What if ensuring accessibility was not just a legal or a moral obligation, but also a practical advantage for businesses? Many businesses currently view compliance with accessibility guidelines as a costly burden. Relevant measures can be expensive and often require changes across multiple domains including infrastructures, policies, training, customer service, and even websites [1]. For example, building an American with Disabilities Act (ADA)-compliant bathroom usually costs more than $8,000 USD [2]. Such costs encourage businesses to postpone making necessary changes [3]. However, delaying accessibility compliance frequently produces far greater financial, legal, and social costs than proactive compliance. In other words, placing “accessibility on the back burner” is a short-sighted strategy with many long-term consequences [4]. 

Complying Late is Counterproductive

Late accessibility compliance is financially inefficient for two main reasons. Firstly, retrofitting existing infrastructure to comply with requirements is often more costly than incorporating accessibility from the start. This is because modifying structural elements can require more time, money, and labor than constructing systems appropriately from the start. For example, retrofitting an elevator into an existing building is generally around 25 percent to 50 percent more expensive than the base installation cost [5]. This same pattern holds for digital products. Estimates from a technology consultancy reveal that the average cost of retrofitting digital products to meet accessibility requirements can be more than six times more expensive than embedding accessibility early on [6]. They attribute this to software developers needing to work through legacy code and fix bugs. Building ADA-compliant systems from the start can therefore reduce long-term costs.

Furthermore, businesses that delay accessibility inevitably reduce access for people with disabilities, a demographic group with $490 billion USD of disposable income in the US alone [7]. For instance, a 2016 survey not only found that 71 percent of UK residents with disabilities click away from websites they find challenging to use, but that 82 percent of them would spend more if websites were more accessible [8]. This is especially concerning considering that 95.9 percent of the top one million websites fail to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in 2026 [9]. Businesses that postpone meeting accessibility standards risk losing out on profits.

Delayed accessibility compliance can also have tremendous legal costs. In 2025, there were more than 8,000 ADA Title III lawsuits regarding alleged barriers to access [10]. Lawsuits can be very expensive as they involve paying settlements as well as hiring defense and expert witnesses. As a case in point, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority has spent over $3 million USD fighting a civil rights lawsuit over broken elevators [11]. This amount included the cost of 11 lawyers, 20 depositions, and over 10,000 pages of motions.

Businesses should be especially concerned about web accessibility lawsuits, which account for more than 5,100 ADA Title III lawsuits in 2025 [12]. While the average web accessibility lawsuit costs firms $55,000 USD to $270,000 USD, costs can far exceed this range [13]. For example, Fashion Nova recently agreed to a $5.15 million USD lawsuit due to their website’s failure to accommodate legally blind people [13]. Admittedly, a handful of firms are responsible for an overwhelming majority of these lawsuits. However, with web accessibility lawsuits rising by 27 percent from 2024 to 2025, businesses have especially strong incentives to ensure compliance rather than risk costly litigation [14]. 

Waiting on accessibility compliance also has social costs that spill beyond the immediate denial of access for people with disabilities. Plenty of accessible infrastructure benefits more than just those with disabilities. For instance, although Berkeley activists initially built curb cuts, small sloped ramps in sidewalks, to improve mobility for wheelchair users in the 1970s, millions of Americans now pass through these areas daily [15]. In fact, a study observing shopping mall behavior found that 90 percent of people will adjust their course to use curb cuts [16]. Furthermore, groups that particularly benefit from this infrastructure include those with bicycles, strollers, skateboards, skates, heavy luggage, and carts. 

The social positive externalities that accessible infrastructure brings, commonly referred to as the curb-cut effect, extends far beyond these ramps. Bathroom rails help older adults with mobility or sensory impairments [17]. Wide doorways allow people with injuries to move around easier [18]. Video captions help non-native speakers improve their comprehension, memory, and attention to media [19]. As businesses delay complying with accessibility measures, they miss opportunities to make their products easier to use for a much broader share of their customer base than they may realize.

Value of a Market-Driven Approach

Poor accessibility compliance persists for many reasons beyond costs, including limited resources, a complaint-driven system that is “more piecemeal than comprehensive”, and ambiguity surrounding responsibility for accessibility obligations [20]. These systemic barriers have existed for decades, and dismantling them has proven to be an immense challenge. 

However, if executives realize that accessibility directly serves their interests, proactive compliance will become a business strategy—not a bureaucratic burden. Leveraging this market-driven approach is a path of much lower resistance than changing entrenched practices. As such, emphasizing the counterproductive nature of delaying accessibility provides an actionable step forward while society continues the long-term work of addressing these deep, systemic issues.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the immense costs of delayed accessibility make timely accessibility compliance not only the most ethical choice, but the most economically rational one. By avoiding retrofit upcharges, better capturing the market share of those with disabilities, safeguarding against expensive lawsuits, and unlocking the broad benefits of the curb-cut effect, it is in businesses’ own interests to comply. With consumers filing a rapidly growing number of web accessibility lawsuits, delaying compliance is now riskier than ever.

Although businesses should ideally view accessibility measures as a fundamental commitment to the civil rights of people with disabilities, it is naive to assume that they will unwaveringly comply without incentives to do so. With weak enforcement being one of the strongest contributing factors to widespread ADA noncompliance, it is vital that more businesses pursue accessibility through their own initiative rather than through external pressure [21]. Consequently, activists and policymakers can effectively drive change by highlighting the high price of waiting on accessibility.