We got an ADA website demand letter. Now what.
The letter names your site, cites WCAG, and gives you a deadline. What it usually says, what to do in the first 48 hours, why the widget will not save you, and how the remediation actually runs.
The envelope is from a law firm you have never heard of. Inside is a letter saying that a client of theirs, who is blind or has low vision, tried to use your website and could not. It cites the Americans with Disabilities Act, quotes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, lists a handful of pages and failures, and asks you to respond within a few weeks. Somewhere near the end it mentions a settlement figure.
I have been on the receiving end of a few dozen of these with clients, and I have remediated the sites behind them. Here is what the letter is, what it is not, and what to do in the order that matters.
What the letter usually says
Most of them follow a template, because the firms that send them send a lot. The claims are usually some mix of:
- Images without alternative text, so a screen reader says “image” and nothing else
- Buttons and links that cannot be reached or operated with a keyboard
- Form fields with no labels, so the visitor does not know what to type where
- Low contrast text
- A carousel or menu that traps focus or cannot be paused
- Missing headings, or headings in the wrong order, so the page has no structure to navigate
- PDFs that are scanned images
The letter will say the site must conform to WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at level AA. That is the standard courts and the Department of Justice have settled on in practice, even though the ADA itself does not name it. Level AA is the realistic target. Level AAA is not expected of a business site and nobody is going to ask you for it.
The letter is not a lawsuit. It is the step before one. Most of these end in a settlement and a remediation agreement, and the plaintiff’s firm would rather settle than litigate, because the economics work for them at volume. That cuts both ways. Ignoring it is how it becomes a filed complaint.
The first 48 hours
- Send it to a lawyer. Any lawyer you already use is fine for the first conversation; they will know whether you need someone who does ADA work. Do not reply to the firm yourself.
- Do not touch the site in a panic. Deleting the carousel at midnight does not help and can hurt, because now the record of what the site looked like is gone.
- Take a copy. Full-page screenshots of the pages named in the letter, and an export of the site if your platform allows one, dated.
- Find out who can change the site. Agency, freelancer, the one person in marketing with the login. The remediation will need them or someone to replace them.
- Get an audit that is yours. The letter’s list is the plaintiff’s list. It is almost never the full list, and the next letter will find what this one missed.
Then call someone who has done this before. The lawyer handles the firm. The engineer handles the site. They need to talk to each other once, early.
The widget will not save you
If you search for your problem you will find companies selling a line of JavaScript that promises compliance in a day. Do not buy it, and if you already have one, remove it.
An overlay sits on top of the page and tries to patch what it sees in the browser. It cannot fix the structure of the page, the labels that were never written, the PDFs, the order of the headings or the keyboard traps in your menu. It can also break the assistive technology the visitor already has. The people who sue know this: in 2025 roughly one in five accessibility suits named a site that was running an overlay at the time. The FTC fined the largest vendor a million dollars in 2025 for claiming its widget made sites compliant.
Your lawyer will tell you the same thing. An overlay is not a defence. The fix is in the code.
How the remediation runs
This is the sequence I use. It is also on the process page, with the gates.
| Step | What happens | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Scope the standard | Confirm WCAG 2.2 AA, list the pages the letter names, then list the templates behind them, because one template fix clears many pages | A scoped list of what is required |
| Audit | Automated checks, then manual testing with a keyboard and a screen reader. This is the list you work from | Findings, ranked by legal risk |
| Plan | Fixes ordered by risk and by how many pages each clears. Anything that changes how the site looks is called out first | A plan and a price to approve |
| Fix on staging | Structure, contrast, keyboard access, focus, forms, media, documents. Page by page against the standard | Fixes to review before they go live |
| Verify | Re-test with assistive technology, record the results | Before and after evidence |
| Statement | An accessibility statement for the site, a dated record of what changed, and what remains with a date | What your lawyer asked for |
| Keep it | Checks in the deploy process so the next content update does not undo the work | A way to stay there |
The order matters. A plaintiff’s firm cares about two things: whether the barriers their client hit are gone, and whether you can show that you are serious. The audit, the plan and the dated evidence are what “serious” looks like on paper. A website that was fixed quietly with no record is, to a court, a website that might not have been fixed.
How much work it is
Nobody can quote this from the letter. The honest answer depends on the size of the site and on how it was built. Here is how to think about it.
| Site | Typical shape | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| A brochure site on a modern theme, a few dozen pages | Mostly template fixes: menu, forms, headings, contrast, image text | Days |
| A content-heavy site with years of pages and PDFs | Templates plus a content pass: alt text, document remediation, embedded media | Weeks, with the content work shared with your team |
| A store with filters, carts, checkout and account areas | Template fixes plus every interactive flow tested by hand | Weeks, longer if the platform fights you |
| A site built on a page builder with custom code on every page | Each page is its own job. Sometimes a rebuild is cheaper than the remediation | A conversation first |
What the letter asks for in settlement is a separate matter for your lawyer. The remediation is usually the smaller number, and it is the one that stops the next letter.
What changes afterward
Accessibility is a property of the site, and a site changes every week. The last step in the table is the one people skip and regret. Automated checks on every deploy catch the obvious regressions. A short rule for whoever writes content, image text and heading order mostly, catches the rest. The statement on the site stays dated and honest about what is still in progress.
Done this way, the site is better for everyone who uses it, the letter gets answered with evidence, and the next one does not arrive. That is the whole goal.