I received an ADA website demand letter. What now?

The longer version

A demand letter typically alleges that a website is inaccessible to people using assistive technology, cites Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and in California often adds the Unruh Civil Rights Act. Most of them arrive before any court filing, and many name specific barriers such as unlabeled form fields, missing image descriptions or a menu that cannot be operated by keyboard.

The barriers listed are often real, whether or not the claim is one you want to settle. Automated tools find them easily, which is exactly why these letters can be produced at volume. That means the technical assessment is worth doing regardless of the legal strategy.

Preserving the current state of the site matters. Once you start fixing things, the version the claim was made against no longer exists, and your lawyer may need to see it.

What to do

1. Preserve the letter, note the date it arrived, and take a full capture of the site as it currently stands.
2. Send it to a lawyer before responding. Deadlines in these letters are often the sender’s own preference, and a legal deadline is a separate question, but that is a judgement for counsel.
3. Commission a technical assessment against WCAG 2.2 AA so you know which allegations are accurate.
4. Fix what is real, and keep a dated record of what was fixed and when. That record is what turns remediation into something you can demonstrate.
5. Put continuous testing in place afterwards, because a site that was fixed once drifts with every page published since.

The obligation behind this

• ADA web accessibility
• Unruh Act (California)