PSA for SaaS founders: Your accessibility widget might be worthless.
I've seen three friends get demand letters this year over website accessibility. In two cases, they had those little "accessibility" icons in the corner. Didn't matter — the lawsuits still came.
Here's why: those widgets are overlays. They don't fix your actual HTML, your forms, your PDFs, or your color contrast. Courts have started specifically calling them out as insufficient.
What actually matters: • Semantic HTML (proper headings, labels, ARIA where needed) • Keyboard navigation works everywhere • PDFs are tagged and readable by screen readers • Color contrast hits 4.5:1 minimum • Forms have proper error messaging
The cheap way to check: Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse → Accessibility. Free. Takes 30 seconds. If you're under 90, you have work to do.
The expensive way to check: Wait for a plaintiff's law firm to run a scanner on your site and mail you a demand letter. That's $15K–$50K in legal fees before you even talk about remediation.
We're going through this right now with our own product - built an internal tool to audit and fix everything continuously. It's tedious work, but it's way cheaper than a lawsuit.
Anyone found a good workflow for staying on top of this without hiring a full-time accessibility engineer?
The interesting part is that accessibility is not really a widget problem — it’s a workflow problem. Sites change constantly, so a one-time audit can become outdated quickly.
The hard part seems to be making accessibility maintenance fit naturally into how teams already ship.