An ADA demand letter arrived. What to do in the first 48 hours

Do not reply to the sender, and do not start changing your website yet. Read the letter carefully, save a dated copy of your site exactly as it is today, tell your insurer, and get the letter in front of a lawyer who has handled ADA website claims before.

We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. This page describes practical steps that keep your options open. Every claim is different, and only a qualified lawyer in your jurisdiction can tell you what your particular letter means or what you should do about it.

Why the first instinct is usually the wrong one

Almost everyone either fires off a reply or rushes to install something on the site that afternoon so they can say it is fixed. Both make the situation worse.

Replying yourself puts your words on the record before anyone has assessed the claim. A sentence like "you are right, we never thought about it" is an admission, written by you, that the other side now owns. Rushing a change to the site is worse in a subtler way: it overwrites the evidence of what the site looked like on the day you were contacted, which is exactly what you need if you later want to show that the letter overstated the problems, or that you had already fixed some of them.

Is it a demand letter or an actual lawsuit?

These are different documents with very different clocks attached, and people confuse them constantly. Work out which one you are holding before you do anything else.

A demand letter is a pre-litigation letter with no legal force by itself. That does not make it safe to ignore, but the deadline printed on it was chosen by the person who wants your money, not by a judge. A filed complaint that has been served on you is a different matter, and the response window is short. If you are holding one of those, stop reading and call a lawyer today.

Hour one to six: preserve the evidence

Before you touch anything, capture the state of your website as it exists right now. This takes about half an hour and it is the most useful thing you can do on day one.

1. Save the demand letter itself, including the full email headers if it arrived by email, and note the exact date and time you received it.
2. Take full-page screenshots of every page named in the letter, plus your home page, and any checkout or contact flow.
3. Save the raw HTML of those pages. In most browsers this is Ctrl+S or Cmd+S, choosing "Web page, complete".
4. Run an automated accessibility scan of the named pages and keep the dated output. Free tools such as WAVE, Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, or the axe DevTools extension will do this in a couple of minutes.
5. Check the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for older snapshots. A capture from before the letter is an independent dated record you did not have to create.
6. Put all of it in one folder with the date in the name, and do not edit anything in it afterwards.

A scan does not prove compliance. What this folder gives you is a fixed reference for the state of the site on the day you were contacted, so any later argument about what changed and when has a starting point.

Hour six to twenty-four: tell the right people

• Your insurer. Many general liability, cyber and media liability policies cover ADA website claims in whole or in part, and most require prompt notice. Late notice is a common reason cover is refused, so notify first and argue about applicability later.
• Your lawyer, or a lawyer who has actually handled ADA website claims. This is a niche and general commercial lawyers often have not seen one.
• Whoever runs your website, whether that is an in-house developer or an agency. Tell them explicitly not to change anything until the evidence above is captured.
• Anyone in your business who might respond to an unfamiliar email or phone call about this. One helpful employee replying to the lawyer acting for the plaintiff can undo a lot of care.

If cost is the obstacle, say so when you call. Many firms in this area do a fixed-fee initial review, because they see the same letters repeatedly and can assess one quickly.

Day two: understand what you are actually facing

Context helps you judge the letter rather than react to it. Federal ADA website lawsuits are projected to exceed 6,000 in 2026 (accessible.org), and around 64% of defendants earned under $25M in revenue (UsableNet, 2025). Typical demand-letter settlements run from $5,000 to $20,000 (nklegal.com). A large share of these letters come from a small number of repeat filers using template complaints.

None of that means your letter is frivolous. Many sites genuinely are unusable with a screen reader or a keyboard, and the underlying law is real. But it does mean this is a known pattern with known economics, and your lawyer will recognise the format immediately. That is a much better position than it feels like on the first morning.

What to ask a lawyer

1. Is this a demand letter or has something been filed? If filed, when was I served and when is my response due?
2. Have you seen this sender or this template before, and what usually happens with them?
3. What is my realistic exposure, including their legal fees, if this goes badly?
4. Should we respond at all, and if so, who writes it and what does it say?
5. Does my insurance cover this, and have I notified them correctly?
6. If we do remediation work now, does that help, hurt, or make no difference to this particular claim?
7. What does a settlement usually require beyond money, for example a remediation timetable or an audit schedule?

Question six matters more than people expect. In some situations, showing that you started fixing problems promptly and documented it is helpful. In others, work done after the letter can be characterised as an admission that the problems existed. That is a judgement call about your specific claim, which is exactly why it is a question for a lawyer and not for a software vendor.

Things not to do this week

• Do not install an accessibility overlay widget as an emergency fix. Over 800 businesses running overlays were sued anyway during 2023 and 2024 (testparty.ai), and settlements in this area have required overlay removal.
• Do not take the site down or delete the pages named in the letter. That looks like destroying evidence and does not end the claim.
• Do not publish an accessibility statement claiming the site is compliant. A claim you cannot support is a new problem on top of the one you have.
• Do not pay the demand without advice. A settlement that does not release you properly can leave you exposed to the same claim again.
• Do not contact the person named as the plaintiff directly.

What actually reduces risk over the following months

Once the immediate week is handled, the work that helps is unglamorous. Find the real barriers with both automated scanning and manual testing, fix the ones that stop people using the site, and keep a dated record of what you found and when you fixed it. Start with the failures that actually block people: forms without labels, important images with no alt text, controls a keyboard cannot reach, and text that is unreadable at ordinary contrast. Those are also the ones that appear in most demand letters.

Automated testing detects roughly 30 to 40% of WCAG success criteria. It cannot determine whether a site is legally compliant, and it is not a substitute for manual review and assistive-technology testing. AccessLedger sells a dated record of what automated checks found on a given day. Nothing more, and nothing less.

We should be clear about our own position here. AccessLedger sells scanning and dated remediation records, so we are not a neutral party. No scan we produce, and no report from any vendor, can tell you that your site is compliant or that you are safe from a claim. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you the exact thing the FTC fined a competitor $1,000,000 for in April 2025.