ADA Website Lawsuit: What to Do in the First 72 Hours After a Demand Letter Lands on Your WordPress Site

How Big This Is, in Current Numbers

UsableNet tracks these filings every month across New York and California state courts and the federal courts. Its tracker counted 401 new ADA web accessibility lawsuits in July 2026. Of those defendants, 77 had already faced a digital accessibility suit before, and 113 were using a third-party accessibility widget when they were sued.

The longer trend runs the same direction. Law firm Saul Ewing's overview puts 2024 at more than 4,000 suits across federal and state courts. The US Chamber of Commerce reported 3,225 federal filings in 2022, "marking a 12% increase from the year prior." Retail and e-commerce sites are the most-hit category in UsableNet's data, and small businesses are a large share of the defendants, because a small site with a shopping cart and no accessibility work is the easiest case to bring.

Two details in those numbers matter more than the totals. Repeat defendants exist because a settlement without a real fix invites a second letter. And the widget figure is the whole argument of the section below.

What the Letter Is and What It Alleges

A demand letter comes from an attorney representing a person with a disability, usually someone who uses a screen reader, who says they tried to use your site and could not. It is not a lawsuit. It is the step before one, and it is written to be resolved by payment and remediation without a filing. A complaint, by contrast, has a case number and a court on it, and a deadline to respond that is set by the rules of that court.

The allegation is almost always the same: the site is a "place of public accommodation" under Title III of the ADA and it discriminates by being unusable with assistive technology. The barriers named tend to match the Department of Justice's own list in its web accessibility guidance: "incompatibility with screen-reader software, the absence of alternate text, missing captions or transcripts for video and audio content, insufficient color contrast, broken links, pop-ups." The letter will typically name specific pages, often the home page, a product page, and checkout, and describe what the tester could not do on each.

What the letter asks for is usually three things: fix the site to WCAG 2.1 AA within a period, adopt an accessibility policy, and pay the sender's attorneys' fees. Whether the fee number is reasonable, and whether to pay it at all, is a question for your lawyer, which is why the next section starts there.

The First 72 Hours

1. Do not reply yourself. Not by email, not by phone, not "just to ask a question." Anything you say can be quoted back. The reply comes from counsel.
2. Get it to a lawyer within days. Per Saul Ewing, a business that does not resolve the complaint "can be forced to defend such cases, make their websites compliant, and pay significant attorneys' fees to the prevailing plaintiff." Ignoring the letter is the one option that guarantees the expensive path. If you don't have a lawyer, your state bar's referral service and your business insurer are the two fastest routes to one who has handled these.
3. Call your insurer the same day. Some general liability and cyber policies cover ADA claims and some exclude them. You want the answer, and you want the claim noticed early, because late notice is a common reason for denial.
4. Preserve the site as it is. Before you change anything, take dated full-page screenshots of every page the letter names, and run an automated scan and keep the report. You want a record of the site's condition on the day the letter arrived. WCAGpatch's free tier does this on WordPress: it scans, dates the result, and keeps the history. Run it now, before you fix anything.
5. Find the pages the letter names and confirm the problems are real. They usually are. Open each page with a screen reader (VoiceOver is built into every Mac and iPhone; NVDA is free on Windows) and try to do what the letter says the tester could not. Write down what you find. This is not the fix; it is the map for it.
6. Do not buy a widget today. The urge is understandable. The record below is why it does not help and can make things worse.

What Your Lawyer Will Ask You For

Having this ready shortens the first meeting and lowers the bill. Expect to be asked for:

• The letter itself, with the envelope or email headers, and the date you received it.
• Who built and who maintains the site. The theme, the page builder, the agency or freelancer, and any contract with them. Some of those contracts carry accessibility warranties.
• Any accessibility work done before the letter. Scan reports, audits, a fixed-issues log, an accessibility statement, staff training. If it exists, it is your best evidence. If it doesn't, say so plainly; your lawyer needs the true picture.
• Traffic and location. Which states your customers are in and whether you have a physical location, because the "public accommodation" question is argued differently in different federal circuits, and New York and California have their own state statutes.
• Whether you have been contacted before, by this firm or any other, about this site or a previous one.
• The current scan and screenshots from step 4 above.

