More than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits landed against U.S. websites in 2025, and federal filings alone topped 3,100, according to UsableNet’s 2025 ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) lawsuit analysis.[1] Ecommerce and food service absorbed most of that volume, but the pattern behind the numbers- plaintiff firms filing at scale against any site that transacts online- has nothing to do with industry. It has to do with whether inaccessible workflows exist in production.
SaaS companies run entire businesses through workflows: signup forms, in-app checkout for subscription tiers, dashboards and settings panels rebuilt every sprint. Most of that surface area has never been reviewed for accessibility, and almost no SaaS company has assigned a single owner to make sure it is.
Why no one at a SaaS company owns accessibility
Ask who owns accessibility at most companies and the answer is usually a shrug distributed across departments. accessiBe’s internal research on accountability found 51% of brands hand the job to engineering by default, and 8.6% never assign it to anyone.[2] What’s left gets scattered across marketing, legal, and compliance, each covering its own corner without anyone responsible for the whole. SaaS companies operate on the same fractured pattern, and it tends to manifest as one of four models.
Legal or compliance-led ownership only wakes up when something forces it to: a demand letter, an audit requirement, a customer’s procurement questionnaire. No trigger, no action. Put accessibility under engineering instead, and it becomes a backlog item fighting for sprint time against every other ticket, a fight it usually loses. Hand it to marketing or growth, the team standing closest to onboarding copy, landing pages, and in-app messaging, and you get people who can see the problem but have no path to a codebase change without opening an engineering ticket and waiting behind features. Only 12.5% of organizations in accessiBe’s research had built a dedicated accessibility function instead, one with standing to act across all three.[2]
As one accessiBe executive put it in a recent interview: “It’s divided responsibility by owner of none. No one is responsible fully,” notes Judy Quintana, SVP of marketing for accessiBE[3]. For a SaaS company shipping several releases a week, divided responsibility doesn’t average out to partial coverage. It provides no coverage because each team assumes the other is checking.
The conversion cost hiding inside SaaS trial and upgrade flows
accessiBe has already documented this failure pattern inside ecommerce checkout. In the same interview, SVP of Marketing Judy Quintana described what an internal scan of checkout flows turned up: “There are all sorts of accessibility challenges within checkout… You associate it with poor design or someone didn’t QA, but there are issues that our tools find in an accessibility scan… if you create any friction in that, it impacts conversion, and that is abandoned shopping carts.”[3]
That connection shows up in accessiBe’s broader research too, not just in one internal scan. In a survey of more than 300 ecommerce leaders conducted with Qualtrics, 87% said applying accessibility best practices to checkout would reduce cart abandonment, yet nearly 1 in 4 admitted their own checkout pages don’t work properly with assistive technologies like screen readers or keyboard navigation, and only 40% had run an accessibility audit in the past year.[4] The pattern is a perception gap as much as a technical one: 72% of leaders in that same survey described their checkout as “fully optimized,” even as the same friction points, unlabeled fields, unclear error messages, keyboard traps, kept showing up as both usability complaints and accessibility failures.[4] The math behind it is not small. Baymard puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.19% and estimates $260 billion in recoverable sales industry-wide from better checkout usability alone.[4]
Checkout isn’t a SaaS company’s highest-stakes flow, but the mechanism is identical. A trial signup form with an unlabeled input field fails the same way a checkout field does: a screen reader user can’t tell what the field wants, and abandons. An upgrade paywall built with a custom modal that traps keyboard focus produces the same outcome as an inaccessible checkout button: the user can’t complete the action and leaves. SaaS companies rarely audit trial signup or upgrade flows for accessibility because, like ecommerce checkout, no one associates the lost conversion with an accessibility gap. It shows up in analytics as an abandonment rate, not an accessibility incident.
