Let’s face it: finding a web accessibility demand letter or lawsuit in your inbox can send your stress levels through the roof.
If you’re a small-to-medium-sized business, it might even feel like the sky is falling. But here’s what I’ve learned in over 7 years in the space: don’t panic!
There are clear, actionable steps you can take to protect your business and resolve these issues. Additionally, your website might not be as inaccessible as the legal claim suggests, and I can reasonably assume you likely did not intentionally block access to a user with a disability.
I also realize the standard response from our industry is, “Shame on you” for not knowing about website accessibility. However, my experience in the space provides the context that you may have been led to believe—by a development partner or accessibility vendor (such as an overlay provider)—that your website was “fully compliant” with all standards.
Then, surprise! Out of left field, you get a legal claim outlining a bunch of reasons why you were not in compliance.
Before we dig in, let me clarify one thing: I’m not a lawyer, and you shouldn’t take any of the recommendations in this article as legal advice. Before proceeding, you should contact your legal advisors (see Step 1 below).
However, having worked directly with over 500 clients to build remediation and risk mitigation plans—and after reading over 5,000 ADA website lawsuits during my time in this space—I’ve learned a thing or two and picked up on consistent trends.
I also happen to know excellent ADA defense attorneys in the business. I work with them regularly and would be happyto pass along their information to support your team!
With that said, let’s dive into the six most practical steps you can take if you receive a website ADA demand letter or lawsuit.
Step 1: Contact Your Legal Team or Reach Out for Expert ADA Legal Advice
Your first move should always be to notify your legal counsel. If you don’t have an attorney familiar with ADA website accessibility cases(a niche area of expertise), don’t worry. With years of experience supporting our Allyant clients on this topic, helping build rebuttal reports, and providing litigation support for many of the landmark accessibility cases, we have built strong relationships with top-tier ADA defense attorneys and can help you connect with someone who truly knows this space.
The Next Step You Can Take Today
Contact Allyant. We’ll connect you with an experienced ADA defense attorney who can review your demand letter or lawsuit with our team and provide tailored legal guidance.
Example
A mid-market Shopify merchant recently contacted our team after receiving a demand letter alleging their PDP pages and checkout process were inaccessible. At the time, they had no in-house legal counsel and had never received an ADA website claim in the past.
Within 24 hours, we connected them with a top ADA attorney with extensive experience supporting retail clients, who guided them on an initial strategy and response while we simultaneously assessed their website for key accessibility barriers (including helping validate if the claims made in their lawsuit were valid).
This quick action, working with an experienced attorney and accessibility vendor testing above and beyond what the plaintiff found, led to a favorable settlement and a clear remediation plan.
Step 2: Review the Claims with a WCAG Accessibility Professional
Don’t rely solely on what’s in the demand letter or lawsuit, and do not assume these claims are the only issues – or even issues at all! For our extensive experience,the claims might be:
- Based on non-legitimate errors for your team’s website that are ‘common’ on many websites.
- Exaggerated or misleading due to reliance on automated testing tools that can flag false positives or low-hanging fruit (non-blockers) instead of genuine user testing and impact analysis.
- Only cover a fraction of the actual accessibility issues on your site, so only remediating the 5-8 noted issues, including in the claim and responding that your website is ‘fully compliant’ can be a trap.
A highly experienced WCAG and digital accessibility vendor like Allyant can quickly validate these claims. We’ll help you identify whether the issues are true blockers or overblown and evaluate how usable your website is for people with disabilities by prioritizing the issues we find across your website’s core pages and templates.
This step provides clarity and ensures you’re addressing genuine problems and prioritizing the most important issues impacting an assistive technology user visiting your website.
Next Step You Take Today
Schedule a free consultation with Allyant’s accessibility experts. During this consultation, you will review the specific claims presented to you and gain an initial understanding of your website’s overall accessibility state.
Example
An entertainment company (now an Allyant client) received a lawsuit alleging that their online ticket purchasing process was inaccessible. We conducted a rapid manual assessment and found that 80% of thereported issues were either not accessibility barriers or not even WCAG violations (such as broken links) but were flagged as common issues by automated testing tools.
