Got an ADA website demand letter? What to do in the first 72 hours

You opened a letter, or a complaint, saying your website violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it probably asks for money and remediation on a deadline. Take a breath. This page explains what you are holding, what to do first, and the one purchase that reliably makes things worse.

What you received, and why you

Website accessibility claims are filed at industrial scale. By UsableNet's count, more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed across federal and state courts in 2025, and roughly 70 percent targeted ecommerce. Counting federal court alone, the law firm Seyfarth Shaw recorded 3,117 website accessibility suits in 2025, up 27 percent from the year before. Most of this volume comes from a small set of plaintiff firms that test sites with screen readers and automated tools, then send letters in batches. Filings concentrate in New York, Florida, and California, where a state civil rights law adds statutory damages per violation.

Small businesses are not exempt: in UsableNet's 2025 tracking, roughly two thirds of targeted companies had revenue under 25 million dollars. Being small, local, or non-malicious does not take you off the list. The letters typically cite the same technical failures we find every day in our own scan data: images with no alt text, buttons and links a screen reader cannot name, text with too little contrast, forms with no labels.

The first 72 hours

1. Treat the deadline as real. Demand letters convert into filed lawsuits, and the 2025 volume shows the senders follow through. Do not ignore it, and do not write back yourself. Anything you send can shape the negotiation.
2. Get a lawyer with digital accessibility experience. Responding to the letter is legal work, not web work. A lawyer who has handled these cases will know the local pattern, what settlements look like, and whether the claim has problems. If you have business insurance, ask your broker whether your policy responds to this kind of claim.
3. Do not install an overlay widget. When you search this topic you will meet products promising instant ADA compliance from one line of JavaScript. Sites running overlays keep getting sued, and in 2025 the FTC ordered overlay vendor accessiBe to pay 1 million dollars over the claim that its product could make any website conform to WCAG, a representation the FTC found false. An overlay bought after a demand letter can read as concealment rather than repair. We publish a full explainer on why overlays fail.
4. Get an honest technical read of your site. You and your lawyer need to know what is actually broken before you can negotiate a remediation plan. You can scan one page free in about a minute, or run a full automated audit of up to 25 pages for $149 and hand the report to counsel. That is triage, not a legal defense, and we say so: automated testing covers roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG criteria.
5. Plan the fix, then keep it fixed. Settlements typically require remediation on a timeline, and sometimes proof it stays fixed. That is the part where ongoing monitoring earns its keep: every deploy and plugin update can introduce new issues after the lawyers are gone.

What a defensible response usually costs

Be skeptical of anyone, including us, who claims one product makes the problem go away. A realistic response has layers, and they do different jobs:

• Your lawyer answers the letter, negotiates, and tells you what level of documentation your situation needs. This is the non-optional layer.
• A fully manual audit from a specialist firm is the document lawyers typically rely on in settlement terms. Firms like Accessible.org publish pricing of roughly $1,250 to $2,750 for most sites. We do not sell manual audits, and an automated report is not a substitute for one in a legal posture.
• Automated scanning, our lane, is the fast, cheap layer: a $149 baseline audit tells you and counsel today what a machine can verify is broken and how to fix it, and Watch monitoring from $129 a year catches what your next deploy breaks. Honest scope, stated on every report: the automated slice of WCAG 2.1 Level AA, roughly 30 to 40 percent of criteria.

Why WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the yardstick everywhere in this process: there is no federal regulation setting a technical standard for private commercial websites, so courts and settlements have converged on WCAG 2.1 AA as the operative benchmark - the Justice Department points to WCAG as guidance while leaving businesses flexibility, and Robles v. Domino's Pizza established that the ADA reaches a retailer's website and app. Our Title II explainer covers the public-sector rule where WCAG 2.1 AA is codified.

After the dust settles

Settling one claim does not retire the risk: the testing that produced your letter is cheap to repeat, and a site that regresses can be tested again. The durable position is unglamorous: fix what the audit found, keep accessibility in your build process, and have scans running on a schedule so regressions surface in days instead of in the next letter. That ongoing layer is exactly what Site Brace Watch is for, from $129 a year with no auto-renew.