You Can Be Fully Compliant and Still Get Sued: Inside the ADA Demand Letter Economy

Our co-founders Michael Bervell (CEO) and Jason Tan (CTO) recently sat down with Chase Clymer on Honest Ecommerce to talk about the most predictable — and most avoidable — legal risk in DTC right now.

▶️ Listen to the full episode →

Below is the version we'd want every Shopify founder to read before their first demand letter arrives.

The number that should worry you

Last year, roughly 5,000 ADA demand letters were filed publicly against ecommerce brands. Public filings are the tip of the iceberg — most of these never reach a docket, because they're settled quietly by email. Our estimate, based on what our own customers forward us, is that the true annual volume is somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.

They're not random. The same 14 to 15 law firms show up over and over. The model is straightforward: recruit a plaintiff who is blind or low-vision, pay them a small amount to attach their name to a claim, send a templated letter, and collect a settlement in the low five figures.

Here's the part that catches founders off guard: being compliant does not protect you from receiving one.

The arbitrage nobody explains to you

Say you get a letter. You've done the work. Your site passes. You're right.

Proving you're right in front of a judge costs $15,000 to $25,000 in legal fees.

The settlement offer on the table is $10,000 to $12,000.

That gap is the business model. It's an economic arbitrage sitting inside the legal system, and it's deliberately priced just below the threshold where fighting back becomes rational. So brands pay. Not because they did anything wrong, but because the math says paying is cheaper than winning.

"If you're right, you then have to pay to prove that you're right." — Michael Bervell, Co-founder & CEO

There is one well-known counterexample. In Jones v. Moscot, the eyewear company decided to spend the $25,000–$30,000 and take it all the way. The judge threw the case out entirely — no damages, no class action, full stop. It's proof the defense works when you can afford it. Most brands simply never get to find out.

Why a 1990 law about wheelchair ramps is being applied to your PDP

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990, under the first Bush administration. It was written for physical space: the pitch of a ramp, the height of a sink, whether your building has an elevator. It has been, on balance, enormously positive — and if you run a physical store, there are still tax credits available for making it more accessible.

There was no ecommerce in 1990.

Around COVID, a set of firms that had built a practice around "drive-by" ADA lawsuits — literally driving past buildings, noting the absence of a ramp, and filing — realized the same discrimination theory could be pointed at websites. If a screen reader can't parse your navigation, the argument goes, that's functionally a building without a ramp.

The theory isn't crazy. We think every website should be accessible. That's the entire reason our company exists.

The problem is the gray area. In physical space, the requirements are written into law with numbers attached. Online, the accepted standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — which is an independently developed specification that is not written into the ADA at all. It's industry consensus that functions as de facto law, which is what happens in most industries when no statute exists.

And WCAG isn't a binary. There are conformance levels (A, AA, AAA), and dozens of individual success criteria underneath them. "Are you compliant?" is not a yes-or-no question, which is exactly the ambiguity these filings are built on.

We spend time in DC a couple times a year pushing for a codified standard. Clear rules would give businesses something concrete to comply with, give plaintiffs a clean path when a violation is real, and — most importantly — give people with disabilities a definition of what "good" actually looks like. That's the dream scenario. It's probably not next year.

The widget trap

For the last six years, the default answer has been an overlay: one line of JavaScript from a provider like accessiBe or UserWay, promising instant compliance. There are a dozen-plus of them on the Shopify App Store alone.

Jason's analogy is the clearest one we've found:

"It's the difference between an Instagram filter and Photoshop. A filter changes how the photo looks. It never changes the photo." — Jason Tan, Co-founder & CTO

An overlay can bump your font size. It can adjust contrast. What it cannot do is rebuild a top navigation that doesn't respond to keyboard events, or repair a heading structure that makes no logical sense to a screen reader — because those live in your code, not on top of it. The widget has no access to the thing that's actually broken.

The FTC has already taken action against a major overlay provider for misleading compliance claims. But the more damaging development is one we see firsthand, because customers forward us their demand letters the week they receive them:

Plaintiffs' firms now name overlay providers by brand, inside the letters, as evidence of non-compliance. We've read letters with a full paragraph listing twelve widget vendors — most of them available on the Shopify App Store — cited explicitly as the basis for the claim.

The tool sold to you as protection has become a targeting signal.

What fixing it at the source actually means

We don't put a layer on top of your site. We go into the codebase.

That means writing real alt text. Rewriting vague link text into something descriptive. Reordering heading levels so a screen reader can move through the page in a logical hierarchy. Repairing keyboard navigation so tab and enter behave the way an assistive device expects. Most of this work is invisible to a sighted user — and transformative to someone using a screen reader.

To stay in the ADA's own metaphor: we're building the ramp, the revolving door, and the elevator into an existing building. An overlay repaints the lobby.

