Guide · website accessibility

Got an ADA website demand letter in Florida? What the fix involves

The letter goes to your lawyer. The website goes to someone who can test it and fix it, and the two can run side by side. The technical job is the same for almost every site: scan it, test it with a keyboard and a screen reader, fix the template first, then the pages, and keep a dated record of what was tested and how. The usual target is WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

Before you read on: I build and fix websites. I’m not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. Whether the ADA covers your site and how to answer the letter are questions for your attorney. This page covers the technical work, which I do for a living.

Why so many Florida businesses get one

961federal website accessibility suits in Florida, 2025

470the year before, in 2024

1,823federal ADA Title III suits of every kind in Florida, 2nd in the country

Federal court filings only, from Seyfarth Shaw’s ADA Title III tracking, February and March 2026. Nationally, 3,117 of the 8,667 federal Title III suits in 2025 were about websites.

Lawsuits are only the visible part. A demand letter isn’t filed with any court, so nobody counts them. What’s clear is that the sites behind them aren’t unusual. WebAIM’s 2026 scan of the top million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, about 56 errors a page on average.

What usually fails

WebAIM names six problems as the most common. Here’s how often each one turned up on the million home pages WebAIM tested in February 2026.

Problem	Share of home pages
Text that's too low in contrast	83.9%
Images with no text description	53.1%
Form fields with no label	51.0%
Links with no text	46.3%
Buttons with no text	30.6%
Page language not set	13.5%

Most of these are cheap to fix once they’re found. The expensive ones are forms, PDFs and anything a third party embeds in your site.

The technical side, step by step

1. Talk to your lawyer before you change anything
The letter is a legal matter, and how you answer it is your attorney's call. Ask whether to save a copy of the site as it stands today before any fixes go in. Then the technical work can start alongside the legal work, not instead of it.
2. Run the free scanners, and know their limits
WAVE, the free axe DevTools browser extension and the accessibility score in Google's Lighthouse will each list problems in a few minutes. None of them can tell you the site is accessible. WebAIM says so about WAVE, Deque says its free extension only does automated testing, and Lighthouse leaves its manual checks out of the score.
3. Test it the way people actually use it
Put the mouse away and work through every page and form with the keyboard alone. Then listen to it with a screen reader. NVDA is free on Windows and VoiceOver is built into every Mac. This is where forms that look fine turn out to be blank boxes.
4. Fix the template first
Most failures live in the theme: the header, the footer, the menu, a chat bubble. Fix them there once and they clear on every page. Then go page by page for images, links, PDFs and anything that moves.
5. Write down what you did, with dates
Keep a record of what was tested, on what date, with which tools, and what changed. Publish an accessibility statement too. The honest claim is that the site conforms to WCAG 2.1 AA as tested on a given date with a given method.
6. Keep it there
New images need descriptions, new videos need captions, and a theme or plugin update can undo a fix. Re-test after any big change.

What that looked like on one real site

In October 2026 I took a Miami-area law firm’s WordPress site from 4,499 failing elements to zero across all 45 pages, on desktop and phone. Nine in ten of the failures were one problem: the brand gold was too faint against white. Five of the eight kinds of failure lived in the header, footer and chat bubble, so fixing the template once cleared them everywhere.

The scanner missed the part that took the most care. Three intake questionnaires had about 225 fields whose labels weren’t connected, so a screen reader announced blank boxes. Only the keyboard and screen reader pass found that.

The full case study, failure by failure → or what the work costs →

Two things not to lean on

A widget. Accessibility overlays promise a fix from one line of code. The DOJ’s own guidance warns that an overlay, or a clean report from an automated tool, doesn’t by itself mean a site is accessible. In April 2025 the FTC finalized a $1 million order that bars accessiBe from claiming its automated products can make any website WCAG compliant.

A Florida remediation plan. You may read that Florida lets a business file a remediation plan that a court must consider later. That’s Florida Statutes 553.5141, and its text talks about facilities. The experts it names to prepare a plan are licensed architects, engineers, contractors and similar professionals. Whether it helps with a website is a question for your lawyer, not your web developer.

The legal backdrop, in plain terms

This is context, not advice. The Department of Justice has no regulation setting a web standard for private businesses. Its March 2022 guidance says businesses have flexibility in how they comply and calls WCAG helpful guidance.

For state and local governments it does have a rule, and that rule uses WCAG 2.1 AA. In April 2026 the DOJ moved its deadlines to April 26, 2027 for larger governments and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. It doesn’t cover private businesses, but it shows which standard the DOJ picked.

Florida sits in the Eleventh Circuit, whose 2021 ruling in Gil v. Winn-Dixie, that a website on its own isn’t a public accommodation, was vacated as moot that December. The court denied rehearing in March 2022. So the question hasn’t been settled here, which is one more reason the letter belongs with a lawyer.

Straight answers

I got an ADA website demand letter in Florida. What do I do first?

Call a lawyer. How to answer the letter is a legal question, and nothing on this page is legal advice. On the technical side, ask your lawyer whether to save a copy of the site before anything changes, then get a real test done: automated scans plus keyboard and screen reader checks.

Which standard should the fixed site meet?

WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the usual target. The Department of Justice has no regulation setting a web standard for private businesses, but its 2022 guidance calls WCAG helpful, and its rule for state and local governments uses WCAG 2.1 AA.

Can I file a Florida remediation plan for my website?

Ask your lawyer. Florida Statutes 553.5141 talks about facilities, and the experts it names to prepare a plan are licensed architects, engineers, contractors and similar professionals. A web developer isn't on that list.

Will an accessibility widget make the letter go away?

Don't count on it. The DOJ's guidance warns that overlays and a clean automated report don't by themselves make a site accessible, and the FTC's 2025 order bars accessiBe from claiming its automated products can make any website WCAG compliant.

I’m not a lawyer, and this page isn’t legal advice.

Sources

All checked on October 31, 2026.

Need the technical half handled?

Send me the site address and tell me what you’re dealing with. I’ll test it the way the steps above describe, fix it, and hand you a dated record your lawyer can use.

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