This analysis enabled the client’s legal team to negotiate a reduced settlement within days and laid the groundwork for initiating their remediation efforts after a comprehensive assessment of their website by our live-user testing team.
Step 3: Post a Strong Accessibility Statement
If your website doesn’t already have an accessibility statement, I recommend working to create one immediately!
Plaintiffs often request accessibility statements as part of web accessibility settlement agreements, so having one proactively can put you ahead of the curve. Even in the absence of a legal claim, this is a recommended best practice for ensuring users with accessibility needs can easily reach your team for support if they encounter barriers.
A well-crafted accessibility statement should not just check a box. Your team should actively uphold your ongoing accessibility efforts through this statement, and you should regularly update it if you are indeed making accessibility part of your continuous processes.
For example, I work with many organizations that posted an accessibility statement six years ago (yes, it’s true!) and it still refers to WCAG 2.0 AA and other outdated compliance standards. This is similar to notifying your consumers with disabilities or plaintiff firms that may pursue legal action that you lack an ongoing and active commitment to accessibility!
As outlined in this article exploring the details of crafting a strong accessibility statement, at a minimum, it should highlight the following:
- Your dedication to and awareness of digital accessibility.
- A summary of your ongoing efforts to test and maintain compliance.
- A point of contact for accessibility feedback or customer support.
Next Step You Can Take Today
Use Allyant’s accessibility statement template, which is immediately available through our HUB platform to all new Allyant clients, to create a statement tailored to your organization’s efforts and display our “Reviewed By” Badge to show that you have active and ongoing testing of your website by people with disabilities.
Example
A hospitality vendor we now work with previously lacked an accessibility statement and received multiple demand letters over the span of a few weeks. Within hours of engaging with Allyant, they posted a comprehensive statement outlining their remediation efforts and commitment to accessibility, which also commenced through an audit detailed below. This straightforward step enhanced their standing in negotiations and demonstrated a good-faith effort to remediate accessibility barriers before their legal counsel had a chance to respond to the plaintiff, who requested in the settlement agreement that they post a web accessibility statement (highlighting for their legal team that they had never reviewed the website!).
Step 4: Kick Off an Accessibility Audit or Assessment
An audit or assessment is critical for mapping out your remediation efforts and is almost always required as part of ADA web accessibility settlement agreements. Additionally, most times, it is specifically spelled out this testing includes people with disabilities – generally, a native screen reader user based on the nature of the plaintiff’s disability in 99%+ of website accessibility claims.
By documenting that you have already started taking steps to address accessibility issues before responding to a demand letter or reaching a settlement agreement, your legal team can strengthen your response and show goodwill to the plaintiff.
Choose a vendor with extensive expertise in accessibility and a proven track record of successful manual testing with similar clients to conduct a thorough audit of your website. This process not only prioritizes the issues identified in the assessment but also offers clear, guided remediation steps for your internal development team or digital agency, giving you a roadmap for efficient remediation and maintaining accessibility.
Next Step You Can Take Today
Begin the process of working with your senior accessibility consultants to map out an Accessibility Audit with our team. We tailor every project to ensure it fits your specific needs and budget, helping set your team up for both short-term and long-term success that addresses your actual requirements. Through this process, we will deliver a prioritized report highlighting your website’s most pressing issues along with a clear plan to resolve them.
Example
A boutique clothing retailer under legal scrutiny initiated an audit with Allyant immediately after receiving a lawsuit while engaging external counsel that we have worked with on hundreds of cases to help them use this audit to strengthen their case. Within a few weeks, they had a detailed report showing their accessibility gaps AND had their digital agency resolve many of the “critical” blockers in their next sprint, which they shared with their legal team to build a stronger response. Their proactive approach resulted in a significantly reduced settlement cost with the plaintiff and also set them up with a clear path to compliance.
Step 5: Prioritize Remediation and Build Long-Term Accessibility into Your Workflow
I explain to organizations every day that an audit is like going to the doctor for a health assessment. Your doctor can map out “issues” and steps to get healthier, but that is just the first step in the process of getting healthy AND maintaining good health.
