Got an ADA Demand Letter About Your Website? What to Do in the First 48 Hours

The letter usually arrives by email or certified mail from a law firm you’ve never heard of. It says a blind person tried to use your website with a screen reader and couldn’t, cites the Americans with Disabilities Act, and asks for money and changes to the site by a deadline a few weeks away.

The first instinct is to do something fast. Don’t. A demand letter is not a lawsuit. No judge has set a deadline, and the next two days are better spent getting organized than reacting.

These claims are common. By one industry count, nearly 5,000 website accessibility lawsuits were filed in the United States in 2025, and New York is one of the busiest states for them. Many letters come from the same few firms using the same template, sometimes sent to dozens of businesses in a single week. That doesn’t make yours safe to ignore, but it does mean there’s a well-worn way to handle it.

1. Don’t ignore it.
The deadline in the letter is the law firm’s, not a court’s. But silence is often how a letter becomes a federal lawsuit, with your business name on a public court docket. A filed case usually costs more to resolve than a letter.

2. Don’t call the plaintiff’s firm yourself.
That firm represents the person accusing you. Anything you say can end up in their next demand or in a complaint: that you already knew about the problem, how much the site sells, that you’ll fix it by Friday. A lawyer who handles these claims knows what they need to hear and what they don’t.

3. Don’t install an accessibility widget and call it handled.
Widgets, also called overlays, add a toolbar on top of your site. They don’t fix the code underneath, and that code is what a screen reader actually reads. Industry trackers counted more than 1,000 lawsuits in 2024 against businesses that already had a widget installed. In April 2025, the Federal Trade Commission finalized a $1 million order against accessiBe, one of the best-known widget companies, over claims that its product could make any website compliant.

1. Write down the key facts. Note who sent the letter, the date it arrived, the deadline it gives, the plaintiff’s name, and the pages or problems it describes. Keep the original email or envelope.

2. Find out whether a lawsuit has already been filed. Sometimes the letter arrives after the complaint, or with it. A lawyer can search federal court records and New York’s court filing system (NYSCEF) by your business name in minutes. If you’ve actually been served with a summons and complaint, the deadlines are real ones. In federal court you generally have 21 days from service to respond. In New York State court it’s 20 or 30 days, depending on how you were served.

3. Save your website as it looks today. Take screenshots of the pages the letter mentions, and save them to a free archive such as the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). If the claim later turns on what your site looked like on a certain date, you’ll want your own record.

4. Check your insurance. Some business policies may cover part of an ADA claim, and most require you to tell the insurer promptly. Find your policies and ask your broker before you agree to anything.

5. Get an honest look at the site. You need to know whether the problems in the letter are real. Fixing them properly, in the site’s own code and with a written record of each fix, helps in any negotiation and protects you from the next letter. Speak to a lawyer about timing first, though, because how and when you fix the site can matter to your defense.

6. Talk to an ADA defense lawyer before you reply. One conversation is usually enough to learn whether the firm that wrote to you tends to file suits, what similar claims have resolved for, and whether you have a defense worth raising.

Many website demand letters are resolved without a lawsuit ever being filed. A typical resolution has two parts: a payment, and a promise to make the site accessible within a set period, usually measured against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

What it costs depends on a handful of things: who sent the letter, whether a suit has been filed, how many real problems the site has, whether New York State and City law claims are part of the demand, and how quickly you respond.

Some letters are weaker than they look. Under the federal ADA, a private plaintiff can only ask a court to order the site fixed and to award attorney’s fees. The money in these demands usually comes from the New York State and New York City human rights laws.

The person behind the claim also has to show a real plan to use your business. In Calcano v. Swarovski North America (2022), the Second Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers New York, upheld the dismissal of five ADA cases built on boilerplate claims of intent to return. Judges in New York have since applied that reasoning to website cases. A lawyer who handles these claims will tell you quickly whether any of this helps you.

Michael Samuel has defended about 100 ADA cases since 2019, most of them about websites. For website cases, the firm charges a flat fee that covers all work up to trial, including a motion to dismiss.

If you’ve only received a letter, call us. We’ll read it, check whether anything has been filed, and tell you plainly what we’d do.

For the website itself, we work with Codexyo, an independent web accessibility team that fixes sites like yours. They are not lawyers, and you’re free to use anyone.

We’ve also written about specific firms that send these letters in New York, including Equal Access Law Group and Apex Trial Law.