ADA demand letter: what to do
This is general information, not legal advice.
A letter that cites the Americans with Disabilities Act and gives you a date is a legal document. Keep it. Call a lawyer before you answer. AltGrade can hand your developer a fix list the same day. The scan is not the reply.
Do this first
Save the letter, the envelope, and the email headers. Write down the day you received it and any day it tells you to respond. Do not negotiate on the phone. Do not post the letter, or your site's issues, in public.
Your lawyer decides what goes back to the sender. While you book that call, a developer can open the shop. Scan the public pages. Give them the unnamed buttons, the contrast failures, and the fields with no labels. Do not describe that PDF, in any reply, as proof the site meets a law.
What the letter is
A demand letter is not a judgment. It is a request, often with a bill attached. The right response depends on who sent it, which court they mention, and what your business sells. Copy-paste replies from the internet skip those facts.
ADA.gov is background reading: https://www.ada.gov/. It is not a script for your case. A vendor that offers a snippet to 'close the matter' is selling a widget. Widgets do not rewrite templates. UsableNet's 2025 mid-year research, linked from the lawsuits page, describes suits against companies that already had one installed.
Give the developer a concrete list
Start on the path a customer uses to pay. Home, a collection, a product with options, the cart, checkout. On Shopify the work is the theme editor, product media alt text, and icon buttons in the header. On WooCommerce, put checkout labels back if the theme hid them. On Wix and Squarespace, set image alt, heading levels, and form titles in the element settings.
Retest after the edit. Tab the page. Measure the price. Confirm the button has a name. Rescan. Paid plans keep the before-and-after so you can see what disappeared and what a later theme change restored. The free scan is enough to start today.
Where AltGrade stops
The free scan checks up to 10 pages and shows the top five groups. The £49 audit adds a PDF and a statement draft. Monitoring from £19 a month emails you when a new critical issue appears. No tax is added.
Use that as the engineering record. Use your lawyer for the letter. A local referral beats another overlay. We will not draft your response.
A useful file for your lawyer
Photograph the letter, note the date you received it, and write down every deadline in one place. Send that file to counsel the same day. Do not post it on a blog and do not answer it yourself.
In parallel, scan the store so the developer is not guessing. A named button, a readable price and a labelled checkout field are ordinary theme edits. They do not replace the legal reply. They stop the same barriers sitting there while the letter is open.
Keep the scan PDF with the letter. Dates matter. If you fix three issues on Thursday, rescan on Thursday and file that report next to the earlier one. Your lawyer can then see what changed.
Questions
Should I ignore the date on the letter?
No. Ask a lawyer what it means before it passes. A scan does not pause it.
Can I send the PDF as my answer?
No. The PDF is for you and your developer. Your lawyer decides what the other side receives.
What will the scan miss?
Automated scans cannot catch every WCAG issue. Someone still needs to check alt text, captions, and a spoken pass through checkout.