SaaS isn’t the top litigation target yet, and that isn’t protection
Ecommerce accounted for nearly 70% of ADA web accessibility lawsuits in 2025, while food service accounted for roughly 21%. Software and SaaS platforms remain a comparatively small share of total filings.[1] That gap isn’t permanent. The same UsableNet analysis found that 46% of federal ADA cases in 2025 involved companies that had already been sued once.[1] The litigation model depends on a supply of unremediated targets, and as ecommerce sites make surface-level fixes, plaintiff firms have room to diversify into any industry running public-facing digital workflows, which describes every SaaS company’s marketing site, signup flow, and customer portal.
The same analysis found something worth sitting with: accessibility widgets appeared in lawsuit complaints without reducing the volume of lawsuits filed against companies that used them.[1] That finding doesn’t mean automated remediation has no value. It means no single layer, whether a runtime tool or a one-time developer fix, closes the gap on its own. For a SaaS company running both a marketing site and an in-app product, pairing the partial, real-time coverage accessWidget provides at runtime with accessFlow’s development-stage checks (https://lp.accessibe.com/accesswidget-accessflow) narrows the space between what ships today and what gets fixed at the source, with accessServices available for the audits, VPATs, and legal situations where automated tools reach their limits and a documented remediation roadmap is what a customer or a court actually wants to see.[5]
How accessFlow fits into a SaaS engineering workflow
accessFlow (https://lp.accessibe.com/accessflow), accessiBe’s developer tooling platform, is built to address this gap: accessibility findings that dev teams have to act on themselves, surfaced in the CI/CD pipeline and IDE, the same way a linter or type checker would flag a bug before it merges.[6] accessFlow’s SDK runs automated accessibility checks against a build and flags WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) Level AA violations before code ships. Its Model Context Protocol integration surfaces accessibility guidance directly in the IDE as a developer writes a component, and findings are routed to Jira, ClickUp, and Asana, so accessibility tickets sit in the same backlog as every other piece of engineering work, without requiring the developer to leave their editor or have specialized accessibility training.[6]
accessFlow doesn’t automatically fix the code. A developer still writes and ships the fix; accessFlow’s role is to ensure the finding reaches the right person — one a developer can act on without specialized accessibility training — while it’s still just a few lines of code, rather than after the feature has shipped to production and a customer or a plaintiff’s attorney finds it first. accessiBe’s newest CI/CD and IDE capabilities (https://lp.accessibe.com/accessflow-new-features) extend that same partial coverage further into the release process.
This is where the four ownership models converge on a workable answer. Engineering-led programs get a concrete mechanism instead of an unenforced policy: a failing check in the pull request, same as any other build failure. Growth and marketing teams touching onboarding copy or upgrade flows can request the same scan without waiting on a dedicated accessibility hire. A legal or compliance function gains something to point to before a demand letter arrives, rather than after: a documented, ongoing review process rather than a one-time audit.
The fix is assigning the review, not adding another tool
None of the four ownership models eliminates the need for review; they just determine who’s supposed to be doing it. For a SaaS company shipping continuously, accessibility costs something either way. Reviewed inside the workflow developers already use, a fix runs a few lines of code. Left outside that workflow, the same fix turns into a support ticket, a lost trial signup, or a lawsuit. accessFlow’s job is to ensure the review happens consistently within the workflow, regardless of which team ends up holding ownership.
Sources
- Jason Taylor, UsableNet. “ADA Web Lawsuit Trends for 2026: What 2025 Filings Reveal.” January 8, 2026. https://blog.usablenet.com/ada-web-lawsuit-trends-2026
- accessiBe internal research on accessibility ownership and accountability (2026).
- accessiBe interview, Judy Quintana (SVP Marketing) and Sapir Rone (June 2026). Internal transcript.
- accessiBe, in partnership with Qualtrics, “Cart Abandonment & Accessibility: The Hidden Revenue Gap” (survey of 300+ eCommerce leaders, updated June 2026). https://accessibe.com/blog/knowledgebase/cart-abandonment-impact-for-ecommerce
- accessiBe internal documentation: Client Preferences & Platform Hub Working Brief V4 (June 2026).
- accessiBe, accessFlow product documentation. https://lp.accessibe.com/accessflow
