Insights
The accessibility letter, and how not to get one
It arrives from a law firm you've never heard of, says your website excludes people with disabilities, cites the ADA, and suggests a settlement. Thousands of small businesses get one every year. Most of it is preventable at build time.
Why these letters exist
Courts have widely read the ADA to cover business websites the way it covers front doors and ramps. That created real, legitimate claims from people who genuinely couldn't use a site, and it also created a volume industry of firms scanning the web for violations and mailing settlement demands at scale.
Here's the uncomfortable part, both kinds of letter cite the same defects. Whether the complaint is sincere or cynical, the exposure is identical, and the fix is the same.
What accessible actually means
Concrete things, not vibes. A blind visitor's screen reader can tell what's on the page because images carry descriptions and buttons have names. Someone who can't use a mouse can reach everything with a keyboard. Text has enough contrast to read with aging eyes. Forms announce their labels and their errors. Videos carry captions.
There's a published standard the letters and the courts point to, and it's testable. A site either lets a screen reader through or it doesn't, and the scanning firms know exactly which defects to look for because the tests are public.
How sites get built to not invite one
Accessibility is cheap when it's a build habit and expensive when it's a retrofit. Clean structure, labeled forms, alt text as part of the content workflow, contrast checked when colors get chosen, keyboard paths tested before launch. On a site built that way, the scanner finds nothing to cite.
One warning worth the price of this page, the overlay widgets that promise one line of code fixes accessibility mostly don't survive scrutiny, and sites wearing them still get letters. There's no sticker for this, the site itself has to work.
If one arrives anyway
Don't ignore it and don't panic-pay it. Call your lawyer, that part is theirs. Then have the site actually fixed, because the letter that costs the most is the second one, and it names the same defects the first one did.
The engineering answer is the durable one. A site that genuinely works for everyone has nothing to settle.