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I Just Got a Letter Saying My Website Isn't ADA Compliant. What Do I Do?

By Jennifer Tryk, Founder of AI Signature Automation

I Just Got a Letter Saying My Website Isn't ADA Compliant. What Do I Do?

If you're reading this because a letter just showed up in your inbox or mailbox saying your website violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, take a breath. You're not the only one, and it's not a scam. But it's also not something you should fix by installing a widget and hoping it goes away.

Let's walk through what's actually happening, why it happens so often, and what to do next.

Is This Real, or Is Someone Trying to Scam Me?

It's almost certainly real. Website accessibility lawsuits under Title III of the ADA have become a steady, well-established part of business litigation in the United States. According to Seyfarth Shaw, the law firm that has tracked these filings since 2013, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025 alone, a 27% jump from 2024. Every single year since 2018, that number has stayed above 2,200. This isn't a rare event. It's a routine, well-worn legal process that plaintiffs' attorneys run at scale.

That doesn't mean every letter is legitimate in its specifics. Some demand letters overstate the number of violations or use scare tactics to push a fast settlement. But the underlying legal theory, that a business's website needs to be usable by people with disabilities, is real and has been upheld in federal courts repeatedly.

Do I Have to Pay?

Not automatically, and not immediately. A demand letter is usually the opening move, not a final judgment. What typically happens next:

  1. An attorney representing a person with a disability sends a demand letter or files a complaint, alleging your site has barriers that prevent someone using a screen reader, keyboard-only navigation, or other assistive technology from using it.
  2. You (ideally with an attorney who has handled ADA Title III cases before) evaluate the claims.
  3. Most cases settle rather than go to trial. Reported settlement ranges vary, but figures commonly cited by accessibility remediation firms fall somewhere between $25,000 and $75,000, often including a required remediation timeline and sometimes an independent audit as part of the settlement terms.

The point isn't to scare you into a specific number. It's to be clear that ignoring the letter doesn't make it disappear, and neither does a quick technical patch.

"I Already Have an Accessibility Widget Installed. Why Am I Still Getting Sued?"

This is the question I hear most, and it's the one that catches business owners off guard. If you installed one of the popular AI-powered accessibility overlay widgets, like accessiBe or similar products, expecting it to make your site legally safe, here's the uncomfortable truth: it probably didn't.

In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against accessiBe, alleging the company made false or unsubstantiated claims that its accessWidget product could make any website compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The company had marketed the product as requiring just "one line of code" to make a site 30% WCAG compliant immediately and fully compliant within 48 hours through an AI process. The FTC also alleged accessiBe paid for third-party reviews and formatted them to look like independent opinions without disclosing the financial relationship. In April 2025, the FTC approved a final order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million and barring the company from making those compliance claims again without real evidence to back them up.

That regulatory action matters because it confirms, at a federal level, something the accessibility community had been saying for years: these widgets don't do what their marketing implies. Screen readers read a page's underlying HTML code directly. They don't interact with a widget layered on top of that code. If your buttons don't have proper labels, if your heading structure is a mess, or if a form field has no accessible name, a JavaScript overlay sitting on top of your site can't fix that. It can, at best, offer a menu of visual adjustments like larger text or higher contrast, which helps some users but leaves the core structural problems untouched.

You don't have to take my word for it. Search "accessibility overlay" in the AppleVis community, a forum built by and for blind and low-vision Apple users, and you'll find posts like this one from a screen reader user who considered building a competing overlay product before learning how the existing ones actually perform: "These overlay companies are preying on the fears of companies of getting sued and selling them a garbage product that ends up excluding more people. You can fix the code, but you can't fix user interaction and logical order. I'd tell businesses that they can save the money and hire a web dev to do simple things like label form fields and add alt text and they'll be miles ahead."

Or look at the Shopify Community forums, where a merchant posted in a thread titled "Sued for not being ADA Compliance," asking whether accessiBe or a similar app was worth purchasing after already being sued. One of the responses summed it up plainly: "I doubt that any app can fix your code and improve your score... it is important to work with a developer."

This isn't a knock on any single company. It's a structural limitation of what an overlay can technically do. Accessibility research firm TestParty, which reviewed court filing data, found that more than 800 businesses using overlay widgets like accessiBe and UserWay were still sued for accessibility violations in 2023 and 2024, representing more than a quarter of all digital accessibility lawsuits filed in that period. The widget didn't prevent the lawsuit. In some cases, it may have given the business a false sense of security that delayed a real fix.

So What Actually Does Work?

An actual WCAG audit looks at your website's real code and real user experience, not just whether a plugin is installed. A proper audit typically checks things like:

  • Whether every image has meaningful alt text (not just any alt text, but text that actually describes the image's purpose)
  • Whether every interactive element (buttons, links, form fields, menus) can be reached and operated using only a keyboard
  • Whether your heading structure (H1, H2, H3) is logical and consistent, since screen reader users often navigate by jumping between headings
  • Whether color contrast between text and background meets the 4.5:1 minimum ratio for normal text
  • Whether ARIA attributes, if used, are implemented correctly (an incorrect ARIA label can be worse than no label at all)
  • Whether forms have properly associated labels, and whether error messages are announced to assistive technology

This is code-level work. It usually means a developer going through the actual page templates and fixing what's broken, not adding a script tag and calling it done.

What To Do Right Now

If you've received a letter, here's the realistic sequence:

  1. Don't ignore it, and don't panic-buy an overlay widget as a quick fix. Based on everything above, it's unlikely to protect you, and it won't be free either.
  2. Talk to an attorney who has actually handled ADA Title III website cases before, ideally before you respond to the letter or agree to anything.
  3. Get a real accessibility audit that evaluates your actual site code against WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard most courts and settlements reference.
  4. Fix what the audit finds, prioritizing the issues that create the most significant barriers first.
  5. Treat this as ongoing, not a one-time fix. Sites change, content gets added, and accessibility needs periodic re-checking, the same way security or SEO does.

Website accessibility isn't just a legal risk category. It's also, quite simply, about whether real people can use your website. Getting it right protects your business and makes your site work better for everyone, including the growing number of AI tools that read your site's structure to understand and recommend your business.

Accessibility is one of the six pillars evaluated in our Signature Visibility Audit, alongside SEO, technical health, GEO, AEO, and trust and transparency signals. If you want to know where your site actually stands, start with the free audit.

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