The Demand Letter That Looks Like Spam, Until You Read It Twice

A client forwarded me an email a few months ago with the subject line "Notice of Web Accessibility Violation." His first instinct was to delete it — it looked like every other scam that lands in a small business inbox. It was not spam. It was a formal demand letter from an attorney, citing specific pages on his website, specific WCAG success criteria his site failed, and a settlement figure attached to make the whole problem disappear quietly. He had never heard of WCAG. He had no idea his contact form, his product images, or his color palette could expose him to legal action. In my experience, that reaction — genuine surprise followed by "wait, this is a real thing?" — is the most common first response I see from business owners.

I am not writing this to scare anyone into buying an accessibility widget. I am writing it because I have watched enough of these cases land on people's desks to know that accessibility compliance has quietly moved from "nice to have" to "operational risk," and most SMB owners are managing that risk with zero visibility into it.

Why This Risk Is Growing, Not Shrinking

Website accessibility lawsuits under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act have been climbing steadily for years, and recent reporting puts 2025 as the highest-volume year on record for these filings, with growth concentrated well beyond the traditional hotspots of New York, Florida, and California. States like Illinois, Missouri, and Minnesota have seen sharp increases in filings against local businesses that never considered themselves a litigation target.

A few dynamics are driving this:

  • Serial plaintiffs and specialized law firms. A relatively small number of firms file a large share of these suits, often against multiple businesses in the same week using near-identical templates.
  • Cheaper case preparation. Automated scanning tools can flag obvious WCAG failures on thousands of sites in a day, making it inexpensive to build a pipeline of prospective defendants.
  • Growing awareness among plaintiffs' attorneys that "quick fix" overlay widgets are not a real defense — more on that below.
  • Regulatory momentum. The Department of Justice's Title II rule now requires state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA on a defined timeline. That rule does not apply directly to private businesses, but it reinforces WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard courts and regulators point to when private lawsuits get litigated.

None of this means every business will get sued. It means the odds are no longer negligible, and the cost of prevention is far lower than the cost of a demand letter, a settlement, and the remediation you would have had to do anyway.

What WCAG Actually Asks For

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines define three conformance levels, and understanding them helps you set a realistic target instead of guessing:

  • Level A — the baseline. Covers the most severe barriers, like content that is completely unusable with a keyboard or screen reader. Meeting only Level A still leaves a site difficult to use for many people with disabilities.
  • Level AA — the level courts and settlement agreements almost universally reference. It covers color contrast ratios, resizable text, consistent navigation, visible focus indicators, and meaningful labels on interactive elements. WCAG 2.1 AA (or the newer WCAG 2.2 AA) is the practical target for any commercial website.
  • Level AAA — the most rigorous tier, generally reserved for specialized government or healthcare content. The W3C itself does not recommend AAA as a blanket policy, since some AAA criteria conflict with normal design and content needs.

I recommend that every client I work with target WCAG 2.1 AA as the floor, with an eye toward 2.2 AA where it is not disruptive to redesign around. That single decision resolves most of the "how accessible do we need to be" debate before it starts.

The Failures I Actually Find in Client Audits

When I run an accessibility pass on a client's site, the same handful of issues show up again and again, regardless of industry:

  • Missing or lazy alt text on product photos, logos, and icons — either blank, or filled with the filename (IMG_4021.jpg), which is functionally useless to a screen reader.
  • Insufficient color contrast, especially light-gray text on white backgrounds, or brand colors used for body copy that look fine to a sighted designer but fail the 4.5:1 contrast ratio required for normal text.
  • Keyboard traps and invisible focus states — buttons and menus that only work with a mouse, or that give no visual indication of where keyboard focus currently sits.
  • Form fields without programmatic labels — a placeholder is not a label. Screen reader users need an actual <label> element tied to the input.
  • Video and audio content with no captions or transcripts, which also happens to hurt your SEO since search engines cannot index audio content either.
  • Heading structures that skip levels or exist purely for visual styling, breaking the logical outline screen reader users rely on to navigate a page.

A practical starting checklist for any SMB site:

  1. Run an automated scan (there are free and low-cost tools) to catch the obvious contrast, alt-text, and label issues.
  2. Tab through your entire site using only the keyboard — no mouse — and note anywhere you get stuck or lose track of focus.
  3. Check every form for real labels, not just placeholder text.
  4. Verify every meaningful image has descriptive alt text, and decorative images are marked as such.
  5. Test contrast ratios on your actual brand palette, not just body text.
  6. Add captions to any video content, even auto-generated ones as a starting point.

Why Overlay Widgets Are Not the Fix You Think They Are

I get asked constantly about the JavaScript "accessibility overlay" widgets that promise instant ADA compliance for a monthly fee. I do not recommend them, and I am not alone — plaintiffs' attorneys have gotten savvy enough that a meaningful share of recent lawsuits specifically target sites running these overlays, because the underlying code is still broken and the overlay is easy to spot. An overlay can adjust font size or contrast on the surface, but it cannot rewrite your HTML to add real labels, fix your heading structure, or make a custom JavaScript widget keyboard-operable. Fixing accessibility at the code and content level takes more effort up front, but it is the only version of "compliant" that holds up.

This overlaps in practice with two other areas I write about often. A site cannot be genuinely accessible if it is not also responsive across devices, since mobile screen readers and zoom behavior depend on solid responsive markup. And accessibility fixes frequently intersect with the technical work behind Core Web Vitals optimization — semantic HTML, proper heading structure, and lean, well-labeled markup tend to improve both scores at once.

Treat This as Risk Management, Not a Checkbox

If I had one recommendation for a business owner reading this, it would be to stop treating accessibility as a design preference and start treating it as you would any other compliance exposure — insurance, data privacy, employment law. You do not need to reach AAA perfection. You need a documented, good-faith effort toward WCAG 2.1 AA, a plan to close the gaps you find, and someone who periodically re-checks the site as content changes, because a compliant homepage today can drift out of compliance the moment a new blog post ships without alt text.

The businesses I have seen get sued were not malicious — they simply never looked. That is the fixable part.

Let's talk through your situation.