Edition #1 — The launch edition
The state of the target on your back
Welcome to the first Phriday Files. Every Friday we'll publish the week's web accessibility news through one lens: what actually threatens an online store. This week, the foundation — the 2025 numbers, straight from the annual ADA Website Accessibility Lawsuit Report.
The numbers that matter
ADA web lawsuits filed in the US in 2025 — up 24% over 2024
hit sites that already had an accessibility widget installed
of sued websites ran on Shopify — one platform, a third of the lawsuits
Who gets hit: restaurants and food brands (35%), fashion and apparel (26%), beauty (8%), home goods (8%), healthcare (7%). If you sell to the public online, you're in the dataset. WordPress sites took another 20%. And in 95% of cases, the matter settles — the pain is the demand letter, the lawyer fees, and the disruption, not the trial.
The widget trap
The ugliest number up there is the widget one: 983 lawsuits landed on websites that had already paid for an "AI accessibility" overlay. The widget sits on top of broken markup like paint over a cracked wall — nothing underneath got fixed. Hundreds of accessibility professionals have signed a public Overlay Fact Sheet saying exactly this. If a vendor promises one-line compliance, that's not a product — it's a receipt.
From the Phriday desk
Our scanner went live this week, four days ahead of schedule, and immediately practiced on us: it found five real contrast bugs on our own website. All five are fixed — phriday.cloud now scans clean at zero violations. We can't think of a better endorsement than our own tool refusing to let us ship broken.
The first real free scan ran Thursday: a small business homepage, and in about sixty seconds the report flagged a serious text-contrast failure and one sneaky issue most stores miss — the site had disabled pinch-zoom on mobile. That setting locks out low-vision customers who zoom to read, and it's a WCAG failure that takes one line to fix.
One fix before the weekend
Check your site's viewport setting. View source and find
<meta name="viewport">.
If it contains maximum-scale=1 or
user-scalable=no — remove those.
Zooming is not a nice-to-have; for millions of low-vision shoppers it's how they buy.
Thirty seconds, one line, real customers kept.
Sources: EcomBack 2025 Annual ADA Website Accessibility Lawsuit Report; Overlay Fact Sheet. Phriday Access provides monitoring and remediation guidance, not legal advice.
Know where you stand — free
A 10-issue scan of your store, plain-English report by email. 60 seconds.
Scan my site free →Phriday Access provides monitoring and remediation guidance, not legal advice. Next edition: Friday, September 4.