5,114 ADA Lawsuits in 2025: Why Shopify Stores Are in the Crosshairs

The Numbers Keep Climbing

In 2025, plaintiffs filed 5,114 ADA-related digital accessibility lawsuits in the United States — a 24% increase over the prior year. Federal and state filings combined. Roughly 70% of those lawsuits targeted e-commerce sites, making online retail the most-sued sector by a wide margin.

Shopify powers millions of e-commerce stores worldwide. That market share makes Shopify merchants a disproportionate share of the target pool. If you’re running a Shopify store, the math is not in your favor.

These are not theoretical risks. They are demand letters arriving in inboxes. They are settlements ranging from $5,000 to $75,000 — plus attorney fees, consent decrees, and ongoing monitoring requirements. And 45% of lawsuits hit businesses that had already been sued before, which means fixing it once and walking away does not work.

Why Shopify Stores Get Targeted

Three structural reasons make Shopify stores especially vulnerable:

1. Every transaction is a testable surface. A plaintiff’s attorney can visit your Shopify store, attempt to complete a purchase using a screen reader, document every failure, and file. The entire process takes hours, not weeks. Compare this to suing a physical retailer, which requires in-person visits and architectural assessments.

2. The Shopify app ecosystem compounds violations. Most Shopify stores run 10–20 apps that inject front-end markup: review widgets, upsell popups, chat bubbles, loyalty programs, email capture modals. Each app adds HTML and JavaScript that your theme didn’t originally account for. Most of these apps are built without accessibility in mind. A store that starts with a reasonably accessible theme can accumulate dozens of new violations just by installing popular apps.

3. Cart and checkout are the highest-risk surfaces. A 2025 e-commerce accessibility study found that only 11% of cart and checkout pages met minimum WCAG criteria. While Shopify’s hosted checkout has improved, the cart page and mini-cart drawer are theme-controlled — and these are the pages where the legal argument for denial of access is strongest.

What About Shopify’s Built-In Themes?

Shopify’s Dawn theme (and its successors) made meaningful accessibility improvements over older themes. Dawn ships with semantic HTML, ARIA landmarks, and better keyboard navigation than its predecessors.

But Dawn is a starting point, not a finish line. The moment you customize a Dawn theme — changing colors in the theme editor, rearranging sections, adding custom code — you can introduce violations. And the moment you install apps that inject front-end markup, Dawn’s baseline accessibility means little.

According to the WebAIM Million study (2025), 94.8% of the top one million homepages fail basic WCAG checks, with an average of 50+ detectable errors per page. Shopify stores are not exempt from this number.

What the Lawsuits Actually Allege

The most common allegations in ADA e-commerce lawsuits map directly to patterns found in Shopify stores:

• Missing alt text on product images (Shopify’s product image alt text field is optional and usually left blank)
• Insufficient color contrast on pricing and buttons (Shopify’s theme editor lets you pick colors without warning about contrast ratios)
• Form fields without associated labels (checkout, address, login, and newsletter signup forms)
• Keyboard traps in modals, drawers, and navigation menus (common in Shopify’s cart drawer and app-injected popups)
• Missing ARIA labels on icon buttons and interactive controls (cart icons, search icons, close buttons)
• Inaccessible search functionality

These are all WCAG violations that can be detected automatically and fixed programmatically. They are not edge cases. They are the most basic requirements of web accessibility.

The Settlement Math

A typical first-offense ADA web accessibility settlement looks like this:

• $5,000 – $25,000 in damages to the plaintiff
• $10,000 – $50,000 in plaintiff’s attorney fees
• A consent decree requiring full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance within 12–18 months
• Ongoing monitoring (often annual audits) for 2–3 years
• Potential contempt of court penalties if compliance is not maintained

For a repeat lawsuit — which happens 45% of the time — the numbers go up, and courts are less sympathetic.

For most Shopify merchants, the cost of a single settlement exceeds what they’d spend on accessibility remediation for years.

What Actually Reduces Risk

Overlays do not reduce legal risk. In 2025, 22.6% of ADA lawsuits hit sites that already had an accessibility overlay installed. The Shopify App Store lists several overlay apps with high ratings and thousands of installs. Those ratings do not equal legal protection. Courts have consistently rejected overlays as evidence of compliance.

What does reduce risk:

• Code-level fixes to your Shopify theme’s Liquid templates, CSS, and HTML that address the underlying ARIA attributes, alt text, and contrast values
• Continuous monitoring that catches new violations every time you update your theme, add a product, or install an app
• A documented audit trail showing what was fixed, when, and why — evidence you can hand to a lawyer if a demand letter arrives
• Covering the high-risk surfaces: product pages, collection pages, cart, and search

SiteRemora automates all four. We connect to your Shopify store, scan continuously, fix violations directly in your Liquid theme files, and generate compliance evidence you can hand to a lawyer if you ever need it.

The Trajectory Is Clear

ADA digital accessibility lawsuits have increased every year since 2017. The European Accessibility Act has added an entirely new enforcement jurisdiction. State-level accessibility laws in California, New York, and Illinois are expanding the plaintiff pool further.

This is not a trend that reverses. The question is not whether your Shopify store needs to be accessible. It is whether you fix it before or after you receive the demand letter.