You received an ADA demand letter about your website

A demand letter is a letter, usually from a lawyer acting for a person with a disability, saying that your website has barriers that break the ADA or a state law. It typically lists pages or problems, asks you to fix them, and often asks for a payment to settle the claim, with a date for your answer. It has not been filed anywhere, and no court has looked at it.

A complaint is different. It is filed in court and served on you, and from that point the court's rules set the time you have to respond. If what you received has a case number and a court's name on it, you have been sued, and a lawyer needs to see it the same day.

Either way, do not treat a letter as a bluff. Some are sent in bulk, some are serious, and the difference is not always visible from the letter. A lawyer can tell you which one you have.

Title III of the ADA forbids discrimination on the basis of disability by anyone who owns, leases or operates a place of public accommodation. Under 42 U.S.C. 12188(a)(1), a private person gets the remedies of 42 U.S.C. 2000a-3(a): a civil action for preventive relief, meaning an injunction or a restraining order. Money damages for aggrieved persons and civil penalties are written into the section on suits brought by the Attorney General, not the private one. On top of that, 42 U.S.C. 12205 lets the court award the prevailing party a reasonable attorney's fee, litigation expenses and costs.

State law can add money. In California, the Unruh Civil Rights Act makes any ADA violation a violation of state law, and Civil Code 52(a) sets damages of at least $4,000 for each offense, plus attorney's fees. California's Civil Rights Department says courts have applied the Act to websites of businesses with physical locations, and have found that online-only businesses are not places of public accommodation under it. New York's state and city human rights laws also cover public accommodations, and the New York City Commission on Human Rights says business websites should work with screen-reading technology. Other states may add remedies of their own; your lawyer will know which apply.

The Department of Justice has no regulation setting a technical web standard for businesses. It published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on the subject in 2010 and withdrew it on 26 December 2017 (82 FR 60932). Its guidance of 18 March 2022 says the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA applies to goods and services offered on the web, that businesses have flexibility in how they comply, and that WCAG and the Section 508 Standards provide helpful guidance. The guidance itself has no legally binding effect.

Two points from that guidance matter for a response. It lists the barriers it expects fixed: poor color contrast, information given by color alone, missing text alternatives on images, videos without captions, inaccessible forms and mouse-only navigation. And it warns that automated checkers and overlays need to be used carefully, that a clean report does not necessarily mean everything is accessible, and that pairing a manual check with automated tools gives a better picture. A widget bolted onto the site is not a defense on its own.

Put the letter's date and every deadline in it on the calendar, and send the letter to a lawyer who handles ADA matters, ideally one admitted in the state named. Insurance may matter too: some business policies respond to these claims and expect early notice, so read yours or ask your broker.

Then preserve. Keep the letter, the envelope and any emails. Save the pages named in the letter as they are today, with dates, before anyone edits them. Keep your site's version history, deployment logs and analytics. Ask your web agency and any platform vendor to do the same. Records made now are the only proof later of what the site looked like and when it changed.

Do not reply to the sender yourself, and do not tell them, in writing or on the phone, that the site is inaccessible or that you know it breaks the law. Let your lawyer decide what is said and when.

Measure the pages the letter names first, then the paths every customer takes: home, search, product or service pages, cart, checkout, booking, contact and login. Use an automated check and a manual pass with keyboard and screen reader, against WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA, and keep the dated results. A measurement tells your lawyer what is true before they answer, which is worth more than any argument.

Fix the barriers that stop someone completing a task, and log each fix with its date and the commit or change that made it. Publish an accessibility statement that names the standard you work to, says what is still being fixed, and gives a contact that reaches a person. A dated plan for what remains is better than a promise that everything is done.

None of this guarantees an outcome. A fixed site can still be sued over its past state, and a settlement depends on facts and on the other side. What the work does is give your lawyer evidence instead of silence.

OAKMONT sells a demand letter response delivered within 72 hours. It covers measurement of every page named in the letter plus the site's main paths, a dated remediation plan your counsel can quote, a published accessibility statement, and a signed attestation of every measurement. It does not claim your site is compliant, and it does not answer the allegation; that stays with your lawyer. The current price is shown on this page.