Start here, because it is the only part of this article that is urgent. If a website lawsuit has landed on your small business: speak to a lawyer before you do anything else, including replying, including changing your website. Not a web developer. A lawyer. Nothing below is legal advice and none of it is a substitute for that conversation.
With that said, most people who receive one of these want to understand what has actually happened to them, and the internet is unhelpfully full of people selling a fix. So here is the technical picture, honestly, from people who do the remediation work and do not do the legal part.
What an ADA website lawsuit against a small business actually is
The argument is that your website is a place of business, and that a person with a disability could not use it in the way that someone else could. Screen readers that cannot interpret a page, images with no text alternative, forms that cannot be completed with a keyboard, contrast too low to read, video with no captions.
Two things are worth understanding about the shape of this. First, there is no single official technical rulebook that a business can point at and say it complied, which is a real source of the frustration people feel. In practice, courts, regulators and the claims themselves all reference the same widely recognised accessibility guidelines, so those have become the working standard whether or not anyone legislated them for your situation.
Second, and this is what surprises people most: a great many of these are sent in volume. Sites are scanned automatically, common failures are detected, and letters go out in bulk. Being targeted usually does not mean someone examined your business. It means your site failed a scan that thousands of sites fail. That is not a reason to ignore it, but it does explain why it feels impersonal, and it is worth knowing before you take it as a judgement on you.
The first week, in order
- Do not ignore it. The single worst option. A demand letter that goes unanswered tends to become a filed case, which is more expensive, more public and much harder to resolve quietly.
- Do not reply yourself. Not to argue, not to apologise, not to explain that you are a small business. Anything you write can matter later. This is what the lawyer is for.
- Get a lawyer who has seen these before. Specifically these. It is a particular niche and someone who has handled them will tell you in one conversation what a realistic outcome looks like, which is worth a great deal when you are frightened.
- Preserve the evidence. Do not quietly rebuild the site this week. Take a full copy of it as it stands, with the date. Your lawyer may need to establish what the site actually did, and hurriedly changing it can look worse than leaving it.
- Get an independent audit started. You need to know what is genuinely wrong, separately from what the letter claims. Some claims list real problems. Some list problems that are not there, or are on a page that no longer exists.
- Work out who owns the fix. Your own site, a platform you rent, a theme, a booking widget from a third party. It affects who pays and how quickly anything can change, and it is better known in week one than in month three.
What an accessibility audit actually finds
Roughly the same list every time, which is oddly reassuring. Most sites fail on the same handful of things, and most of those are unglamorous rather than deep.
| Finding | What it means | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Images with no text alternative | A screen reader reaches a picture and has nothing to say about it. Product photos and infographics are the worst offenders. | Low, but tedious at volume |
| Forms with unlabelled fields | The field is visually obvious and programmatically anonymous, so the user is asked to fill in nothing in particular. | Low to medium |
| Cannot be used by keyboard alone | Menus, modals and carousels that need a mouse, or a focus order that jumps around unpredictably. | Medium |
| Contrast too low | Light grey text on white. Extremely common, because it is a house style rather than an oversight. | Low, but it touches your brand |
| No visible focus indicator | Someone navigating by keyboard cannot see where they are. Often removed deliberately for looking untidy. | Low |
| Headings used for size, not structure | Screen-reader users navigate by headings, so a decorative heading order makes the page unnavigable. | Low to medium |
| Video with no captions | Also a problem for anyone in a noisy room, which is most people on a phone. | Medium, and ongoing |
| Third-party widgets | Bookings, chat, reviews, maps. You may not be able to fix these yourself at all. | Varies, sometimes blocked entirely |
That last row is the one that derails timelines. If a booking widget is inaccessible and the vendor will not fix it, your options are to pressure them, replace them, or provide an accessible alternative route. Find out early.
An important caveat about automated scans, including the one that probably generated your letter: they find perhaps a third of real problems and they produce false positives. A serious audit combines automated scanning with someone actually using the site by keyboard and with a screen reader. Anyone quoting from a scan alone is not giving you the picture.
What remediation involves and costs
| Scope | Typical range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Audit of a small site, with a prioritised report | $2,000 to $6,000 | One to two weeks |
| Fixing the common failures on a small brochure site | $4,000 to $12,000 | Two to four weeks |
| A larger site, or a shop with many templates | $12,000 to $40,000 | Four to ten weeks |
| Accessibility handled properly inside a rebuild | Usually 10 to 15 per cent on top of the rebuild | Same as the rebuild |
Illustrative from the kind of work we quote, not a price list. The variables that move it most are how many distinct page templates exist, whether the content is in a system you control, and how many third-party widgets are involved.
One thing worth weighing honestly: if the site is old and you were going to replace it within a year or two, remediating it and then replacing it means paying twice. Building accessibility into a redesign is usually cheaper than retrofitting, and rebuild or refresh works through which of those you actually need.
About the widget you are about to buy
You will find products promising instant compliance from one line of script: a floating icon that opens a panel of contrast and text-size controls. They are heavily marketed to exactly the person who has just received a letter, which is not an accident.
Be careful here. These tools sit on top of a page and try to correct it as it loads, rather than fixing what is underneath. Many people who actually use assistive technology report that they interfere with the software they already rely on, and organisations of disabled people have objected to them publicly and repeatedly. Sites using them have still received claims. Some of the marketing implies a legal protection that the product cannot give, and no supplier, including us, can promise you will not be sued.
There is a narrow legitimate use: as a temporary aid while real remediation is underway. As a substitute for it, you are spending money on something that does not fix the underlying problem and may make the experience worse for the people the law exists to protect.
Preventing the next one
- Fix it properly rather than minimally. Doing only what the letter names leaves everything it did not name, and a second claim from a different person is entirely possible.
- Put alt text in your publishing process, so every new image gets it at upload rather than in a cleanup project next year.
- Test with a keyboard. Unplug the mouse and try to complete your main task. This takes ten minutes and finds a surprising amount.
- Check contrast when the brand changes, because this is where it usually reappears.
- Ask about accessibility before buying any widget, and get the answer in writing. This is the constraint you cannot fix later.
- Publish an accessibility statement saying what you have done, what you know is imperfect, and how to tell you about a problem. Ours is at accessibility. It is not a shield, but a real route to report a problem sometimes resolves things before they escalate.
Not for you if
The genuinely good news, and it is easy to miss while you are alarmed: the technical work is well understood, the list of problems is short and predictable, and most of it is fixable in weeks rather than months. The frightening part of this is the legal process, not the website.