The average home page tested in the 2026 WebAIM Million study carried 56.1 detectable accessibility errors, 10.1% more than the year before. Each of those errors, on its own, looks like a minor design or code decision: a color that’s slightly too light, an image without alt text, a form field without a proper label. Individually, none of it looks expensive. Added up across a site and left unaddressed for years, though, it becomes a cost that shows up in places most businesses don’t think to look for it: customers who leave without complaining, legal exposure that compounds, and a remediation bill that grows the longer it’s deferred.

Lost customers you never see

The most invisible cost is also, in aggregate, probably the largest: visitors who can’t complete what they came to do and simply leave. A screen reader user who hits an unlabeled form field, or a keyboard-only user who can’t reach a dropdown menu, typically doesn’t file a support ticket. They abandon the task and go to a competitor’s site instead. That kind of loss never appears on a report labeled “accessibility,” because it looks identical to ordinary cart abandonment or bounce rate in whatever analytics tool a business already uses. It’s a real cost that’s structurally invisible, which is exactly why it’s easy for a business to underestimate how much an inaccessible checkout flow or contact form is actually costing.

Web accessibility litigation, mostly under the ADA in the US and increasingly under the European Accessibility Act in the EU, is a second cost category, and it compounds in a specific way: the longer a known issue goes unfixed, the harder it becomes to argue it wasn’t a known, ignorable risk. EU businesses now face this concretely and with defined numbers attached. Maximum fines EU member states have set for EAA non-compliance range from roughly 60,000 to around 900,000 euros, alongside possible product withdrawal or a market ban, according to Level Access’s EAA overview. In the US, exact litigation counts vary by tracker and no single authoritative figure exists, but the trend across every tracker has stayed consistently high for years, with retail and e-commerce sites remaining the most frequently targeted category.

The cost of deferred remediation

Accessibility issues don’t stay static on a site that isn’t tested regularly, they accumulate. That’s the practical meaning behind the WebAIM Million’s 10.1% year-over-year increase in average errors per page: sites are shipping new features and redesigns faster than they’re testing them, so problems pile up rather than getting caught and fixed along the way. A business that waits three years to run its first accessibility audit isn’t facing the same fix it would have faced in year one. It’s facing three years of accumulated, interlocking issues across a site that’s grown more complex in the meantime, which is a meaningfully larger and more expensive project than a smaller, earlier fix would have been.

The reputational cost of getting the fix wrong

There’s also a cost specific to how a business chooses to address accessibility, not just whether it does. In 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1,000,000 to settle charges that the company made misleading claims about how much of a website its accessWidget product could automatically fix, and about paid customer reviews, according to coverage of the FTC order. That’s a cost that came not from having accessibility problems, nearly every business does to some degree, but from how those problems were represented publicly. It’s a useful reminder that overpromising what a fix accomplishes carries its own risk, separate from the underlying accessibility gap itself.

The cost of a wrong fix, not just a missing one

It’s also worth separating “no accessibility work” from “the wrong kind of accessibility work,” since both carry cost but in different forms. A business that does nothing faces the lost-customer and legal-exposure risks described above. A business that installs a tool marketed as a complete fix, without understanding its actual limits, can end up in a position where it believes it’s covered when significant gaps remain, which is arguably a worse position than knowing there’s work left to do. That’s part of why being specific about what any tool actually handles automatically, versus what still needs manual review, matters as much as doing the work in the first place.

What this actually costs to fix

None of this is an argument that accessibility work is free or trivial. It’s an argument that the cost of not doing it doesn’t stay flat over time, and it doesn’t show up as a single obvious line item either. Businesses that treat accessibility as ongoing, tested work, rather than a one time project or a single script installed and forgotten, tend to face smaller, steadier costs instead of a large deferred bill arriving all at once as a lawsuit, a regulatory fine, or a slow bleed of customers who quietly went elsewhere. Platforms combining automated monitoring with human reviewed checks, like Wawsome’s, are built around exactly that idea: catching regressions continuously costs less, in the long run, than rediscovering the same accumulated problems years later.