The day an accessibility demand letter arrives.

What the letter is

A demand letter says that a person with a disability tried to use your website, could not, and that this violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. It usually names specific failures: product images with no description, links and buttons a screen reader cannot name, form fields with no label, text that fails contrast. It usually asks for two things: fix the site, and pay.

These letters are common and they are a business. In 2025 there were 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States, up 27 percent on the year before, and most of them named e-commerce stores. Demand letters, which come before any lawsuit, are estimated in the tens of thousands a year. Most are sent by a small number of law firms, in volume, to stores that were found by scanning.

That does not make the letter fake, and it does not make the failures fake. It means you are not being singled out, and it means the fix is known.

Our adviceSearch the plaintiff’s name and the law firm’s name. You will often find the same names on dozens of near-identical cases. That does not make the claim go away, but it tells you this is a process, not a grudge, and it tells your lawyer exactly what kind of case it is. Do not contact the plaintiff or the firm yourself; that is what the lawyer is for.

The first 24 hours

1. Do not ignore it. Deadlines in these letters are real, and silence is how a letter becomes a lawsuit.
2. Do not answer it yourself. Anything you write can be quoted back. Your lawyer answers.
3. Get a lawyer who handles ADA website claims. Not your business lawyer, unless they do this weekly. Ask directly how many of these they have handled.

   Our adviceCall more than one. Ask each the same three questions: how many of these have you handled, what would you do first, and what does one usually cost to resolve. The answers differ more than you would expect, and so do the fees. Ask whether they have dealt with the firm that sent yours; a few firms send most of these letters, and a lawyer who knows the sender knows the script. The first conversation should be free. A lawyer who handles these will hear you out, tell you what the letter is, and tell you what happens next before any money changes hands. If one wants a retainer before listening, call the next one.

4. Do not install an accessibility overlay widget. The pop-up “accessibility” toolbars sold as instant compliance do not fix the code. Stores running them are still sued, and some letters now name the overlay itself.
5. Save everything. The letter, the envelope or email headers, the date it arrived. Take dated screenshots of the pages the letter names, exactly as they are today.

   Our adviceTake the screenshots on your phone as well as your laptop. Claims often describe the mobile site, and the two can fail differently. And do not fix anything on those pages until the screenshots exist; your lawyer will want the before as much as the after.

What to send your lawyer

• The letter, complete, with the date received
• Your store address and the theme name
• Your Shopify plan, because on most plans the checkout code belongs to Shopify, not you
• Any accessibility work already done: a past audit, a statement page, fixes with dates
• An audit of the pages the letter names, if you can get one quickly, so the lawyer knows which claims are true

Our adviceInclude the theme name and whether it was customized, and the list of apps installed. It tells the lawyer, and whoever fixes the store, whose code each failure lives in. Half the time the worst offenders are an app and a tutorial someone followed two years ago.

Why the audit matters to the lawyer. A dated, page-by-page record of what is actually broken and what has been fixed is the document a response is built on. It turns “we take accessibility seriously” into a list with dates.

Our adviceOne lawyer put it to us plainly: you are not going to fight this, you are going to fix it. Whatever happens with the letter, the store needs the work, so start the work the same week. He also walked us through who had to make the next move, and when, before we had spent a dollar. Ask yours those two things in the first call: what happens next, and who has to act.

What a store can fix this week

Most of what these letters point to lives in the theme, and most of it is a few lines each. In order of how often it appears:

• Product images with no alt text. Fixable in bulk, by CSV or API, once the descriptions are written.
• Links and buttons with no name. Color swatches, icon buttons, social links. Usually one template each.
• Form fields with no label. Search, newsletter, contact. A label per field.
• Low color contrast. Text over product photos is the usual culprit. A background, a color change, or a different crop.
• No skip link, no landmarks. Small theme edits.
• No accessibility statement. A page that says how the store is tested and how to report a problem. Write it honestly; do not claim compliance.

What takes longer: keyboard focus through menus and cart drawers, carousels, third-party app widgets, and anything inside checkout on a non-Plus plan, where the code is Shopify’s.

What not to do

• Do not claim the store is now “ADA compliant” or “WCAG certified.” Nobody can honestly certify that, and the claim becomes a target.
• Do not delete pages or products named in the letter. Fix them.
• Do not buy the first “compliance package” a vendor emails you the same week. The letters and the vendors often arrive together.

Our adviceIf a vendor promises a certificate or a guarantee, ask which law recognizes it. None does. Ask instead for a dated list of what they will test, what they will fix, and how they will prove the fix. If they cannot answer in a sentence, they are selling the widget.

What done looks like

A dated report of what was tested and what was found. A fix log showing each change, before and after. A re-test, by keyboard and screen reader, showing the fixes work. An accessibility statement that says what was done and how to report a problem. And a plan for what is left, with dates. That is what your lawyer can use, and it is what makes the next letter less likely to be about you.

Our advicePut a date on everything. A fix without a date is an opinion. And keep the statement page honest about what is still open; a statement that admits two known issues and a fix date reads as credible, and one that claims perfection reads as a target.