The demand letter is real mail
Website accessibility lawsuits are not just a problem for big-box retailers. Small businesses receive demand letters, typically from a law firm asserting that a website could not be used with a screen reader, citing the Americans with Disabilities Act, and offering to settle. Courts have repeatedly allowed such claims to proceed against business websites, settlements commonly run into the thousands of dollars, and defending instead costs more. Some firms send these letters in volume, which means being small does not keep you off the list; using a common website template with common flaws can put you on it.
The good news is unglamorous: most complaints cite the same handful of failures, and most of those are fixable without rebuilding your site.
Accessibility in plain terms
An accessible website works for people using assistive tools: a blind visitor with a screen reader, which is software that reads the page aloud; a person with low vision zooming in or needing strong contrast; someone who cannot use a mouse and navigates by keyboard; a deaf visitor needing captions on video.
The widely used yardstick is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and demand letters usually reference it. You do not need to memorize it. You need to know that it is the standard your site will be measured against, and that the failures below account for most of what gets cited.
The failures behind most complaints
- Missing alt text: images without the short written description a screen reader announces. A photo of your storefront reads as nothing; a button that is only an image may be unusable.
- Low contrast: light gray text on a white background looks refined and is unreadable for many visitors. Contrast is measurable, and stylish sites fail constantly.
- Keyboard traps: menus, sliders, and popups that only work with a mouse. A popup that cannot be closed from the keyboard blocks the entire site.
- Unlabeled form fields: boxes a screen reader announces with no name, so a visitor cannot tell name from email.
- No visible focus indicator, so keyboard users cannot see where they are on the page.
- Videos without captions.
None of these is exotic. Most are attributes, labels, and color choices, not redesigns.
What overlay widgets do not fix
You will encounter vendors selling an accessibility overlay: one line of code that adds a widget with contrast toggles and text resizing, marketed as instant compliance. Understand its limits before paying. An overlay does not repair the underlying code; missing labels and broken keyboard navigation remain, and overlays can interfere with the assistive tools visitors already run. Sites using overlays continue to receive demand letters, and many accessibility practitioners advise against relying on them.
A widget can be a supplement. It is not a substitute for fixing the actual issues, and the actual issues are usually cheaper to fix than a recurring widget subscription.
Test it yourself in twenty minutes
- Put the mouse aside and tab through your homepage using only the keyboard. Can you see where you are? Can you open the menus, reach every link, and submit the contact form? Can you close any popup that appears?
- Run your homepage through the free WAVE tool at wave.webaim.org; it flags missing alt text, contrast failures, and unlabeled fields visually, on your actual page.
- Check your text and button colors in the free WebAIM contrast checker.
- Turn on the screen reader built into your phone or computer, such as VoiceOver on Apple devices, and listen to your homepage for two minutes. Hearing your site read image, image, blank button is clarifying in a way no report matches.
This will not certify anything, but it finds the majority of what demand letters cite.
What to do next
- Run the twenty-minute test and write down everything that failed.
- Fix in this order: alt text on meaningful images, form labels, contrast on body text and buttons, keyboard access to menus and popups, a visible focus indicator, captions on any video.
- Make accessibility a requirement in future work: one contract line saying new pages meet WCAG level AA, the mid-level standard letters cite, changes behavior cheaply.
- Add an accessibility statement page with a contact method for reporting barriers; it shows good faith and gives a real person a route to you that is not a law firm.
If your developer cannot walk through the WAVE results with you, find one who can. This is standard practice at HashWhales, and it should be standard anywhere, because the fixes that reduce legal risk are the same ones that make the site work for more of your customers.