Kernelis Studio builds websites for a living. We spend our days choosing typefaces, refining color systems, and arguing over whether a button should say "Get Started" or "Learn More." Accessibility is not an abstract concept around here. It is a commitment we make to every client, baked into our process from the first wireframe.
So you can imagine the feeling when we finally ran a proper accessibility audit on kernelis.studio. Our own site. The one we look at every single day. The tool returned forty-nine failures.
Forty-nine places where the contrast was too low for someone to comfortably read. Not on a client project. On ours.
Here is what we found, what it would have cost if the wrong person had noticed first, and what the law actually says. Most of what is written about that last part is designed to frighten you into buying something.
What the Law Actually Says
Three things get deliberately blurred together in the accessibility industry. They are worth separating, slowly and carefully, because your anxiety level and your budget depend on knowing the difference.
Lawsuits are real, and they are accelerating
Website accessibility lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act are not a theoretical risk. They are a thriving practice area. The law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which has tracked these filings for years, counted 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, a 27 percent jump from the 2,452 filed the year before. That surpasses the previous federal peak of 3,255 set in 2022. Fold in state court filings and UsableNet puts the total at 4,928 cases for 2025.
The geography matters too. New York federal courts led 2025 with 1,021 filings. Florida followed with 961, nearly double its 2024 total. Illinois came third with 585. According to EcomBack's annual report, the top sixteen plaintiff firms filed 3,567 cases between them, just over 90 percent of all 2025 filings. These are volume operations, not isolated grievances.
And UsableNet found that 46 percent of 2025 federal cases involved repeat defendants. Plaintiff firms track litigation history and revisit companies that appear to have addressed only surface-level issues. One settlement does not buy peace.
Puerto Rico is a United States territory, so the ADA applies here in full. No business with a public-facing website is exempt based on size, location, or industry. UsableNet found that 64 percent of companies sued in the first half of 2025 had annual revenue below $25 million. The majority of targets are small and mid-sized businesses, not Fortune 500 brands.
The penalty numbers you see quoted are usually wrong
Under Title III of the ADA, the Department of Justice can seek civil penalties. The current amounts, codified at 28 CFR 85 and adjusted for inflation in 2025, are $118,225 for a first violation and $236,451 for each subsequent one.
You will see $75,000 and $150,000 quoted almost everywhere instead. Those are the 2014 figures. They are still published on an archived page at ada.gov that nobody ever took down, which is a government domain, which is why so many people copy them in good faith. If a page quoting ADA penalties has not been updated since 2014, ask what else on it is stale.
Here is the part that matters more than either number: only the Attorney General can seek those penalties. A private person suing your business cannot. A private plaintiff, the person who actually sends the demand letter, gets a court order to fix the site plus their attorney's fees and costs. That is still expensive and still disruptive. It is not a six-figure federal penalty, and anyone quoting you one without that context is selling fear.
The real financial exposure for most businesses is state-level, not federal. In California, the Unruh Civil Rights Act incorporates the ADA by reference and lets private plaintiffs recover a statutory minimum of $4,000 per violation, plus actual damages, punitive damages, and attorney's fees. Multiple visits to an inaccessible website can compound. California draws a disproportionate share of all ADA-related litigation for exactly this reason. New York state law similarly allows monetary damages.
So when you see a headline about massive ADA fines, look at which law it is citing. Federal Title III penalties are DOJ-only. The numbers that actually threaten a small business come from state statutes, settlement demands, and the cost of defending yourself.
There is no federal web standard for private businesses
In 2024 the Department of Justice issued a final rule requiring WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance. It applies to state and local government websites and mobile apps. Those deadlines were extended in April 2026, to April 26, 2027 for larger public entities and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. HHS separately extended its Section 504 deadline for federally funded healthcare entities with fifteen or more employees to May 11, 2027.
If you run a shop, a studio, a clinic, or a consultancy, those rules are not about you. Your exposure is litigation, not regulation.
