Got an ADA website demand letter? What to do this week

First: do not ignore it, and talk to a lawyer

• Note any response date in the letter. Missing it can make things harder.
• Talk to a lawyer who handles ADA website claims before you reply, pay or agree to anything. Your business insurer may be able to point you to one.
• Keep the letter and every message about it.
• Ask your lawyer how to record what the site looks like today — for example dated screenshots of the pages the letter names — before you change them.

How common this is

UsableNet counted 5,114 digital accessibility lawsuits in the US in 2025, about 70% of them against e-commerce sites, and 1,427 against companies that had been sued before. Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025, up 27% on 2024. Demand letters that never become lawsuits are not counted, so the real number of letters is higher.

Letters usually describe barriers such as images without text alternatives, form fields without labels, low-contrast text, and pages that cannot be used with a keyboard or a screen reader, and they often refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Days 1–3: find the barriers

• Start with the pages and barriers the letter names, if it names any.
• Check every post, page and product, not just the home page. Lumtera's free plugin does this in one click and lists the most common problems first.
• Open the pages customers use most — home, key product or service pages, cart, checkout, contact — in review mode, which checks the page your theme renders, with a keyboard walk.
• Fix the common, high-volume problems first: low contrast, missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, empty links and buttons, and a missing page language.

Weeks 1–4: fix, test and plan

• Fix shared parts once: the header, menus and footer appear on every page, so one fix there helps everywhere.
• Test your forms and checkout with only the keyboard, then with a screen reader such as NVDA (free) or VoiceOver (built into Macs and iPhones).
• Write down what is left, with dates. A plan you follow is worth more than a promise.
• For the journeys that matter most, consider an audit by an accessibility specialist. Automated checks find a meaningful share of barriers, not all of them.

Why an overlay is not the fix

Some vendors sell a widget that promises to make a site accessible with one line of code. In April 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission ordered one of them, accessiBe, to pay $1 million and stop claiming that its automated product makes sites compliant without evidence. UsableNet reports that sites using such widgets were sued too. Fixing the site itself is what removes the barriers.

Keep a dated record of the work

Write down what you found, what you fixed and when. A record shows the work you have done; it does not guarantee any outcome, and your lawyer will tell you how to use it.

Lumtera's free plugin keeps a site report you can export as CSV. Lumtera Pro adds a tamper-evident evidence log — each entry dated and chained to the one before, so Verify shows whether anything was changed afterwards — scheduled checks of key pages, and an evidence pack you can hand over.

Publish a statement and a way to report barriers

An accessibility statement says honestly where your site stands and how people can reach you when something does not work. A feedback form turns complaints into fixes. Both are in Lumtera's free plugin, and the statement never says "fully conformant" on its own.

Questions

Sources

• UsableNet: 2025 year-end report on web accessibility lawsuits
• Seyfarth Shaw, ADA Title III blog: federal website accessibility lawsuit filings in 2025 (March 2026)
• FTC: final order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million (April 2025)
• ADA.gov: guidance on web accessibility and the ADA
• WebAIM Million 2026