The Cost of Exclusion
What inaccessible and unusable digital products are really costing you –– and what you gain by getting it right.
That's not a niche audience. That's roughly 70 million people— a significant share of the market — quietly encountering barriers, quietly leaving, and rarely coming back to explain why.
It's not just who you're losing. It's what you're missing.
Accessible products convert better. They have lower abandonment rates, stronger SEO, and broader reach. They hold up better in enterprise procurement reviews, where accessibility compliance is increasingly a hard requirement.
More importantly: the same work that removes barriers for users with disabilities tends to improve the experience for everyone. Designers call this the curb cut effect — solutions built for people at the margins end up making things better across the board.
"The fix would have been far
less expensive than the fight."
The legal landscape has changed.
In 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Robles v. Domino's Pizza that the ADA applies to websites and apps — not just physical locations. The Supreme Court declined to overturn it. Digital accessibility is now a legal obligation, not a best practice.
Domino's spent years fighting the lawsuit rather than fixing the issues that prompted it. Those issues were common, correctable, and far less expensive than the litigation — and the penalty — that followed.
~4,000 ADA website accessibility lawsuits filed
in 2025, a 24% increase over the prior year.
67% of those lawsuits targeted companies
with less than $25 million in annual revenue.
$5K–$75K typical settlement range, before
attorney fees, redesign costs, and monitoring expenses.
This isn't about fear. It's about information.
Most teams building digital products aren't trying to exclude anyone. Exclusion is usually the predictable result of building without the full range of users in view. Not negligence — just a blind spot.
The businesses that get this right aren't motivated solely by litigation risk. They're motivated by a clearer picture of who their users actually are and how they need to use a business's product.