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I got an ADA website demand letter — what do I do now?

First: this is not legal advice. We build an accessibility scanner; we are not lawyers, we have not read your letter, and nothing on this page is a statement about your situation or what you should do about it. What this page is: a calm description of what these letters generally are and a practical sequence for the first week, written so you are better prepared for the conversation with an actual lawyer rather than instead of it.

Don’t panic

If you have just opened one of these, your heart rate is up and you are two clicks from buying whatever the first search result is selling. That is the worst state to make a decision in, and it is the state these letters are most effective in.

So, plainly: you have time. Not unlimited time, and not “ignore it” time — but you almost certainly have days to weeks, not hours. Nothing useful happens in the next twenty minutes. Read the letter properly, find out what is actually wrong with your site, and get advice from someone who can give it. In that order.

You are also not being singled out for being especially bad. In its analysis of 2025 court filings, UsableNet counted more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits filed across federal and state courts in that year alone. Meanwhile the WebAIM Million, which runs an automated accessibility test across the top one million home pages every year, found detectable failures on 95.9% of them in its 2026 report. Most of the web has this problem. That is not a defence, and it does not make your letter go away — it is context, so you stop reading this as a personal indictment and start reading it as a work item.

What these letters generally are

A demand letter is a letter, not a court filing. It typically comes from a law firm on behalf of a named individual, states that they encountered barriers on your website, cites the Americans with Disabilities Act and often the WCAG guidelines, and asks for some combination of remediation and a payment to settle.

A few things are worth understanding about the shape of them:

  • A letter is not a lawsuit. Some are followed by a filing; many are not. Whether yours is a step toward litigation, an opening position in a negotiation, or a volume mailing is exactly the sort of judgement a lawyer who does this work can make in a phone call and you cannot make from a blog post.
  • Some are specific and some are generic. A letter that names actual pages, actual elements, and the assistive technology used is a different document from one that could have been sent to any website. Your lawyer will care about the difference.
  • The underlying complaint is usually real even when the letter is opportunistic. This is the uncomfortable part. Whatever you think of the sender’s motives, the barriers on the site are generally there. Which means the work in front of you is real work, and it is worth doing regardless of how this particular letter resolves.

Step 1 — Read it properly and write down the dates

Before anything else, get the facts out of the letter and into a document:

  • Who sent it — the firm, and the individual they represent.
  • What they say they encountered, and on which pages.
  • Every date and deadline in it. Response windows are the thing people miss while they are busy panicking about the money.
  • What they are asking for — remediation, a payment, both, an ongoing commitment.
  • How they want to be contacted.

Then preserve everything. Keep the envelope, the email headers, the letter itself. Do not delete anything from your site or your logs in a tidying-up reflex. And do not reply yet — not even a friendly acknowledgement, not even to say you are taking it seriously. Wait for step 3.

Step 2 — Get a real picture of what is actually on your site

You cannot discuss a letter about your website’s accessibility without knowing what is on your website. Right now you probably have the sender’s characterisation and nothing else.

A code-level scan takes thirty seconds and will tell you, concretely: which failures are on the page, how many elements each one affects, which WCAG success criterion each maps to, and what the fix looks like. That turns “they say my site is inaccessible” into a list — and a list is something you can talk about, prioritise, and cost.

→ Scan your site free — one page, full report, no signup and no credit card.

Two honest caveats before you read too much into the result.

A clean scan does not mean a clean site. Automated testing finds roughly half of accessibility issues. The rest — whether alt text is accurate, whether the reading order makes sense, whether a keyboard user can escape your booking widget — need a person. Our methodology page is specific about which half is which. If a scan comes back with nothing, that is genuinely good news about the machine-checkable half and says nothing at all about the other half.

A bad score is not an admission of anything. It is a to-do list produced by a testing tool, the same tool a plaintiff’s expert is likely running. Knowing what is on it is strictly better than not knowing.

Step 3 — Talk to a lawyer who does this specific thing

This is the step people skip because it costs money, and it is the one that most changes the outcome.

You want a lawyer with actual ADA digital accessibility experience — not your general business counsel, and not a firm that added a landing page about it last year. This is a niche with its own case law, its own repeat plaintiffs’ firms, and settled expectations about how these resolve. Someone who has handled twenty of these knows things that cannot be reasoned out from first principles.

