The importance of accessibility for online companies.
We'd been working on accessibility at Heegstra for a while before I understood what was actually at stake. I thought of it as the right thing to do: the web should work for everyone, including people with visual, hearing, or motor impairments. Then I went down a rabbit hole and found out there's a second reason, and it's a lot less friendly.
The lawsuit business
In 2025, close to four thousand lawsuits were filed in the US against websites over accessibility. That number has been climbing every year, and the timing is not a coincidence. AI has made building websites almost effortless. Every week someone new launches an agency, ships a site in a weekend, and moves on. But AI doesn't check accessibility unless you make it. So the web is filling up with sites that look great and quietly fail the standards, and there are firms that scan the web specifically to find them. When they do, you get a letter: settle for five or ten thousand dollars, or go to court. For a small business or a young designer, that letter is terrifying. Legal defense isn't cheap, and that's exactly the point.
The frustrating part is that the rules themselves come from a good place. The ADA exists so that someone using a screen reader can order from your shop like anyone else. The problem is the business model that grew around enforcement, which profits from confusion more than from access.
They're not betting your website is inaccessible. They're betting you don't know what compliant means.
What compliant actually means
So what does compliant mean? There's no official ADA certificate you can hang on the wall. What courts and regulators actually point to is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Version 2.1 Level AA is the common benchmark, and 2.2 is the newest. It covers things like text alternatives for images, sufficient color contrast, and a site you can navigate with just a keyboard. Concrete, checkable things.
Good faith, documented
And here's what I learned that lowered my blood pressure: demonstrated good faith matters. Audit your site, fix what you find, and document everything: what you checked, what you changed, when. Publish an accessibility statement, the way you see on professional sites, sometimes tucked into the terms, sometimes on its own page like ours. None of this makes you untouchable, but someone who is visibly, verifiably working on accessibility is in a very different position than someone who never thought about it. If you know someone with one of these impairments, ask them to try your site. No tool replaces that.
Two tools carried me through the audit. The WAVE extension by WebAIM overlays your page with icons showing exactly where it fails WCAG, right in your browser. And if you build with Claude Code, there's an accessibility skill that audits your code against WCAG 2.2 and suggests the fixes.
I'm not a lawyer, and reading this doesn't make you lawsuit-proof. Everything here is my own reading of the landscape, informed speculation rather than a legal conclusion. That's a conversation for actual legal counsel, and check whether your business insurance covers this while you're at it. But most people get that letter never having heard of any of this. Now you have.
And if you'd rather not untangle it alone, this is something we can help you orient in. We've been through the process ourselves and can point you in the right direction, on where to start rather than where to end. It's also why accessibility is part of how we build every site in our complete website package, not an add-on you bolt on after the letter arrives. An afternoon of understanding this can save you a five-figure letter.
The web got easier to build. Make sure yours works for everyone.