Blog

Accessibility

The Cost of Non-Compliance: Real Accessibility Lawsuits and How Transcription Helps You Avoid Them

Daniel Chang

Posted in Zoom Dec 2 · 5 Dec, 2025

The Cost of Non-Compliance

Real-World Accessibility Lawsuits – and How Transcription Helps You Avoid Them

Accessibility used to be treated as a “nice extra.” Those days are gone.

Between the ADA in the US, the Web Accessibility Directive, and the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in 2025, failing to make your digital content accessible now carries real legal, financial, and reputational risk.

One of the most common – and most fixable – problems at the center of these disputes?
Missing or low-quality captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions.

This article walks through:

What non-compliance actually costs
Real lawsuits involving missing captions and inaccessible media
How solid transcription and captioning workflows dramatically reduce your risk

1. The four types of accessibility “cost”

When companies think “cost of accessibility,” they usually think about buying tools or paying vendors.

In reality, not doing accessibility tends to be much more expensive.

1. Direct legal costs

These are the obvious ones:

Lawsuits and class actions
Settlements and damages
Attorney fees (for both sides in some cases)
Court-ordered monitoring or reporting obligations

A single case can easily run into hundreds of thousands in legal spend, even if the final damages figure is smaller.

2. Regulatory fines and penalties

In the EU, under the EAA and related national laws:

Member States can set administrative fines for non-compliant digital services.
Fines often start in the thousands to tens of thousands of euros per issue.
In some countries, fines can reach hundreds of thousands or more per infraction, sometimes with daily penaltiesuntil issues are fixed.
Authorities can also restrict your ability to sell certain digital services in the market.

In other words: repeated non-compliance turns into a line item in your budget.

3. Emergency remediation costs

When a complaint or lawsuit hits, teams often have to:

Caption hundreds or thousands of hours of legacy videos under time pressure.
Fix media players, rebuild templates, and patch LMS or platform issues.
Rebuild processes for marketing, training, and product teams.

Doing all this rushed is far more expensive than building accessibility into your normal content workflow from the start.

4. Brand and opportunity costs

Less visible, but just as real:

Public coverage of lawsuits that says “X brand shut out disabled users.”
Lost trust with students, customers, or employees.
Lost business from the ~15–20% of people who live with a disability (and their families, networks, and organizations).

In short: non-compliance doesn’t just cost money – it also costs reputation, loyalty, and growth.

2. Real-world lawsuits: what actually happened

Accessibility lawsuits are no longer theoretical. Here are a few landmark cases where missing captions or inaccessible digital content were at the center.

Netflix: captioning on 100% of streaming content

A major streaming platform faced a high-profile lawsuit from the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) for failing to provide closed captions on much of its “watch instantly” content.

Outcome (simplified):

The court agreed that online streaming falls under disability rights law.
The company agreed to caption 100% of its streaming library within a defined period.
It committed to improving interfaces so users could easily find captioned content.
Various analyses estimate hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs, plus the internal cost of updating content workflows and tech.

Key lesson: if you stream video at scale, captions are not optional.

Harvard & MIT: online courses and video resources

Two US universities were sued, again by NAD and individual plaintiffs, over uncaptioned or poorly captioned online learning materials – including MOOCs, lectures, and other public content.

Outcomes (simplified):

Both institutions entered into detailed settlement agreements.
They committed to captioning vast amounts of existing and future online content.
Public filings reference millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees and related costs across the cases.
The settlements have become a de facto model for digital accessibility in higher education.

Key lesson: if you publish large volumes of educational or training video, you need a systematic captioning and transcription strategy or you risk becoming the next test case.

Domino’s Pizza: website and app accessibility

A blind customer sued a major pizza chain because he couldn’t use their website and app with a screen reader to order food. The company argued that the ADA didn’t apply clearly to websites and apps.

What happened:

An appeals court held that the ADA does apply to digital services linked to physical places.
The US Supreme Court declined to overturn that decision, effectively letting it stand.
Later rulings ordered the company to fix accessibility issues and pay damages under state law.
Analysts estimate the company spent years of legal effort and substantial sums fighting instead of just fixing the site early.

Key lesson: arguing that accessibility laws “don’t apply” to your digital content is usually more expensive and damaging than just making your content accessible.