Bring them: the letter, your scan report, a note of when your site was last worked on and by whom, and any accessibility work you have already done. Ask them how letters like yours typically resolve, what a response should and should not say, and whether anything you do now — including fixing things — affects your position. That last question matters and it is genuinely a legal question, not a technical one.

Do not send a response before you have had that conversation. A well-meant email admitting the site has problems, or promising a timeline you cannot meet, is a document that exists forever.

Also: tell your insurer. Check whether you have cyber, media, or general liability cover, and read the notification clause. Some policies require prompt notice and some responses can affect cover.

Step 4 — Fix what you can, and document all of it

While the legal conversation runs, do the work. It is worth doing on its own terms, and a demonstrable record of ongoing effort is a materially different thing to have than a promise.

The scan report is your queue. Work it in this order:

  1. Critical and serious issues first — they are ranked for you.
  2. Template-level issues before one-off issues. One missing form label on one page is a small fix. A missing label on the field that appears in the footer of every page is one fix that clears hundreds of failures. Grouped reporting makes these obvious: a single issue with two hundred locations is almost always one template.
  3. The checkout, the contact form, and the main navigation before anything else. If someone cannot buy from you or contact you, that is both the most serious barrier and the one most likely to be described in a complaint.
  4. The six common categories. WebAIM’s 2026 analysis found that six failure types accounted for 96% of everything its automated test detected across a million home pages: low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, and a missing document language. They are common because they are easy to introduce — and most of them are fast to fix.

Then get a human involved for the half a machine cannot see. A qualified accessibility practitioner testing with a screen reader and a keyboard will find things no scanner will, and their report is a different class of document from ours.

Document as you go. Date each fix. Keep the before-and-after reports. Write down what you have decided to do and when, including the things you have not got to yet and why. A dated record of what you found, what you fixed, and what is scheduled is the concrete artefact that shows this was treated as work rather than as a nuisance.

Step 5 — Set up monitoring, because a fix does not stay fixed

Here is what happens next if you stop at “we fixed it”: in six weeks someone updates a theme, installs a plugin, or edits a page, and a fix you paid for quietly reverts. Nobody notices, because nobody is looking. The next letter arrives about a site you believed you had sorted out.

A scan is accurate for about a week. Continuous checking is what turns a one-time remediation into an ongoing practice — and an ongoing practice is both better for your actual visitors and a more credible record than a single dated report from the month you got a letter.

→ Scan your site free, then decide whether monitoring is worth $39/mo to you. Pricing is on one page with no sales call.

What not to do

Do not ignore it. Deadlines in these letters are real deadlines, and non-response is the one path that reliably removes your options.

Do not install an overlay widget and consider it handled. This is the most common expensive mistake, and it is the one the search results will push you toward while you are frightened. An overlay is a script that sits on top of your site and attempts to patch accessibility problems in the browser; it does not change your code. In January 2025 the FTC required accessiBe to pay $1,000,000 to settle allegations that it misrepresented its overlay’s ability to make websites meet WCAG; the final order was approved in April 2025 and bars the company from making that claim without evidence to support it. Separately, UsableNet’s reading of 2025 filings found no meaningful reduction in lawsuits against companies that were already using a widget, with volume peaking above 150 cases in a single month. We have written up what the evidence actually shows, with every source linked, so you can check it rather than take our word for it — we sell an alternative and you should read us accordingly.

Do not respond directly to the sender before speaking to your lawyer. Not to negotiate, not to explain, not to be polite about it.

Do not delete pages or take the site down. It rarely helps and it can complicate things.

Do not buy a “compliance” badge or a seal. No badge changes what a screen reader encounters on your checkout page.

Do not assume your platform handles it. Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace and the rest give you accessible primitives and then let you and your theme and your apps do whatever you like. The output is what gets tested, not the platform.

The short version

  1. Breathe. You have days, not hours.
  2. Read the letter, write down every date, preserve everything, reply to nobody yet.
  3. Scan your site so you know what is actually there.
  4. Get a lawyer who does ADA digital accessibility specifically.
  5. Fix the highest-impact issues and document every one.
  6. Bring in a human tester for the half automation cannot see.
  7. Set up monitoring so it stays fixed.
  8. Do not paste in an overlay and call it done.

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Automated testing finds roughly half of accessibility issues. The rest need a human. We tell you which is which — see our methodology.

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