Once you’ve identified these issues, it’s time to act. Here’s how we generally recommend clients streamline this process:
- Focus on the most critical barriers first,which are clearly blocking access to assistive technology users. Full stop:Not all accessibility issues are created equally in terms of legal risk, but more importantly, they impact your consumers with disabilities. A reputable third-party accessibility partner should help you prioritize the most urgent fixes to quickly make your website compliant and usable.
- Collaborate with a partner who can deliver results to your development team (either in-house or external) that enable them to address issues within key templates and components to help maintain accessibility.Additionally, a thorough accessibility audit and partner should work together to train your core team on why the issues arose, how to fix them, and then validate their successful remediation steps. This is the best possible training ground!
Accessibility isn’t a one-and-done task; your website will need continuous maintenance as it evolves. This is also the pitfall in hiring a development firm or accessibility to only “remediate your website” following a legal claim, then hand it back to your development team who has not learned through this process or upskilled on design and development accessibility issues they created historically. It creates an endless cycle where your team doesn’t break the cycle of building inaccessible code and content.
Next Step You Can Take Today
Engage Allyant’s accessibility support services to guide your remediation efforts and train your team in long-term accessibility practices. This includes active and ongoing QA testing during remediation sprints to ensure that accessibility barriers have been successfully addressed, while also providing your team with on-demand testing for new design and development updates over time.
Example
A CMS provider we support faced challenges remediating their platform while rolling out new features and providing their end-clients with accessible components, which resulted in ongoing demand letters and lawsuits for said clients. By using our prioritized remediation plan and ongoing QA testing services, they achieved compliance of their core components faster and helped their end-clients effectively rebut demand letters and lawsuits brought about by plaintiffs not actually looking to make a purchase on their clients’ websites running on the CMS platform, as there were no true accessibility blockers.
Step 6: Choose a Vendor with a Proven Track Record in Accessibility Litigation Support
Do not let ANY vendor tell you their services (or widget) will prevent a web accessibility claim in the future or ensure you are 100% compliant and legally safeguarded. This is simply a false statement every time.
Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that ADA website lawsuits are not just occasional events for most brands over the course of a year,and certainly not over a span of several years when actively engaging with an accessibility partner. New plaintiffs frequently “pile on,” targeting businesses even after effective remediation efforts due to the ease of filing ADA claims in our current legal environment and the ability to find “accessibility issues” with automated testing tools, regardless of their validity or whether they create actual barriers for end users.
This is why it is crucial to partner with a vendor that has a proven track record in assisting clients with future claims.
At Allyant, our industry-only dedicated Accessibility Claims Team specializes in risk mitigation and litigation support. We will clearly outline how we can assist you if you’re targeted again and provide immediate support to your internal or external counsel.This approach ensures that you don’t waste time or money starting over with a new vendor after future claims, which,unfortunately, are likely to occur within 18 to 24 months after your first (or second or third) web accessibility claim.
Next Step You Can Take Today
Schedule a call with Allyant’s expert accessibility consultants to discuss a long-term strategy for mitigating legal risks and building accessibility into your business operations. We will turn over this documented litigation support success and our detailed process for supporting accessibility claims, working with our client’s internal legal counsel, or leading ADA Defense Firms across the nation.
Example
A billion-dollar global retailer faced recurring lawsuits (2-3 every 12 months,despite strong ongoing remediation efforts and active testing of new designs in Figma with our UX accessibility consultants, alongwith agile testing of new releases.
Allyant’s team collaborated closely with their legal counsel to document compliance progress and provided expert rebuttals in both written and video form from our Native Screen Reader Testers,which helped dismiss two cases entirely within a 12-month period, as it was evident the plaintiff did not actively attempt to purchase from their website.
This partnership not only saved the client significant legal costs but also protected their brand reputation, while rightfully rewarding them for their strong and continuous commitment to delivering a highly accessible digital experience to ALL consumers!
The Bottom Line
Receiving a demand letter or lawsuit doesn’t have to mean disaster for your business, nor should it lead to shutting down your website or breaking the bank! With the right steps and a strong team of experts backing you with a tailored approach, you can navigate the process, protect your brand, and, most importantly, build a more inclusive digital experience for everyone.
Feeling overwhelmed or in need of immediate support? The Allyant team is here to help!Contact us below to discuss your accessibility challenges and learn how our team can support your compliance journey.
