Let's talk about the two things keeping small business owners up at night when it comes to web accessibility: getting sued and getting scammed.
Both are real. And the second one is making the first one worse.
The Lawsuit Landscape Is Real
Over 4,000 ADA related digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2024. That's more than 10 per day. And the number keeps climbing.
If you sell products online, accept appointments, run a restaurant with online ordering, or manage a patient portal, you're in a higher risk category. But lawsuits have hit businesses of every size and type. A local shop with a five page website can get a demand letter just as easily as a national chain.
Here's what that demand letter usually looks like: a law firm sends you a letter claiming your website violates the ADA, and they want $5,000 to $25,000 to make it go away. If you fight it, legal fees pile up fast. $50,000 to $100,000 or more. And whether you settle or lose, you still have to fix the website.
We've seen these letters. We know what they target. And we know what actually protects you.
What Actually Protects You
Businesses that proactively address accessibility almost never get sued. The demand letters go after sites with obvious, significant barriers and zero effort toward fixing them.
Having documentation that you take accessibility seriously, that you've been working on it, that your site was built with it in mind from the start, gives you real ground to stand on.
That's why every site we build ships with semantic HTML, proper heading hierarchy, ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, skip links, and our custom AccessibilityToolbar. Not because a lawyer told us to. Because Melissa, a licensed occupational therapist whose training gave her a deep understanding of how people with disabilities interact with the web, made sure we understood what "accessible" actually means in practice.
The Overlay Scam
Now here's where it gets ugly.
An entire industry has popped up selling "accessibility compliance" as a $49/month JavaScript widget. Companies like AccessiBe, UserWay, and a dozen others promise that you can paste a script tag into your site and magically become WCAG compliant.
That is not how any of this works.
The FTC fined AccessiBe for deceptive marketing. The National Federation of the Blind has publicly called out overlay products. Accessibility advocates across the industry have documented, in detail, how these widgets fail screen reader users, create new barriers, and sometimes make sites actively worse.
Here's why overlays don't work: WCAG compliance requires changes to your actual code. Proper heading structure. Semantic HTML elements. Correct ARIA roles. Keyboard navigation that flows logically through your page. An overlay widget sitting on top of broken code can't fix what's underneath. It's a paint job on a cracked foundation.
We Found a Real Example
While doing competitive research, Melissa found a website called HELPipedia (specialneeds.help) that claimed to be an accessibility resource for people with special needs.
The site had fake WCAG compliance badges displayed prominently. It was running an overlay widget. And it had disabled text selection across the entire site, meaning a user who needed to copy text, use it with a screen reader, or interact with it in any nonstandard way was locked out.
A website claiming to serve people with disabilities was actively preventing those people from using it. With a compliance badge sitting right there on the page.
That's not an edge case. That's the overlay industry in a nutshell.
What a $49 Badge Actually Gets You
Let's be specific. Here's what an overlay widget does not do:
It does not fix your heading structure. If your H1 jumps to an H4, the overlay doesn't know and doesn't care.
It does not add meaningful alt text. It might generate automated descriptions like "image of a rectangle" or "photo123.jpg," which is worse than useless for someone who needs to understand what the image actually shows.
It does not fix your forms. If a form field has no associated label element, a screen reader user still can't tell what they're supposed to type. The overlay might try to guess, but guessing is not accessibility.
It does not make your navigation keyboard accessible. If your dropdown menus are built with divs instead of proper HTML, no amount of JavaScript layered on top will make them work with a keyboard.
And when that demand letter arrives, "We installed an overlay" is not a legal defense. Courts have specifically ruled that overlay widgets do not constitute compliance.
What Real Accessibility Looks Like
Real accessibility is engineering. It's in the code from line one, not bolted on after the fact.
When Tyler builds a site, he writes semantic HTML from the first component. Every interactive element gets keyboard support. Every image gets a real alt description written by a human who looked at the image and thought about what a screen reader user needs to know. Every form field has a proper label. Every page has a logical heading hierarchy. Color contrast ratios are checked before a single pixel ships.
We build a custom AccessibilityToolbar into every site. Not an overlay. A real component, coded into the site, that gives users control over font size, contrast modes, and motion preferences. Because that's what Melissa would want for anyone with a disability trying to use the site.
Beyond Lawsuits: What You're Losing Right Now
One in four American adults lives with some form of disability. Screen readers. Voice control. Low vision tools. Magnification. Switch devices.
If your website doesn't work with those tools, you're not just exposed to legal risk. You're actively losing customers. Every day, right now, people are landing on your site, trying to use it, failing, and leaving. You never see the analytics for the visit that didn't happen because the form couldn't be completed.
Protecting Your Business the Right Way
Skip the overlay. Skip the badge. Here's what actually works:
Build accessibility into the code from the start. If you're building a new site, this is the time to do it right. It costs nothing extra when it's part of the foundation.
If you already have a site with problems, get an honest audit. Not from a company selling you the fix before they've looked at the problem. Run Lighthouse in Chrome. Try navigating your own site with just a keyboard. You'll learn more in 10 minutes than any sales pitch will tell you.
Document what you're doing. Keep records of fixes, improvements, and your ongoing commitment. An accessibility statement on your site demonstrates good faith.
And if your site was built on a platform that makes real accessibility nearly impossible (looking at you, most WordPress themes and page builders), consider whether patching is worth the effort, or whether building it right from scratch is the smarter investment.
We build every site from scratch in Next.js. No templates, no themes, no page builders. Because that's the only way to guarantee the code is clean enough to actually be accessible.
We build custom, accessible websites for small businesses. No overlays. No fake badges. Just clean code that works for everyone. Let's talk.