What a good-faith record looks like when the demand letter arrives

General information, and useful

We are not lawyers, and when a demand letter arrives your counsel leads. What follows is what we have learned sitting next to merchants and their lawyers while they worked out what to say back, and it comes down to one observation: the letter asks what you knew and what you did about it, and the quality of your record decides how that conversation goes.

A store with no record is arguing from memory. A store with dated scans, a fix log, and a published statement is arguing from paper. The second conversation is shorter and cheaper.

What the letter will ask

Demand letters in this area follow a pattern. They list barriers a tester hit on specific pages: an image a screen reader could not describe, a menu that could not be opened from the keyboard, a form field with no label. They cite the Americans with Disabilities Act, often a state statute as well, and they propose a settlement with remediation and fees.

Your counsel's first questions will be practical. When did you first become aware of accessibility as an obligation? What have you done about it, and when? Is the work ongoing? Is there a way for a customer with a disability to reach you? Can you show any of this?

Each of those questions has a document behind it, or does not.

The four parts of a record

1. A dated scan history. Evidence that someone has been looking, regularly, at the pages that matter. Each scan should say which pages were covered, what was found, and when. A single audit from two years ago is a data point; a series is a practice.

2. A fix log with before and after. For every change made in the name of accessibility: the date, what was wrong, what was changed, and who made it. For theme fixes, keep the diff. For content fixes, keep the product or page and the text added. The before-and-after matters because it shows the issue was understood as well as closed.

3. A published accessibility statement. A page on the store that says which standard you work toward, what you have done, what you know is still imperfect, when it was last updated, and how to reach a person. Plaintiffs' firms read it before they write; so do judges.

4. An open channel and a response habit. A contact path for anyone who hits a barrier, and a record of what happened when someone used it. Many letters follow a complaint that went unanswered.

What a record does, and its limits

It does not make you immune. No document prevents a letter, and no vendor can promise that; the one that promised compliance loudest paid a $1M FTC penalty in 2025 for the claim.^* Under the ADA there is no safe harbor for trying.

What a record does is change the character of the dispute. It narrows the list of barriers that remain open, because many of the ones cited were fixed last month and you can show it. It shows the effort is systematic rather than reactive, which affects what a settlement looks like and whether a firm thinks you are worth pursuing a second time. And it gives your counsel something to send on day one instead of a promise to look into it.

Starting from zero: a one-week plan

• Day 1. Scan the five pages that get tested first: home, a collection, a product, the cart drawer, search. Save the report with its date.
• Days 2 and 3. Fix the mechanical failures the scan found in the theme: landmarks, skip link, button and link names, heading order, form labels, in the order the checklist gives them. Keep the diff for each.
• Day 4. Write alt text for every meaningful image on those five pages and in your best-selling products. Log which products you touched.
• Day 5. Publish the accessibility statement, with a contact address that someone reads.
• Day 6. Set the rescan cadence and the owner for each kind of issue: theme to the developer, content to whoever edits products, the way an agency routes it.
• Day 7. Put the scan, the fix log, and the statement in one folder with the dates in the file names. That folder is the record.

Writing the statement

Keep it short, plain, and true. It should say:

• That you want everyone to be able to shop with you, and that you work toward WCAG 2.1 AA.
• What you have done so far, in a sentence or two, without technical jargon.
• What you know is still imperfect, honestly. A statement that admits a known limitation is more credible than one that claims perfection.
• How to reach a person, by email at minimum, and that you will respond.
• When the statement was last reviewed.

Do not say "fully compliant". Do not say a widget makes the site accessible. Do not let it go three years without a date change.

Beyond this article

Settlements, consent decrees and state-specific statutes are counsel's territory, and the right response to a particular letter depends on facts we cannot see from here. A record helps every one of those conversations; it does not replace any of them. The short answers to the questions merchants ask that week are in the FAQ.

In short

The letter asks two questions: what did you know, and what did you do. Dated scans, a fix log with diffs, a published statement, and an open channel answer both. SiteRemora keeps the first two for you by default: every scan is dated, every fix is recorded with its before and after and can be reverted, and the history stays with the store. If you are starting from zero, the week above gets you a record; if you would rather see where you stand first, a scan of those five pages takes a few minutes.