You Got an ADA Website Demand Letter. What Now?

A letter lands. It says your website blocks people who are blind, cites the Americans with Disabilities Act, names a few of your pages, and offers to settle for a number that looks smaller than the cost of fighting. Your two instincts — ignore it, or panic-buy the first widget a Google ad shows you — are both wrong.

This is written from the web-design chair, not the lawyer's chair. Foundgrove does not sell accessibility remediation and we do not give legal advice. Get a lawyer today. What we can give you is the part nobody on the search results page will: what happens to your website over the next 30 days, and which of the things vendors are about to sell you actually change anything.

What is an ADA website demand letter, and is it real?

Real enough that you cannot file it in a drawer: plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal court in 2025, a 27% increase over 2024's 2,452, according to Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III tracker. Those suits made up 36% of every federal ADA Title III case filed that year.

A demand letter is the step before the lawsuit. It typically names your business, names specific URLs, describes barriers a screen-reader user says they hit, and proposes a settlement. Seyfarth is explicit that its count covers federal filings only — state-court cases and demand letters are not in that number at all. The letter on your desk was never going to show up in a public statistic.

Filings cluster hard by state. In 2025, New York federal courts saw 1,021 of them, Florida 961, Illinois 585 — and California just four, because, as Seyfarth explains, California's federal and state courts of appeals have concluded that online-only businesses are not covered by the ADA, which pushes those claims into state court instead. Where you operate changes the shape of this entirely.

The underlying position is not new. The Justice Department's guidance on web accessibility says it has 'consistently taken the position' that the ADA's requirements apply to the goods and services public accommodations offer online — and the examples DOJ lists by name include hospitals and medical offices, food and drink establishments, hotels, and retail stores.

What should you do in the first 48 hours?

Five moves, in this order — and buying software is not one of them.

• Get counsel first. An ADA defense lawyer, not the attorney who set up your LLC. This is a specialist area and the first 48 hours set the posture.
• Preserve the site exactly as it is. Archive or crawl the pages named in the letter, with dates. Your own lawyer needs to see what the claimant says they saw.
• Do not reply directly. Not by email, not by phone, not through your front desk. Anything you say about your website becomes part of the record.
• Check the letter is even about you. These go out in batches. The business name, the URLs, and the barriers cited are sometimes wrong, stale, or copied from another site.
• Pull your vendor list. Booking widget, live chat, payment form, review embed, PDF menus, appointment scheduler. A lot of the failures live in code your web team does not control.

Then — and only then — commission an audit. Not a remediation. Not a subscription. An audit.

Why should you not quietly change your site before counsel sees it?

Because the barriers named in the letter are the evidence, and a same-day redeploy overwrites them before your own lawyer has looked at a single line of code. Whether and when you change the site is a call for counsel, not for your web guy at 11pm on a Tuesday.

There is a practical reason the panic patch does not help either. WebAIM's 2026 scan of the top one million home pages found that 95.9% had detected WCAG 2 failures, averaging 56.1 errors per page. If your site is anything like average, the pages in the letter are not the only pages with problems — the barriers cited are a sample, not the list.

What does a real WCAG 2.1 AA audit look like?

It is a manual, page-by-page test against WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the standard the W3C published on 5 June 2018, with success criteria graded at levels A, AA and AAA. AA is the line everyone in this fight argues over.

Here is the nuance the overlay ads skip. DOJ's business guidance states that 'the Department of Justice does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards' for businesses open to the public. The one place the federal government has actually named a technical standard is the 2024 Title II rule — and that rule covers state and local governments, not your dental practice. It names WCAG 2.1 Level AA. So there is no federal Title III number to hit, and WCAG 2.1 AA is still the yardstick you audit against, because it is the one everyone else uses.

An automated scan is the first ten minutes of the work, not the work. WebAIM's own report warns that 'absence of detected errors does not indicate that a page is accessible or conformant.' A real audit adds keyboard-only navigation, screen-reader passes, and human judgement on things no crawler can score — like whether your alt text actually describes the photo.

The barriers that turn up most, and where they hide on a service-business site:

Six categories — and WebAIM reports they account for 96% of all errors it detects. What you want back from an auditor is a findings list: URL, element, the WCAG success criterion it fails, severity, and the fix. Not a score out of 100. Not a badge.

Can buying an accessibility overlay now make things worse?

An overlay is not a defense, and the FTC has the paperwork: in January 2025 it ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented the ability of its AI-powered accessWidget to make any website WCAG-compliant.

Read what the order actually bars. The company is prohibited from representing that its automated products 'can make any website WCAG-compliant or can ensure continued compliance with WCAG over time, unless it has the evidence to support such claims.' The FTC also alleged accessiBe formatted articles it drafted or edited to look like impartial third-party reviews, without disclosing the connection.

DOJ says the softer version of the same thing: automated checkers and overlays 'can be helpful tools, but like other automated tools such as spelling or grammar checkers, they need to be used carefully. A clean report does not necessarily mean everything is accessible.'

Practically: the widget does not remove the barrier. The screen-reader user who wrote the letter still cannot complete your booking form. You have added a monthly bill and a script tag, and changed nothing about the thing the letter is about. Fix the code.

How should a remediation quote be itemized?

By WCAG success criterion and by page template, with hours attached to each — not as a $49-a-month line item. A subscription is not remediation; it is a subscription.

On third-party code, ask every vendor for a VPAT. The ITI Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is a free document a vendor completes per success criterion — supports, partially supports, does not support, or not applicable — and once filled in it is called an Accessibility Conformance Report. ITI is blunt that there is no VPAT certification and no pass/fail badge. A vendor who cannot produce one has almost certainly never tested.

And the fixed code belongs in your repository, under your control. We build service-business websites that way for the same reason we say it about ad accounts: you own the asset, or you are renting your own business back from an agency.

How do you reduce your exposure going forward?

Fix the six barrier categories at the template level once, and you have removed the source of 96% of the errors WebAIM detects across the web — because contrast, labels, and alt text are not page problems, they are system problems. Contrast is a design token. Labels are a form component. Alt text is a CMS field you make required.

The rest is process. Test with the keyboard before you ship: tab through the page, and if you cannot reach the phone number, open the booking modal, and close it again without a mouse, neither can a chunk of your visitors. It is the same discipline that makes mobile conversion optimization work — actually use the thing, on the device, before you call it done.

Publish an accessibility statement with a real route to report a problem. DOJ's guidance lists it as a practice outright: websites 'that provide a way for the public to report accessibility problems allow website owners to fix accessibility issues.' It costs you nothing and it doubles as a trust signal on a page most owners leave empty.

If you operate in California, know the number. California Civil Code section 52 sets damages for a violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act at 'in no case less than four thousand dollars ($4,000)' per offense, plus attorney's fees. That is the statute talking, not us. Ask your counsel how it applies to your situation.

One more thing worth putting in your calendar. Under DOJ's Title II rule, state and local governments must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027 if they serve 50,000 or more people, and by April 26, 2028 if smaller. If you subcontract to a city, a school district, or a public hospital, expect that requirement to land in your next contract — accessibility stops being a legal risk and starts being a procurement requirement.

None of this replaces the rebuild. If your site is failing on contrast, labels, and keyboard access, it is also failing the visitors who can see it fine — which is the whole argument of our service-business website playbook.

To be straight with you: we do not sell accessibility remediation and we do not give legal advice. Get counsel, then a specialist WCAG auditor. What we do is build conversion-focused websites where contrast, labels, and keyboard access are baked into the templates and the code ships to your repo. And note — our free audit is an SEO audit, not a WCAG audit. If that is what you need once the legal dust settles, Get my free audit.