AI is building your digital experience. It’s also making it less accessible.

AI is writing your copy, building your landing pages, and increasingly generating the code behind your digital experience. Which raises a question worth sitting with: if AI is building more of what your customers touch, who is making sure it works for everyone?

For many brands, that question doesn’t have a clear answer yet. And the data shows it.

As of the 2026 WebAIM Million report, 95.9% of the top one million website homepages have detectable accessibility failures. The average page has 56.1 errors. And the number of errors increased 10.1% over the prior year, reversing six consecutive years of gradual improvement.

That trend didn’t reverse by accident. According to that same report, the average homepage now contains 1,437 elements, up 22.5% in a single year and nearly double what it did in 2019. More code is being shipped, faster, with the same accessibility gaps baked in. If your team is using AI to build or update digital experiences, that pattern almost certainly includes you.

Accessibility gets treated as an engineering problem, something you hand off and forget. But when AI is generating the experiences your customers touch, the gap becomes everyone’s problem, and marketing has more leverage to close it than most teams realize.

AI-assisted development Iis making the web less accessible

The AI tools your team uses to write copy, build landing pages, and generate code were trained on the web as it exists. The web is largely inaccessible, and that’s exactly what these models learned from. The six most common failure types — low-contrast text, missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language — have been the top failures for seven consecutive years.

When a model learns from billions of pages of existing web content, it learns those patterns. Most AI tools today lack the training foundation needed to generate consistently accessible code.

What makes this challenging for marketing teams is that these failures remain hidden until a user encounters them directly. The code looks fine. The page renders correctly. The gap only surfaces when someone navigates with a screen reader, or tabs through a form with a keyboard. By then, someone has already had a bad experience on your site, or it has already been flagged for legal action.

The New York City Bar Association put it plainly in a June 2025 report: “AI cannot solve for accessibility if it was never trained to recognize it.” Asking an AI tool to generate accessible code is asking it to do something it has no foundation to do well. The failures stay invisible until a real user encounters them, or a plaintiff’s law firm flags your site.

Accessibility lawsuits have doubled since 2020, and ecommerce is the primary target

Marketing leaders understand the reputational impact of accessibility litigation. The data shows this risk is both real and growing.

According to AudioEye’s 2026 Web Accessibility Litigation Report, U.S. digital accessibility lawsuits have doubled since 2020. 78% target ecommerce. Nearly eight in 10 are now filed in state courts, where damages can compound quickly. In 2025 alone, 26,253 combined federal and state claims were filed.

The most instructive data point from that report: 38.5% of companies that faced accessibility lawsuits already had an accessibility tool in place when they were sued. They thought the problem was handled. They had partial coverage and didn’t know it. Litigation often reveals these gaps publicly, with significant reputational consequences.

This isn’t only a U.S. problem. On June 4, 2026, a French court ordered Carrefour to bring carrefour.fr and its app to full accessibility conformance within six months, the first ruling under the European Accessibility Act to reject partial conformance as a legal defense. Carrefour’s own accessibility statements had claimed 50% to 70% conformance across its platforms. The court’s reasoning was direct: a site can’t be somewhat accessible. It works or it doesn’t.

Settlement costs typically run $15,000 to $75,000. Legal fees run $10,000 to $30,000 on top of that. And those are the cases that settle quickly. One widely-cited case against a major retailer began as a routine accessibility claim in 2020 and ended five years later with over 200 court filings and a total cost of $5.15 million. Defending against these claims often costs more than early settlement, and significantly more than solving it proactively.

Inaccessible digital experiences are turning away a $18 trillion market

More than 1.3 billion people globally live with a disability. Together with their family and friends, they represent over $18 trillion in spending power, according to the Return on Disability Group. Seven out of 10 customers with disabilities will leave a website if it’s inaccessible, and 83% limit their shopping to sites they know work for them.

Your marketing spend is already allocated to reach this audience. An inaccessible digital experience turns them away before your message can resonate.

Brand trust is built or lost at the experience level. Accessibility is no different. The brands that are known for getting this right build loyalty that doesn’t appear in any single quarter but compounds across cycles. Those that overlook accessibility experience abandoned sessions, negative word of mouth, and in some cases, public litigation.

3 things marketing leaders can do right now

Accessibility doesn’t have to live entirely in engineering. Marketing leaders have more leverage here than most realize.

1. Scrutinize your tools, the ones you have and the ones you’re about to buy. If your team is using AI to build or update digital experiences, find out what that AI can and cannot detect. Automated tools can only detect about two-thirds of accessibility issues, and of those, fix about half. The issues outside that range are often the ones most likely to trigger a lawsuit.

That scrutiny matters even more as you revise your stack. As you evaluate new AI-powered platforms, whether it’s a CMS, a personalization engine, or a code generator, don’t assume the vendor solved accessibility because they solved speed. Ask what the tool does and doesn’t detect, whether a human ever reviews the output, and who owns the gap when it’s wrong. Partnering with a solution like AudioEye, which combines AI-powered automation with expert-written custom fixes, gives you coverage that no automated tool delivers on its own.

2. Connect accessibility to the metrics you already report. Baseline conversion rate and bounce rate on a high-traffic page, fix it, then measure the same page again. Put the accessibility issue count in the same report as CAC and conversion rate, not a separate compliance dashboard nobody in marketing reads. This is a revenue and reach conversation, not a compliance cost.

3. Make accessibility part of your campaign launch process. No digital experience, whether a landing page, a product launch, or a seasonal campaign, should go live without an accessibility check. Treat it the way you treat brand safety in media buying: a non-negotiable before anything goes out the door.

The AI tools your team relies on are not going away, and they shouldn’t. But speed without accessibility is not a growth strategy. The brands that close this gap will reach more customers, reduce legal exposure, and build the kind of trust that no ad budget can buy.