One man, 1,800 lawsuits

Anthony Bouyer is 55, an internet marketer, and by reputation the most feared customer in California. He has sued roughly 1,800 businesses in the state. The system was simple: walk in, find a violation, file. One corner store paid him $14,000 to make the case go away. The owners are furious, but the courts have been clear that what he's doing is legal.

The reason this works is a California quirk layered on top of federal law. The Unruh Civil Rights Act lets a plaintiff collect statutory damages for each visit to a non-compliant business, no proof of actual harm required. That turns accessibility gaps into a repeatable revenue stream for anyone willing to file at volume.

For years that meant physical defects — a counter too high to reach over from a wheelchair, a parking space an inch too narrow, a threshold without a ramp. But the hunting ground has moved. The new target isn't the parking lot. It's your website.

Last year saw 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits. A serial plaintiff doesn't need to drive to your store to find a violation on your site — they don't even need to leave the couch. Anyone can scan your store for missing alt text, including people who sue for a living.

The deadline everyone's watching isn't the one that matters

Every Shopify owner I talk to is anxious about the 2026 ADA deadline making the rounds online. For most private online stores, that deadline isn't really the threat. The law that already applies to you has been on the books for years, and almost nobody is talking about it.

Back in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear Domino's appeal, which left a Ninth Circuit ruling standing in Robles v. Domino's Pizza. A blind customer named Guillermo Robles couldn't finish an order on Domino's website or app with his screen reader, and the court treated that as an ADA violation. The Ninth Circuit's reasoning leaned on the website's tight connection to Domino's physical pizza shops, and it pointedly left the bigger question — whether an online-only business is covered — for another day. Courts in other parts of the country have answered that question differently, so where you stand depends partly on where you are. But the direction of travel is hard to miss: if your store has any brick-and-mortar footprint, the nexus argument is already settled against you, and even pure e-commerce sites are losing these cases in plenty of jurisdictions. (We got into the messy aftermath — and why bolt-on accessibility overlays don't actually solve it — in our breakdown of why overlays fail ADA website compliance.)

There's a wrinkle that works in plaintiffs' favor here: Title III has no regulation spelling out a technical web standard, so businesses technically have flexibility in how they make a site accessible. In practice, though, courts, settlements, and demand letters almost all converge on the same yardstick — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, at level AA. It's the closest thing to a default the industry has. Sitting inside it is Success Criterion 1.1.1, "Non-text Content," which says any image that conveys information needs a text alternative: your product shots, your lifestyle photography, the hero banner that names a sale. (Purely decorative images are the exception — WCAG actually wants those marked with an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them, which is a distinction worth getting right rather than describing everything in sight.)

Why alt text is the violation they find first

Plaintiff firms don't audit sites by hand. They point automated scanners at thousands of sites a week and look for the cheapest filing they can build a case around. The violation those scans surface most often is missing alt text, and the reason is mechanical: a script can spot an <img> tag with no alt attribute in milliseconds, and it's never wrong about it. There's nothing to interpret and nothing for a defendant to argue with.

A color-contrast problem or a keyboard trap usually needs a person to confirm before it holds up. A missing alt attribute doesn't. It's either present or it's not, and a scanner settles that question without anyone looking. For someone filing at volume, that's the path of least resistance, and it happens to sit on the vast majority of online stores.

An average store carries hundreds or thousands of product images, and most platforms make alt text an optional field that nobody fills in. So the typical catalog is a dense field of exactly the violation a scanner is built to catch. You don't have to be careless to be exposed. You just have to have a normal product catalog.

The fix is the same scale as the problem

The good news about a violation that's trivial to detect is that it's also trivial to fix at scale. You don't need a lawyer for this part. You need every image in your catalog to carry an accurate text alternative, and you need it done in an afternoon, not over six months of manual data entry.

That's the job we built AltText.ai for. It reads each product image and writes accurate, conversion-minded alt text on its own, so a catalog of thousands gets handled in a single pass instead of a long afternoon of manual entry. It connects directly to Shopify, WordPress, the REST API, and our MCP server, which means you fix the catalog in place rather than exporting and re-importing it. If you sell into more than one country, it writes in over 130 languages, so a multilingual storefront isn't carrying the violation in every market it ships to.

None of this is about passing one audit and forgetting it. It's about shutting the easiest, highest-volume entry point a serial plaintiff has into your business — and it's worth running the scan yourself before someone who sues for a living runs it for you.