Glossary
Website accessibility demand letter
A website accessibility demand letter is a pre-lawsuit notice from a plaintiff's law firm claiming your website violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (and usually a state analog like California's Unruh Act), describing barriers a tester or automated scan found, and offering to settle for a payment plus remediation commitments before a complaint is filed in court.
Why you received one
Demand letters are produced at scale: plaintiffs' firms run automated accessibility scanners across thousands of small-business sites, flag the ones with mechanical WCAG failures (missing alt text, unlabeled forms, broken keyboard navigation), and mail letters priced below the cost of mounting a defense. Your site most likely surfaced in a scan, not a browsing session.
The letters cite real legal theory (Robles v. Domino's established that the ADA reaches commercial websites, and Unruh adds $4,000 statutory damages per occurrence in California) attached to findings of wildly varying quality. Some describe genuine barriers; some are boilerplate stretched over a false positive.
What it typically demands, and what happens next
The standard package: a settlement payment (commonly four to five figures), an agreement to remediate to WCAG 2.1 AA within a stated period, and sometimes monitoring or reporting terms. If ignored, the letter's leverage is the cost asymmetry: filing the complaint costs them little, while answering it costs you counsel.
What you should not do is reply, pay, or sign anything before counsel looks at it. What you can do immediately is establish the facts: whether the cited barriers actually exist on your site, and what else a scan of your site surfaces. The letter's findings are rarely the complete list, and remediating only the cited items leaves the rest for the next letter.
How Complidar checks this
Complidar runs the same class of automated scan the firms run (axe-core WCAG checks across up to 120 pages), plus 21 non-accessibility checks, and attaches comparable settled cases to each finding. Owners use it after a letter to verify the claims and scope the real exposure, and before one to remove the mechanical findings that put sites on target lists.
Related questions
Is a demand letter the same as being sued?
No. It's the step before. No complaint has been filed yet, which is exactly why the letter exists: settling pre-suit is cheaper for both sides. It is also why the response window matters; bring it to counsel promptly rather than ignoring it.
Can I just fix the issues and ignore the letter?
Remediation helps your posture but doesn't automatically end the claim: the letter asserts past violation, not just present state. The decision of whether and how to respond is counsel's; the scan's job is making sure counsel negotiates from a complete picture of your site rather than the plaintiff's excerpt.
How do these firms find small-business sites?
Automated scanning at scale, the same way Complidar works, which is the practical argument for scanning your own site first. The mechanical failures that put a site on a target list are exactly the ones automation finds and developers can fix.
22 checks · up to 120 pages · no card
Last updated 2026-06-11 · Informational, not legal advice