A HER PRODUCT ERA GUIDE

We got sued because our website wasn't ADA compliant.

Not by a competitor. Not by a customer. By a plaintiff who had filed nearly identical claims against hundreds of other small businesses.

We are the founders of a multi-million dollar beauty brand. The lawsuit landed with no warning, over something we had no idea was a legal risk. We settled. It cost us considerably more than we want to print on this page.

This is the guide we built afterward with our attorney and our web designer. You can audit your own site with it in about ten minutes.

Get The Guide — $18.99

3,117 website accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal court in 2025.

Up 27% from the year before. And for every case that reaches a courtroom, an estimated 7 to 10 demand letters go out first. That is somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 businesses a year, almost none of whom saw it coming.

SOURCES: SEYFARTH SHAW ADA TITLE III FILINGS · USABLENET · WCAGSAFE

A legally blind customer used a screen reader on our site. Then the lawsuit arrived.

Here is the part that matters: the issues cited against us were real.

Our free-shipping banner was a background image, so a screen reader couldn't read it and blind customers never knew the offer existed. Our Instagram feed announced "Instagram post" eight times in a row with no way to tell them apart. Our Vegan and Cruelty Free badges were invisible to assistive technology. Our checkout had a discount field that keyboard users tabbed straight past without ever seeing it.

We fixed the site within 24 hours of being served and settled without admitting wrongdoing. But we didn't need a court to tell us the site needed to change. It did, and we changed it.

Being small didn't protect us. Being small is the reason we were picked.

Nine violations were cited against us. Most of them ship with your theme.

Nothing on that list was exotic. They are standard issues on most Shopify themes, and automated scanners flag them in seconds. That is how these lists get built in the first place.

01. Revenue size does not create an exemption. Small businesses are targeted because they are least likely to already be compliant.

02. Fixing your site after a filing does not end the case. The violation existed the day it was filed.

03. You get roughly 20 to 30 days to respond to a demand letter.

04. Early settlements run $3,000 to $15,000. Defending through trial runs $30,000 to $75,000 and up.

Eleven pages. Everything we wish someone had handed us.

01. The exact nine violations cited against us, written out plainly so you can check your own site for each one.

02. The ten-minute audit. Five steps, starting with a free scan that takes about thirty seconds.

03. The fixes you can make yourself today inside Shopify admin, with no developer involved.

04. What genuinely needs a developer, and what remediation actually costs.

05. The demand-letter playbook. What to do, and what never to do, in the first thirty days.

06. Six free testing tools and the three Shopify accessibility apps worth comparing.

07. A printable compliance checklist built to run monthly.

08. The attorney who represented us and the web designer who fixed our site, including a discount code she extended to our readers.

Written for Shopify stores. The law applies to every platform, and the audit steps work anywhere, but the step-by-step fixes are written for Shopify.

$18.99. Our settlement was four figures, and that was the cheap version.

The audit takes ten minutes. You can run it tonight, on your own site, without hiring anyone.

We can't promise a guide makes you lawsuit-proof, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What it does is show you what we didn't know, before someone else finds it first.