Jason came to this problem the hard way. Three years ago he was a software engineer on the iOS team at Twitch when the company was hit with an accessibility lawsuit. It was the first time he'd watched legal and engineering collide on the same tickets. What struck him wasn't the lawsuit — it was that some of the strongest engineers he knew had no idea how to fix the issues. For normal feature work, the gap between a junior and a staff engineer is obvious. Here, everyone was scrambling equally. The remediation took three to six months and still didn't cover every defect, on a custom-built web and mobile stack, at a company owned by Amazon with a thousand engineers.

Which points directly at why Shopify is where we went deep. Liquid, Hydrogen, and a standardized theme architecture mean the same defect patterns repeat across thousands of stores. We fixed sites by hand first, learned the patterns, and turned them into agents. A ten-person brand now gets the same remediation quality a nine-figure one does.

We're now working with 130+ brands across the US and Europe — Peak Design, Cuyana, Dime Beauty, Levain Bakery, and many others.

The side effect: SEO and GEO

A screen reader reads your site by parsing your code and speaking it aloud. So does Googlebot. So does an AI agent trying to summarize your product page for a shopper who asked ChatGPT for a recommendation.

They're all just machines reading markup.

Which means every fix that makes your site legible to an assistive device makes it more legible to a crawler. Better alt text, cleaner heading hierarchy, and descriptive link text are accessibility remediations and structured-content improvements. Our customers consistently see SEO and GEO lift as a byproduct of compliance work. That wasn't the pitch when we started. It's become one of the most reliable outcomes we deliver.

What actually happens when you get a letter

Two scenarios.

You're not a customer yet, and the letter is already in hand. We've sprinted a full remediation in seven days, handed the brand documented evidence of a fixed site, and watched them take it to opposing counsel. We've seen settlements land at $1,000–$2,000 instead of $12,000–$13,000 on that basis.

Michael's framing: outrunning trolls is like outrunning a bear. You don't need to be the fastest. You just can't be the slowest. The firms filing these letters are optimizing for the path of least resistance, and every week you spend visibly un-fixable is a week you're the easy target.

You're already a customer. Then our posture is to push back, because we know the site is compliant and we have months of evidence proving it. That means:

• A point-by-point rebuttal of every claim in the letter. Roughly 90% of what we review is templated and non-specific — boilerplate that doesn't survive contact with an actual audit.
• Legal referrals to counsel who specialize in these cases and price accordingly, versus you cold-searching for a specialist at full freight.
• Investigative work. Do the IP logs show the claimant actually visited the site on the date alleged? Is the filing attorney's own website accessible? These questions have a way of shortening conversations.

The outcome so far: fewer than 5% of our active customers have received a demand letter. For context, there were roughly 1,000 widget-related lawsuits across about 5,000 companies over the last 12 months — a 20% incidence rate for brands relying on overlays alone.

The part that isn't about lawsuits

People with disabilities, together with their families and extended families, represent trillions of dollars in spending power. Shopping decisions travel through households — if one store works for someone and another doesn't, the whole family shops at the one that works.

We see it in our own data. More accessible stores in our customer base tend to be more profitable and generate more revenue. The compliance case gets founders in the door. The commercial case is why they stay.

Where to start, today, for free

If you want a quick read on where your store actually stands, three free tools will give you a directional answer in minutes:

• axe-core
• Google Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools)
• WAVE

Shopify tries to ship accessible defaults out of the box. But every theme tweak, every app install, every custom section is an opportunity to break something — and it happens everywhere. It happened at Twitch, with a thousand engineers and Amazon's balance sheet behind them. It's a natural consequence of shipping.

Our mission is a more accessible internet, and that doesn't always route through our revenue line. Run the free scanners. Fix what you find. If the gap is bigger than your team can close, talk to us at testparty.ai.

The short version

1. Compliance doesn't stop the letter. Anyone can file for any reason. What compliance changes is what happens next.
2. The settlement math is engineered. $10K–12K to settle versus $15K–25K to prove you're right is not an accident.
3. Overlays are a targeting signal, not a shield. Twelve widget vendors named in a single demand letter should end the debate.
4. Source-code fixes compound. The same work that serves a screen reader serves Google and every AI agent parsing your catalog.
5. Documented evidence is leverage. It's the difference between a $12,000 settlement and a $1,000 one — or no settlement at all.
6. Start free. axe-core, Lighthouse, WAVE. Fifteen minutes to know where you stand.

This post reflects our experience working with 130+ ecommerce brands on accessibility remediation. We are not attorneys and nothing here is legal advice. If you've received a demand letter, talk to qualified counsel — and if you'd like a referral, reach out.

🎧 Hear the full conversation on Honest Ecommerce — "ADA Demand Letters: How TestParty Defends Shopify Brands," with host Chase Clymer.