EU examples: fines and market access

Under the European Accessibility Act and national laws:

Some countries now allow fines from around €5,000 to €20,000 per violation, plus daily penalties (for example, up to €1,000 per day) until problems are fixed.
In serious cases, non-compliant services can face restrictions on operating in an entire market.
Authorities and disability organizations are becoming more active in monitoring and filing complaints.

Key lesson: once enforcement ramps up, treating accessibility as an afterthought can quickly become a recurring cost center.

3. Why missing transcription and captions trigger these disputes

Most of the cases above – and many similar ones – revolve around one core idea:

People who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low-vision, or with certain cognitive disabilities cannot access audio-visual content without text or descriptions.

The most common failures:

No captions on videos
Auto-captions with high error rates (names, jargon, numbers wrong)
No transcripts for podcasts or audio-only content
No audio description or descriptive text for important visuals (slides, charts, UI)
Media players that screen readers and keyboards can’t operate reliably

From a legal and ethical standpoint, that means:

Deaf and hard-of-hearing users can’t understand what’s being said.
Blind and low-vision users miss crucial visual information.
People who process text better than audio are excluded from learning and participation.

Courts and regulators see this as a denial of equal access – especially when the content relates to education, services, or essential information.

4. How solid transcription, captions, and descriptions reduce your risk

Transcription and captioning are not magic shields, but they directly address some of the most frequent and fixablecauses of accessibility complaints.

1. They provide the legally expected “text alternative”

For most laws and standards, the basic expectation is:

Pre-recorded video with speech → captions, ideally plus a transcript.
Audio-only content → transcript.
Visual-heavy video → audio description or a descriptive transcript/summary.

If you systematically provide these, you’re aligning with the technical standards (like WCAG) that courts and regulators often use to interpret laws.

2. They show good faith and due diligence

When something goes wrong and a complaint arises, it matters whether you can show:

“We caption our videos by default.”
“We always publish transcripts for our podcasts.”
“We have a backlog plan and an accessibility policy.”

Having clear transcription and captioning practices makes it far easier to show that you are taking accessibility seriously, even if you’re still improving legacy content.

3. They protect you from “death by legacy content”

A lot of organisations have:

Old lecture recordings
Archive webinars
Years of podcast episodes

…sitting online without any text support.

If you map your content and start systematically captioning and transcribing the pieces that are still used, you reduce the chances that someone will stumble on an inaccessible but important video and file a complaint.

4. They come with business upside

Beyond compliance, high-quality transcripts and captions also:

Improve search and SEO (more text = more indexable content).
Boost engagement (people skim transcripts, copy quotes, revisit key parts).
Make content easier to repurpose into blogs, social posts, and documentation.

So the money you spend on transcription is not just an insurance policy; it’s also a growth and content asset.

5. A 5-step risk-reduction plan using transcription

You don’t need a giant legal team to start reducing risk. You need a plan.

Step 1 – Inventory your media

List:

Public videos (marketing, documentation, support)
Educational and training content
Podcasts and audio series
Live event recordings

Mark which ones:

Are customer-facing
Are used in the US or EU
Already have captions or transcripts

Step 2 – Classify by risk

High risk:

Anything in education, health, finance, government, or core product usage
High-traffic pages and flagship content
Mandatory training (compliance, HR, safety)

Medium:

Webinars, podcasts, general marketing

Low:

Internal planning meetings, low-distribution content

Step 3 – Set baseline rules

For example:

All new public videos → captions required; transcripts strongly recommended.
All new podcasts/audio → transcripts required before publishing.
All high-risk legacy content still in use → put into a captioning/transcription queue.

Step 4 – Use a hybrid workflow

To keep costs manageable:

Use AI to generate draft transcripts/captions for speed.
Use human editors to correct errors, especially:
- Names, numbers, dates
- Technical terms and jargon
- Timing and readability

This gives you near-human quality at a lower cost than manual typing from scratch.

Step 5 – Make it part of your normal workflow

Add simple rules to your publishing process:

“No video goes live until captions are attached.”
“No podcast goes live until the transcript is ready.”
“Event recordings are not considered ‘done’ until captions and transcripts are in place.”

Once this is routine, your risk drops dramatically over time.