The real cost of an inaccessible website

“Accessibility is expensive” is a common objection. The question is: compared with what?

What a claim costs

When a demand letter arrives, the costs stack up quickly:

1. Your own legal fees — even a quick settlement involves counsel.
2. The settlement or judgment — typically including the plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees, and in states like California, statutory damages of $4,000 per violation under the Unruh Act.
3. Remediation on a deadline — settlements require you to fix the site within months, often at rush rates.
4. Monitoring and reporting — many agreements require audits and reports for years.
5. The next claim — a settlement covers one plaintiff. If the site still isn’t accessible, another can sue.

At the far end of the scale:

• Target paid a $6 million class settlement plus about $3.7 million in plaintiffs’ fees (2008).
• Domino’s litigated for six years, through the Ninth Circuit and a Supreme Court petition (2016–2022).
• The DOJ can seek civil penalties of up to $118,225 for a first ADA Title III violation and $236,451 for subsequent ones.
• UC Berkeley ended up removing more than 20,000 public videos rather than make them accessible after a DOJ finding.

Read the full stories in landmark cases and education cases.

What you lose without a lawsuit

• Customers who leave quietly. People who can’t complete a purchase rarely file complaints; they go elsewhere.
• Contracts. Public-sector and enterprise buyers increasingly reject products without a credible ACR.
• Reputation. Accessibility failures — especially at public institutions — make news.
• Staff time. Handling individual accommodation requests one document at a time is slow and expensive.

What doing it right costs

Accessibility costs least when it’s part of normal work:

For documents, the same logic applies: an accessible Word template costs almost nothing to use; remediating a finished 100-page PDF by hand takes hours.

A sensible investment plan

1. Audit once, properly, so you know the size of the problem. Website audit.
2. Fix shared components and top journeys first — highest impact per dollar.
3. Fix the source — templates, design systems, document templates — so new content is accessible.
4. Budget a small annual amount for monitoring, training and a re-audit.
5. Avoid false economies like overlays, which add cost without removing risk.