What to Fix First on a WordPress Site

Fix whatever the letter names first, because those are the items that will be checked when your lawyer says the site has been remediated. After that, the highest-yield work is the five failures that the WebAIM Million found on the majority of home pages in its February 2026 report. Every one of them can be found by an automated scan, and every one of them can be fixed inside WordPress without editing theme files.

1. Low-contrast text (83.9% of pages). Usually the theme's button and link colors. Fix in the Customizer or the theme's global styles; the target is 4.5:1 for normal text.
2. Missing alt text (53.1%). Fix in the Media Library, one field per image. On Pro and up, WCAGpatch's AI fixer writes these into the same field.
3. Missing form labels (51%). Fix in your form plugin's field settings: a real label, not just a placeholder.
4. Empty links (46.3%). Icon-only social links and "read more" links. Fix by adding visible text or an accessible name in the block or widget settings.
5. Empty buttons (30.6%). Hamburger menus, search icons, cart icons. Same fix, in the theme's header settings or the block that renders them.

The full checklist, with the axe rule and the WordPress location for each item, is on the ADA website compliance checklist page. What a scan cannot find, and what still needs a person, is covered in the ADA compliance for WordPress guide.

Why the Widget You Were About to Buy Won't Help

An accessibility overlay is a script that runs in the visitor's browser and adjusts the page on the fly. It does not change the code the complaint is about. Three facts from the record:

• UsableNet counted 113 defendants in July 2026 who were sued while using a widget. The widget did not prevent the suit, and in some filings the widget itself is named as a barrier.
• On April 22, 2025, the FTC approved a final order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million and barring it from claiming "that its automated products can make any website WCAG-compliant or can ensure continued compliance." The vote was 3 to 0.
• The Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by more than 1,000 accessibility professionals and people with disabilities, states that "full compliance cannot be achieved with an overlay."

If you already have one installed, don't rip it out on day one without telling your lawyer; changes to the site during a dispute should be deliberate and logged. But do not count it as remediation, and test the site with it switched off. The longer version of this argument is on the accessibility overlay page.

Documenting the Work, So It Counts

The DOJ's guidance does not demand a perfect site. It describes barriers to remove and recommends pairing an automated checker with manual testing. Settlement discussions, in practice, turn on whether you can show what you found, what you fixed, and when. So build the paper trail as you go:

• Keep every scan report, dated, including the one from before you started.
• Log each fix: the page, the issue, the date, who did it.
• Re-scan after each batch of fixes so the violation count is visibly falling over time.
• Keep the manual-testing notes from step 5, and the notes from any later screen-reader passes.
• Publish an accessibility statement with a contact route, and answer anything that comes through it.

WCAGpatch's certificate is one piece of that trail: a dated PDF with pages scanned, violations found, and violations fixed, regenerated after every scan. What it can and cannot prove is set out on the WCAG certification page. It is evidence of effort, not a shield, and this page is not your lawyer.

Sources

1. UsableNet, "Web Accessibility Lawsuits Tracker". July 2026: 401 suits filed, 77 repeat defendants, 113 defendants using a third-party widget; retail and e-commerce most affected; New York, California and federal courts tracked.
2. Saul Ewing LLP, "A Rise in ADA Website Accessibility Lawsuits". 4,000+ suits in 2024; consequences of an unresolved complaint, quoted above.
3. US Chamber of Commerce, "ADA Website Accessibility Lawsuits: How to Protect Your Business". 3,225 federal filings in 2022, up 12%.
4. DOJ, "Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA". Common barriers list; recommendation to pair automated and manual testing.
5. FTC, "FTC Approves Final Order Requiring accessiBe to pay $1 Million," April 22, 2025. Order terms and 3–0 vote.
6. Overlay Fact Sheet. "Full compliance cannot be achieved with an overlay"; 1,000+ signatories.
7. WebAIM Million, February 2026. Failure percentages: contrast 83.9%, alt text 53.1%, form labels 51%, empty links 46.3%, empty buttons 30.6%. The WordPress mapping is ours.