Every small business website we checked had problems

In February 2026, the WebAIM Million project checked the top one million website homepages. The results were worse than any prior year.

95.9% of pages had problems. The average page had 56.1 distinct issues, a 10.1% increase from the previous year.

These are not obscure technical problems. The most common ones are basic:

Low contrast text means visitors with impaired vision can't read your page. Missing alt text means screen reader users get nothing from your images. Missing form labels means your contact form doesn't tell people what to type where.

None of this is visible to you when you browse your own site. But it affects real visitors every day.

These are also legal violations

The same problems listed above are what get cited in ADA website lawsuits. In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 of them in U.S. federal court, a 27% increase over the prior year. Including state court filings, the total exceeded 5,000 cases.

Lawsuits are just the visible portion. An estimated 35,000 to 50,000 demand letters were sent in 2025. A law firm sends you a letter saying your website violates the ADA and offers to settle for $5,000 to $20,000. Most businesses settle. It is cheaper than hiring a lawyer.

64% of defendants are businesses with less than $25 million in annual revenue. These are restaurants, dental offices, salons, contractors, retail shops. The kind of businesses that paid someone to build them a website on Wix or Shopify and assumed the template was compliant.

It is not. Courts have been explicit: the business owner is responsible for their website's accessibility, regardless of which platform or template they use.

How plaintiffs find you

The process is automated. Plaintiffs' firms run the same kind of scanning tools that accessibility auditors use, but instead of fixing the issues, they document them and file complaints. Some firms file hundreds of cases per year. 40% of federal ADA web cases in 2025 were filed by individuals representing themselves, up 40% year-over-year.

46% of companies sued in 2025 had already been sued before. A resolved complaint does not prevent a new one if the underlying issues remain unfixed.

What we found when we checked real sites

We ran the same checks on several well-known commercial websites. Every single one had issues:

These are well-funded companies with professional web teams. The issues exist because no website builder or template handles this by default. It requires deliberate effort.

If Gymshark and Allbirds have issues, your local dentist's Wix site almost certainly does too.

What these problems look like

Here is what the most common issues mean in practice:

Low contrast text means the color of your text does not stand out enough from its background. A person with low vision or color blindness may not be able to read it.

Missing image descriptions means your images do not have text alternatives. A blind person using a screen reader hears nothing when they encounter these images.

Missing form labels means the input fields on your contact page, your search bar, or your email signup have no programmatic labels. A screen reader user does not know what information to enter.

Empty links and buttons means your navigation contains clickable elements with no text. A screen reader announces "link" or "button" with no context for what it does.

None of these are visible to you when you browse your own site. All of them affect real visitors. And all of them are cited in ADA lawsuits.

What you can do about it

Most of these are fixable. On WordPress and Shopify, 85% to 90% of common issues can be fixed through the platform's built-in editor. Wix and Squarespace are more limited but still cover 60% to 70%.

The fixes are not complicated. Adding alt text to images. Adjusting text contrast. Labeling form fields. Making sure buttons have text. For most small business sites, the full fix takes three to five hours.

The question is whether you do it before or after you receive the demand letter.