# Accessibility Watch

> An educational web-compliance watchdog, built by the team behind the wcagcheckr and ForensicConsent browser extensions. We track the two compliance risks that draw demand letters to ordinary business websites — web accessibility (ADA / WCAG 2.1 AA / European Accessibility Act) and tracking-before-consent (CIPA "wiretapping", the Video Privacy Protection Act, and GDPR / ePrivacy) — and publish free tools that find the issues and provide fix recipes at no cost.

Accessibility Watch exists to help site owners understand and reduce their compliance-litigation exposure. Our reporting is sourced and dated; our free browser extensions genuinely find and help fix issues (they are not crippled teasers). Paid tiers add AI-generated fixes, whole-site crawling, and court-grade forensic evidence.

## Two coverage areas
1. **Web accessibility** — does your site meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA? Free tool: wcagcheckr (https://wcagcheckr.com).
2. **Consent & tracking** — does your site fire third-party trackers before consent? Free tool: ForensicConsent (https://forensicconsent.com).

## Key facts — accessibility (sourced)
- 3,948 US ADA website-accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025, up ~24% year over year (EcomBack 2025 Annual Report; bracketed by Seyfarth Shaw's 3,117 federal filings).
- 983 of those 2025 lawsuits (24.9%) targeted websites that were already running an accessibility overlay/widget — overlays do not confer legal protection (EcomBack 2025).
- The FTC ordered overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1,000,000 in 2025 over misleading widget-compliance marketing (FTC, April 2025).

## Key facts — consent & tracking (sourced)
- More than 4,300 US CIPA "wiretapping" lawsuits have been filed since 2022 (roughly 3,300 in California), over websites loading pixels/session-replay before consent; California statutory damages run $5,000 per violation.
- The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) drives a fast-growing wave of suits over a video player sharing a page with a marketing pixel (e.g. the Meta Pixel); statutory damages are ~$2,500 per violation.
- EU regulators enforce cookies-before-consent directly: France's CNIL fined Shein €150M (Sept 2025) and Google €325M; noyb's 226 complaints found ~80% of sites non-compliant.

## Content pillars
- ADA Lawsuit Watch — accessibility lawsuit trends, demand letters, overlay-failure data
- EAA / Global Compliance — European Accessibility Act, EN 301 549, deadlines
- How-to-fix guides — per-criterion WCAG remediation
- Overlays, honestly — why accessibility overlays fail and what works instead
- CIPA / Consent watch — pre-consent tracking, "wiretapping" demand letters, how to gate trackers
- VPPA watch — the video + pixel footprint plaintiffs target, and how to break it
- Evidence & defensibility — forensic, dated, tamper-evident proof of compliance

## Legal context (factual)
Web accessibility is required under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 in the US, and the European Accessibility Act (EAA) across the EU since June 2025; the recognized technical standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Separately, transmitting visitor data to third parties before consent is litigated in the US under CIPA and the VPPA, and in the EU under GDPR + ePrivacy (prior consent required for non-essential trackers).

## Key pages
- /methodology — how reports are produced (what we do and don't claim)
- /disclaimer — automated findings, not legal advice; how to get a report corrected or removed
- /about — who we are (transparent: built by the wcagcheckr + ForensicConsent team)
- /privacy, /terms, /contact

## Report pages
- /report/<domain> — automated WCAG 2.1 AA scan of a public page, each barrier explained in plain language with how to fix it; sealed with a trusted RFC-3161 timestamp. A site that fixes its issues is delisted automatically on re-scan.
- /consent/<domain> — automated scan of which third-party trackers fire before consent (pixels, analytics, session-replay, chat) plus the VPPA video+pixel footprint, each with the legal exposure it carries and how to fix it.