldn't hear their screen reader say "image image image image" because none of your photos have alt text. But that's what most small business sites sound like right now. I've tested dozens. It's worse than you'd guess.
And here's the kicker: the exact stuff a plaintiff's scanner flags — missing alt text, bad heading order, unlabeled forms, poor contrast — is the same stuff that keeps Google, Pinterest, Siri, and ChatGPT from understanding what your business does. The <img> without alt text is why Google Images can't match your product photos to the person searching for exactly what you sell. The form field without a label is why Siri and Alexa can't complete a voice-driven checkout on your site. I thought I was fixing a legal problem. I was also fixing the reason I wasn't showing up in searches I should have been winning. One fix, two problems solved.
That's why I wrote this. And why I built the tool.
The widget trap
Before I get to the tool: if anyone's pitched you a "one-line fix" accessibility widget or overlay, please walk away. In April 2025 the FTC fined accessiBe $1 million for falsely claiming its overlay could make any website fully WCAG-compliant. Data from 2025 showed no reduction in lawsuits against businesses using accessibility widgets — over 100 businesses running widgets were still sued in a single month. The National Federation of the Blind has publicly called these tools harmful. There are over 400 active lawsuits against overlay providers.
Widgets are fine as a supplemental layer for user accommodation. They are not a legal shield. Fix your actual code first. Then, if you want an overlay for the people who need one, add it.
What the WCAG Audit tool does
The WCAG Accessibility Audit is a one-URL, in-browser scanner. You paste a URL, click Run, and about 8 seconds later you get a report showing every programmatic WCAG violation on the page. No signup. No email capture. No credit card. Nothing sent to my servers — the analysis runs in your browser after a single fetch through a Netlify proxy.
Here's what it actually checks:
- WCAG 2.1 AA baseline — the version courts currently cite. Missing alt text, empty headings, duplicate IDs, unlabeled forms, skipped heading levels,
<meta refresh>, viewport lockouts, autoplay media, generic link text, etc. Seventy-plus individual checks across the four WCAG principles. - WCAG 2.2 AA — the six new success criteria added in October 2023. Target size (2.5.8), dragging movements (2.5.7), focus-not-obscured (2.4.11), consistent help (3.2.6), redundant entry (3.3.7), accessible authentication (3.3.8/9). Procurement teams are already asking for 2.2 conformance; most sites aren't checking for it.
- WCAG 3.0 draft — the early-draft readability outcome. Your text graded for reading level.
- Google Search Console image-metadata fields — because while we're looking at your images anyway, we might as well flag the IPTC rights fields (
copyrightNotice,license,creditText,acquireLicensePage,creator) that GSC nags about and that unlock the Licensable badge in Google Images.
You can export the report as CSV, standalone HTML, or a print-ready PDF — three separate buttons. I use the CSV as a ticket list. I send the HTML to clients. I print the PDF for the people who want something on paper.
There's also a one-click AI fix prompt at the bottom. Copy it, paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor alongside the HTML of your page, and the model will produce BEFORE/AFTER snippets for each issue. Scoped so it won't redesign your layout or rewrite your copy — just patches the markup.
What the tool can't do (and what to do about it)
Every automated accessibility scanner — WAVE, axe, Lighthouse, mine — catches somewhere between 30% and 57% of WCAG issues. The rest need a human. Things static HTML alone can't verify:
- Computed color contrast at runtime (CSS variables, dark mode, filters all change it)
- Focus order under keyboard navigation
- Screen-reader announcement quality
- Whether your
prefers-reduced-motionhandling actually works - Keyboard traps inside modals
For any page that matters — checkout, sign-up, primary service pages — do the automated scan, fix everything it flags, then do a manual pass with NVDA or VoiceOver. Put your mouse in a drawer and try to move through the site using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, and Escape. If you can't see where focus is, can't submit the form, can't close a popup — those are WCAG violations and they're exactly the pattern a plaintiff's scanner flags first.
The fifteen-minute test you can run right now
If you only take one thing from this post, take this. Three checks, no cost, no signup:
1. Run your site through WAVE. wave.webaim.org is the industry reference, maintained by WebAIM at Utah State University. Paste your URL, wait a few seconds, and look at the error and contrast counts across the top. If you're on Wix or Squarespace you'll see a lot of ugly class names full of random characters — ignore the gibberish, trust the counts. Anything over five errors is what a serial-plaintiff scanner considers worth filing on.
2. Run my scanner. jwatte.com/tools/wcag-accessibility-audit/ for the full WCAG 2.1/2.2/3.0 report. If you want accessibility + SEO + schema + mobile + AI-search checks in one pass, use the Mega Analyzer instead — it includes the accessibility checks but also tells you whether you're findable in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI answers.
3. The keyboard test — 30 seconds. Mouse in a drawer. Tab through the page. Can you see a visible focus outline? Can you reach and submit the contact form? Can you close every popup with Escape? Three "yes" answers = passing the most common scanner pattern. Any "no" = fix that first.
Between those three, you'll know in fifteen minutes whether you've got a real problem. Most small business sites I've run land somewhere between "needs a weekend of cleanup" and "oh no." Almost none score 90+.
What actually fixes this
I'm going to save you a week of reading and give you the sequence that works:
- Run the scan. Use the WCAG Audit or WAVE. Export the CSV.
- Fix the code, not the widget. Add alt text. Fix heading order. Label every form control with a real
<label for>, not a placeholder. Removeuser-scalable=nofrom your viewport meta. Make sure your focus ring isn't hidden byoutline:none. These are the high-leverage fixes; they clear 60–70% of issues. - Copy the AI prompt. Paste it into Claude with your page HTML. The model produces BEFORE/AFTER patches. Apply them. This clears another 20%.
- Revalidate with WAVE. If my tool says pass but WAVE still flags something, WAVE wins. Open an issue and I'll tighten the rule.
- Manual pass with NVDA. Takes 20 minutes for a small site. Catches the stuff no automated tool can.
- Re-run quarterly. Accessibility rots. A new plugin, a redesigned card component, a swapped font — any of those can put you out of compliance without you noticing.
If you want the whole map instead of just the compass, the methodology is covered in depth in The $20 Dollar Agency (Ch 8 and 13 are the accessibility chapters) and The $97 Launch (Ch 12 and 29 treat accessibility as a launch gate). Both on Amazon Kindle if you'd rather read on your phone between appointments.
Why this tool exists, in one sentence
Because a Portland yoga studio paid $11,500 for a two-hour fix, and because widget vendors are charging $49 a month to not actually protect you, and because one in four of your prospective customers can't use your site the way it's built right now — and because none of that has to be true. Fifteen minutes, three checks, the code you already have. Start with the scan.
Then revalidate with WAVE. Every time. No exceptions.
This post isn't legal advice. I'm a developer, not an attorney. If you've been contacted by a plaintiff's firm, don't email them back yourself — call your lawyer. The tools and checks above help you avoid getting into that situation; they don't help you get out of one.