Courts have consistently treated WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the working benchmark in private litigation, and WCAG 2.2 Level AA is increasingly considered best practice. But conformance is not a legal safe harbor and non-conformance is not automatic liability. The honest summary: no checklist guarantees you avoid a claim, no single standard has the force of law for private businesses, and the lawsuits keep coming anyway.
What We Found on Our Own Site
Forty-nine failures. Most were small. A few were embarrassing. These are the ones that taught us something worth sharing.
A green that passed and failed at the same time
One green on our site carries meaning: available, included, verified. On the light sections it was too pale to read comfortably, so we darkened it. That fixed eight contrast failures and broke two others, because on a dark card the darker green disappeared into the background. No single green passes on both a light and a dark ground. The fix was not the color. It was changing the surface underneath it.
Five stars that said nothing
Our testimonials show a five-star rating. A screen reader read out five star characters, one at a time, and told the listener nothing about what they meant. There is now a line of visually hidden text saying "Rated 5 out of 5," and the stars are marked as decorative so assistive technology skips them. A tiny change, an enormous difference in meaning.
A giant number announcing itself
Our process section has an enormous faint "01" sitting behind the text, purely decorative, adding visual rhythm. A screen reader was reading it aloud as content. It is now hidden from assistive technology and completely unchanged on screen.
Twenty questions that were not questions
Our FAQ holds twenty of them. They were built as plain text inside buttons, which meant that to a machine reading the page, and to anyone navigating by heading, they were not questions at all. The page had forty-four headings and not one was shaped like a question. We rebuilt the markup so the questions are real headings and the answers follow them.
And the one no tool found
Our main call to action swaps its text label for a drawn arrow when you hover it. When we moved every button label to dark ink for contrast, that arrow stayed white, so hovering put white back on pink at a contrast ratio of 3.71 against a required 4.5. Every automated scan we ran walked straight past it, because scans do not hover. It surfaced when a person used the site.
That is the part worth remembering. Tools find some of it. Using your own site finds the rest. Automated testing catches only a fraction of WCAG failures, with published estimates ranging from twenty to forty percent depending on the tool. The remainder, the logical order, the keyboard traps, the hover states, the meaning that only makes sense experienced in sequence, requires a human being.
What It Actually Costs
Fixing those forty-nine failures during design cost almost nothing. Most were a color value a few percentage points too pale. The fixes were small changes to values already living in our design system. Not one new color was added. Our brand pink never moved.
The expensive version is the other one, where you find out because someone sent a letter.
Here we have to be careful, because the published cost figures come almost entirely from companies that sell accessibility services. Treat them as industry estimates with an interest in the number being large. With that caveat: accessibility vendors put demand letter settlements for small and mid-sized businesses in the $5,000 to $25,000 range, out-of-court settlements after a filing at around $30,000 and up to $150,000, defense fees at $30,000 to $175,000, and total exposure per case at $55,000 to $270,000 or more.
The properly sourced numbers are the ones that matter anyway. In 2025 the online retailer Fashion Nova agreed to a $5.15 million class action settlement in Alcazar v. Fashion Nova, the second-largest web accessibility settlement on record. The Department of Justice then filed a Statement of Interest in February 2026 opposing that settlement, arguing it delivered little to blind consumers while compensating attorneys generously. Even the resolution was contested.
And if you are relying on an accessibility widget, read this one twice. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalized a $1 million consent order against accessiBe, finding the company misrepresented that its tool made websites WCAG-compliant. UsableNet found that a quarter of all 2025 digital accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that had an overlay widget installed. Widgets do not prevent litigation. They create a sense of security while the underlying code stays broken.
Our own estimate, and we will label it as an estimate rather than dress it up as research: proactive auditing and remediation for a small site runs somewhere between $3,500 and $10,000 a year. Against the exposure figures above, that is a factor of fifty or more. The math is directional, not precise. It is also not close.
Why This Is a Design Decision
Accessibility is not a checklist you run at the end of a project. By then every choice is made and you are unpicking them one at a time, like pulling stitches out of a finished garment.
