AI Is Building Your Digital Experience. It's Also Locking People Out.

I saw a number the other day that stopped me in my tracks.

The 2026 WebAIM Million report says that among the top one million websites by traffic globally, 95.9% have detectable accessibility defects.

On average, each page has 56.1 errors.

What shocked me even more: that number is up 10.1% from the previous year. After six consecutive years of slow decline, the trend reversed course in the very year AI started writing code at scale.

Think about what that means.

It means that among your customers, there's a group of people being quietly shut out of your website. And you have no idea.

AI-Written Code Comes with Built-In Defects

What tools is your team using right now to write code, build landing pages, generate copy?

Chances are, AI is involved.

But do you know how those AIs learned to write web pages?

They studied billions of web pages and then imitated them. The problem is that the vast majority of web pages on the internet are already non-compliant. What AI learned was the set of defective patterns that already existed.

WebAIM's report shows that for seven straight years, the top six categories of defects haven't changed: low-contrast text, missing alt text, unlabeled forms, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language declarations. AI learned a defective way of writing from a defective world.

A June 2025 report from the New York City Bar Association put it in a way I found especially apt: AI has never been trained to recognize accessibility. When you ask it to do this, it has no foundation.

It's like asking someone who grew up eating nothing but mass-produced cafeteria food to cook French cuisine. They can't. It's not their fault — they were never taught.

What makes this worse is that these defects are invisible.

The code looks fine. The page renders normally. The problems only surface when someone tries to navigate with a screen reader or fill out a form using only a keyboard. By that point, your customer has already suffered through a disastrous experience on your website.

Turns Out, This Is a Spectacularly Bad Deal

You might think that doing accessibility poorly just means losing a few users. Not a big deal.

AudioEye's 2026 accessibility lawsuit report has some numbers worth working through.

First, digital accessibility lawsuits in the US have doubled since 2020. In 2025 alone, federal and state courts combined received 26,253 cases.

Second, 78% of them target e-commerce.

Third, settlement amounts typically range from $15,000 to $75,000, with attorney's fees adding another $10,000 to $30,000 on top.

Fourth, that's just the price of a "quick settlement." One large retailer's case started as an ordinary accessibility lawsuit in 2020, dragged on for five years, went through more than 200 court hearings, and cost a total of $5.15 million.

Going to court costs far more than fixing the problem from the start.

There's another data point that sent a chill down my spine: among the companies that get sued, 38.5% had already installed accessibility tools. They thought the problem was solved. In reality, those tools only covered about half the issues — and they didn't know it.

Lawsuits are often the mechanism that exposes all those hidden traps at once. Think about it: what's your brand reputation worth?

And this isn't just an American problem.

On June 4, 2026, a French court ruled against Carrefour. It ordered the company to bring its website and app into full compliance with accessibility standards within six months. Carrefour's own accessibility statement claimed a compliance rate of 50% to 70%. The court's logic was simple:

A website can't be "almost" usable. It either works, or it doesn't.

This was the first ruling under the European Accessibility Act that rejected "partial compliance" as a valid defense.

You're Turning Away an $18 Trillion Market

Alright, we've covered the legal risks. Let's switch angles and talk about money.

According to Return on Disability Group, more than 1.3 billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. Add in their families and friends, and this group represents more than $18 trillion in purchasing power.

$18 trillion. For context, that's a figure exceeded only by the GDPs of the US and China.

What do you think happens when these users encounter a website that's hard to use?

Seven out of ten simply leave.

83% will only buy from websites they know work for them.

A portion of your marketing budget — the money you spend on customer acquisition — is already meant to reach these people. But your website isn't usable, so they get shut out before they ever see your copy, your product, or your story.

This isn't a compliance cost. It's revenue you're losing.

As a Marketing Leader, You Have the Most Leverage

At this point, you might be thinking: isn't this the engineering team's job?

Let me be clear: if you're still treating accessibility as something you can just offload to the tech team and call it done, part of your customer acquisition spend this year is money down the drain.

Your leverage as a marketing leader on this issue is far greater than you realize. Three things you can do right now.

First, audit the tools you have — and the ones you're about to buy.

Your team uses AI to build landing pages, generate code, spin up campaign pages? Go find out what that AI can detect and what it can't. Automated tools can only catch about two-thirds of accessibility issues, and only half of those can be auto-fixed. The ones it can't detect are precisely the ones most likely to trigger lawsuits.

When you're buying a new AI-driven platform — whether it's a CMS, a personalization engine, or a code generator — don't assume that because the vendor solved for "speed," they also solved for "accessibility." Ask three questions: What can this tool detect, and what can't it? Is there a human reviewing the output? And when something goes wrong, who's on the hook?

Solutions like AudioEye, which combine AI automation with expert human remediation, can give you coverage that a purely automated tool simply can't match.

Second, put accessibility metrics on the dashboards you already look at.

Pick a high-traffic page. Record its conversion rate and bounce rate before making any changes. After fixing the accessibility issues, measure again. Then put the accessibility defect count on the same report as your CAC and conversion rate.

Don't build a "compliance dashboard" and leave it sitting in a corner where no one looks at it. This is about revenue and reach, not compliance overhead.

Third, embed accessibility checks into your launch process.

Whether it's a landing page, a new product launch, or a seasonal campaign — nothing goes live without passing an accessibility check. Treat it the same way you treat brand safety in media buying: non-negotiable, and it gets caught before anything goes out the door.

In Closing

The AI tools your team relies on aren't going away — and they shouldn't. They make you faster and more efficient.

But faster doesn't mean better. A digital experience that shuts out users with disabilities isn't a growth strategy.

In 2026, the average homepage has 1,437 elements — up 22.5% from a year ago. Code keeps piling up, faster and faster. If defects are growing at the same rate, what we're building with AI is just a thicker wall.

The first ones to tear down that wall will reach more customers, reduce their legal risk, and earn a kind of trust that ad spend can't buy.

When are you going to take action?