It arrives as a PDF attached to an email. It cites your website, lists accessibility failures, references the Americans with Disabilities Act, and proposes a number to make it go away. The number is usually chosen to be cheaper than a lawyer.
If one has landed, here is the shape of the thing.
Why you
Almost nobody is selected by a person who visited your site and had a bad time. The letters are generated at volume. An automated scanner is pointed at a list of businesses, the ones with the most machine-detectable failures are sorted to the top, and letters go out.
This matters because it tells you exactly what the sender saw: the same category of issues a free scanner finds in thirty seconds. Low contrast text. Form fields with no labels. Buttons a screen reader announces as "button". Images with no text alternative.
It also tells you something more useful. The selection is mechanical, which means the fix is partly mechanical too.
What the letter is and is not
A demand letter is not a lawsuit. It is a request for money with the threat of one attached. Some senders litigate. Many do not and never intended to.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Get one. What follows is about the technical side, which is the part we can speak to.
The thing you cannot create afterwards
Here is the part most businesses do not know until it is too late.
If you fix your site today, you have a site that works. What you do not have is a record of what was wrong, what changed, and the date it changed. And a dated remediation record is worth considerably more than a working site, because it is evidence of what you did and when you did it.
You cannot produce that record retroactively. Once the broken version is gone, it is gone. The moment to start documenting is before you touch anything.
So: scan first, save the output, then fix. In that order. Even if you do the work yourself and never speak to anyone about it.
What actually reduces the risk
Not a widget. In January 2025 the FTC fined a leading accessibility overlay vendor one million dollars over its claims, and businesses that installed overlays have still received letters. Overlays do not change the underlying HTML, and the underlying HTML is what a tester reads.
What reduces the risk is fixing the real failures and being able to show you did. There is no shortcut and anyone selling you one is the second problem.
The order to do it in
- Scan and save the result. Before any changes. This is your before photograph.
- Talk to a lawyer about the letter itself. That part is not a technical question.
- Fix in order of what a tester would cite first. Contrast, labels, alt text, keyboard navigation, focus order. Roughly that sequence.
- Re-scan and save that too. Now you have a dated pair.
- Publish an accessibility statement with a real contact route, and answer it when someone writes.
If you would rather not do any of that
That is a reasonable position, and it is most of why people call us. But do step one today regardless of who does the rest. The before photograph expires the moment somebody edits a template.