It is deciding, while choosing a color, to measure its contrast rather than trust your eye. It is deciding, while placing an image, whether it carries meaning or is decoration. It is deciding, while building a component, whether it works for someone who cannot see the screen, cannot use a mouse, or does not perceive color the way you do.
Our design system now documents these decisions in writing, so the choice is made once instead of argued every time a new page gets built. The system encodes the principle, not just the value.
Here is the thing that changed how we think about it. A blue light filter, the kind built into a lot of prescription glasses and device settings, warms the screen and pulls perceived contrast down. Switching our buttons from white text to dark made the difference obvious immediately, on buttons that had been stared at for months without anyone noticing. The design had been built for one pair of eyes, without noticing that even those eyes have an opinion depending on the day, the device, the lighting, and the filter.
Nobody sees the same screen. Designing as though they do is not confidence. It is oversight.
Why This Matters to Kernelis Studio
Kernelis Studio exists to build for women founders and small businesses. People who were told the good version was for somebody else, that professional design was a luxury they would have to grow into.
A website someone cannot use is that same exclusion in a different costume. A person arrives, cannot read the text or reach the button, and leaves. You never hear about it. No analytics report says "this person could not see it." No form submission captures the visitor who gave up. The exclusion is silent, which is what makes it easy to ignore.
We will not ignore it. Not on client sites, and not on our own.
Better to build for everyone and be slower than to build for most people and call it done. The law is a reason. It is not the reason. The reason is that a website is a door, and a door that does not open for everyone is a wall.
We fixed our forty-nine. We are still looking for the fiftieth. That is the job.
Frequently asked questions
Can a small business really be sued over website accessibility?
Yes, and small businesses are the usual target. UsableNet found 64 percent of companies sued in the first half of 2025 had annual revenue under $25 million. Puerto Rico is a United States territory, so the ADA applies here in full.
What are the actual ADA penalties for an inaccessible website?
Federal civil penalties under Title III are $118,225 for a first violation and $236,451 for each subsequent one, codified at 28 CFR 85. But only the Attorney General can seek them. A private plaintiff gets a court order to fix the site plus attorney's fees, not those penalties. The widely quoted $75,000 and $150,000 figures are from 2014 and out of date.
Is there a legal standard my website has to meet?
Not for a private business. The Department of Justice rule requiring WCAG 2.1 Level AA applies to state and local government only. Courts treat WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the working benchmark in private litigation, but conformance is not a legal safe harbor and non-conformance is not automatic liability.
Do accessibility widgets protect me from a lawsuit?
No. UsableNet found a quarter of all 2025 digital accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that already had an overlay widget installed. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalized a $1 million order against accessiBe for misrepresenting that its tool made websites WCAG-compliant.
How much does it cost to fix accessibility problems?
Almost nothing when it happens during design. Most of our forty-nine failures were a color a few percentage points too pale, fixed with values already in our system. The expensive version is finding out because someone sent a demand letter.
What can automated testing actually catch?
Only part of it. Published estimates run between twenty and forty percent of WCAG failures depending on the tool. Hover states, keyboard traps, reading order, and whether content makes sense in sequence all need a person. The failure we missed on our own site existed only in a hover state, which no scan reproduces.
Sources
Civil penalty amounts: 28 CFR Part 85, eCFR (current). Lawsuit counts: Seyfarth Shaw, Federal Court Website Accessibility Lawsuit Filings Bounce Back in 2025; UsableNet, 2025 Year-End Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report; EcomBack, Annual 2025 ADA Website Compliance Lawsuit Report. Regulation: U.S. Department of Justice, Title II web and mobile app accessibility final rule; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HHS extends mobile and web accessibility deadline (May 2026). Enforcement: Federal Trade Commission, FTC Approves Final Order Requiring accessiBe to pay $1 Million (April 2025); U.S. Department of Justice, Statement of Interest in Alcazar v. Fashion Nova (February 2026). Settlement cost ranges are industry estimates published by accessibility vendors and are labeled as such in the text.
