ADA-related demand letters targeting websites have grown roughly 14% year-over-year since 2018. If you just received one, here's what to do — and what not to do — in the first 72 hours.
First 24 hours
- Don't reply directly. Forward to your lawyer (or get one) before any written communication. Anything you send becomes evidence.
- Preserve the page state. Take a full HTML + screenshot snapshot of the URL(s) cited in the letter, today's date. Their claims are time-bound; you need proof of what was live when.
- Run a baseline scan. axe-core, WAVE, AccessProof — anything that produces a date-stamped issue list. This becomes the starting point of your remediation log.
Day 2–7
- Triage findings: critical/serious first (color contrast, missing labels, keyboard traps).
- Document each fix with a commit / ticket / dated entry. The paper trail matters more than the speed.
- Add an accessibility statement page (publicly linked from the footer) describing your standard, conformance level, contact, and remediation plan.
What reduces risk long-term
Most plaintiffs settle out of court if you can show continuous, dated remediation activity. A single audit means nothing; quarterly automated scans + a public statement + a contact form do.
Common mistakes
- Negotiating directly with the plaintiff before counsel.
- Removing the offending page (looks like evidence destruction).
- Using an "accessibility overlay" widget. Courts increasingly view them as cosmetic; they don't fix underlying issues and may add new ones.
How AccessProof helps
Each scan produces a dated, exportable PDF report. Schedule weekly or monthly scans, archive the PDFs, and you have the contemporaneous documentation that turns "we tried" into "we proved we tried".
Originally published on access-proof.com.