You Got an Accessibility Demand Letter for Your Shopify Store. Now What?

An Envelope, Not a Verdict

An accessibility demand letter has landed — by email or on letterhead — claiming your Shopify store is inaccessible to people with disabilities and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. It probably lists specific barriers, references WCAG, and proposes that you resolve the matter for a sum of money.

First, the reassuring part: a demand letter is not a lawsuit. It is a claim and an invitation to settle before one is filed. How you respond in the next few weeks has a real effect on how this ends. This article explains what the letter means and what to do. It is general information, not legal advice — for that, talk to a lawyer, and do it promptly.

Don't Panic, and Don't Ignore It

The two worst responses are the extremes. Panicking leads merchants to admit fault in writing, install a quick "compliance" widget, or wire a settlement without advice. Ignoring it lets a resolvable claim harden into a filed lawsuit with a court deadline attached.

The correct posture is calm and prompt. These letters frequently arrive in waves from a small number of firms that file high volumes of similar claims. That does not make the underlying accessibility problems imaginary — most stores genuinely do have the barriers cited — but it does mean this is a known process with known steps, not a catastrophe.

What a Demand Letter Actually Is

A demand letter typically asserts that the sender (often a person who uses a screen reader or other assistive technology) attempted to use your store and could not complete a task — browsing products, using search, or checking out — because of specific barriers. It ties those barriers to the ADA (and sometimes a state law such as California's Unruh Act or New York's civil rights statutes), and it asks you to (a) fix the site and (b) pay damages and attorney fees.

The leverage is that litigating is expensive and uncertain, so many defendants settle. Typical first-offense settlements run in the range of $5,000 to $25,000 in damages plus the plaintiff's attorney fees, often with a commitment to bring the site into WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA conformance on a timeline.

The Anatomy of the Claim

Most letters cite the same handful of WCAG failures, because they are the ones that are easy to detect and hard to deny:

• Images without text alternatives (WCAG 1.1.1)
• Insufficient color contrast (WCAG 1.4.3)
• Form fields without labels (WCAG 3.3.2)
• Icon-only buttons and links with no accessible name (WCAG 4.1.2)
• Keyboard traps and unreachable controls (WCAG 2.1.1, 2.1.2)

If you run a Shopify store that has never been audited, there is a good chance at least several of these are genuinely present. Knowing which are real and which are boilerplate is one of the first things a lawyer — and a proper scan — will establish.

Five Mistakes That Make It Worse

1. Responding directly without counsel. Anything you write can be used. Route substantive communication through a lawyer.

2. Admitting fault or making promises you can't date. "We'll fix everything by Friday" becomes a commitment you may miss.

3. Installing an accessibility overlay and calling it done. This is the most common reflex and one of the least effective. More on this below.

4. Deleting or altering the store without preserving a record. You want to fix barriers, but you also want an auditable trail of the state of the site and what you changed and when.

5. Doing nothing because "it's probably a scam." Even template-driven claims can turn into filed lawsuits. Treat every letter as real until your lawyer tells you otherwise.

What to Do in the First 30 Days

1. Preserve the letter and calendar any deadline it states. Do not let a response window lapse.
2. Contact a lawyer experienced in ADA web accessibility, and check whether your business insurance (general liability or a cyber/media policy) covers this — some do.
3. Get an objective audit of your store against WCAG 2.2 AA. You need to know which alleged barriers are real, how severe they are, and exactly where in your theme and apps they originate.
4. Start remediating the real issues at the code level — alt text, contrast, labels, keyboard access — and document every change with a before-and-after record. Demonstrable, dated remediation is leverage in a settlement and evidence of good faith.
5. Fix the whole customer journey, not just the cited page. Plaintiffs test home, collections, product, cart, and search. Fixing only the one URL named in the letter leaves the rest exposed.

Why "We Installed an Overlay" Is Not a Defense

The instinct to install a one-click accessibility widget is understandable and almost always counterproductive. Overlays sit on top of your site and do not fix the underlying Liquid, CSS, and HTML. Courts have repeatedly declined to treat them as evidence of compliance, the FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1 million for misleading compliance claims, and — tellingly — a meaningful share of accessibility lawsuits in 2025 were filed against sites that already had an overlay installed. Telling opposing counsel "but we have a widget" can invite the response that you were on notice and chose a cosmetic fix.

<script src="overlay.js"></script>
<!-- injects ARIA at runtime,
     on top of your Liquid -->

<button aria-label="Add Walnut
  Sneaker to cart">
  {% render 'cart-icon' %}
</button>

The Settlement Question

Whether to settle is a decision for you and your lawyer, weighing the cost of settlement against the cost and uncertainty of litigation. Two things are broadly true regardless of that decision. First, settlements almost always require actual remediation on a timeline, so the fixing work is coming either way — starting early is pure upside. Second, roughly 45% of accessibility lawsuits target businesses that had been sued before, frequently because they settled, patched superficially, and drifted back out of compliance. A settlement that isn't backed by durable, monitored fixes buys you a repeat visit.

How to Not Be Here Again

The only reliable protection is a store that is and stays accessible. That means code-level fixes to the real barriers, coverage across the whole journey, a documented audit trail you could hand to a lawyer, and continuous monitoring so the next theme update or app install doesn't quietly reopen a hole.

This is exactly what SiteRemora does. It scans your Shopify store against WCAG 2.2 AA, pinpoints the exact line of code behind each violation, and fixes it in your theme — no overlay. Every change is recorded with its before and after and can be reverted in one click, giving you the kind of dated, itemized remediation record that is genuinely useful when a lawyer asks "what have you done about it?" And because it keeps scanning after the crisis passes, it catches new violations before the next demand letter can.

A demand letter is a bad week. Being here a second time is a choice.