The letter arrives on law-firm stationery. It says your website violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, cites a federal case or two, lists defects in language you half-understand, and offers to settle for a number with four zeroes. Thousands of Texas small businesses have received a version of it. This post explains what's real about ADA website compliance, what the letters actually are, and the work that makes your business a poor target — which happens to be the same work that makes your website better.

What the law actually says

Title III of the ADA requires "places of public accommodation" to be accessible to people with disabilities. The statute predates the web, and Congress never amended it to mention websites — so the question of whether it covers them was answered by courts, mostly yes, with circuits differing on details. The Department of Justice has repeatedly affirmed it views websites of public accommodations as covered, and in 2024 finalized a rule requiring state and local government sites to meet a specific technical standard: WCAG 2.1 AA. For private businesses there's still no codified technical standard — which sounds like relief and is actually the problem, because ambiguity is what demand-letter economics feed on.

What WCAG is

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard everyone measures against — courts, the DOJ, settlement agreements, and every serious developer. They come in levels; Level AA is the operative bar, covering things like: text contrast strong enough to read, every function workable by keyboard, images carrying text alternatives, forms with labels, video with captions, and motion that stops on request. The current version is WCAG 2.2. None of it is exotic; it's craftsmanship with a checklist. (The first five fixes post walks the biggest items.)

What the demand letters are

A cottage industry. Law firms run automated scanners across thousands of small-business sites, flag failures, and mail settlement demands — typically $5,000–$25,000 — priced deliberately below the cost of mounting a defense. Restaurants, dental offices, shops, and contractors are favorite targets because they're public accommodations with money and without counsel. Texas, with its business density, sees steady volume.

Two things are simultaneously true and worth holding together: some plaintiffs are opportunistic, and the defects the scanners find are usually real. The business that treats this purely as a shakedown misses the point that matters most for prevention: the letters overwhelmingly go to sites with zero accessibility effort — no alt text anywhere, unlabeled forms, no accessibility statement, contrast failures on every page. Scanners sort the internet by negligence, and the bottom of the sort gets the mail.

Why the economics favor doing the work early

Building accessibility into a site from day one adds almost nothing to the cost — it's how the site should be assembled anyway. Retrofitting a finished site runs real money. A settlement runs more, plus the retrofit you'll owe anyway, plus the remediation deadline in the agreement. One column compounds in your favor, the other against. That asymmetry — not fear — is the honest sales pitch for accessibility, and it's why every Spring build ships WCAG 2.2 AA verified at no tier and no upcharge.

What actually protects you

Real conformance work against WCAG 2.2 AA — verified with testing, not vibes. Automated scans catch maybe a third of issues; the rest need a human with a keyboard and a screen reader.
An accessibility statement page saying what standard you target, what you've done, and how to reach you with a barrier. It signals effort to users, scanners, and anyone's lawyer.
A feedback channel that works — an email that's answered, fixes that happen. Several courts weigh whether a business responds to barriers when raised.
Ongoing checks, because sites drift: every menu PDF upload and plugin update can introduce failures. Quarterly re-verification (it's in our Care Plan) keeps the floor from rotting.
Skepticism toward overlay widgets — the "one line of JavaScript makes you compliant" products. They've been named in hundreds of lawsuits themselves and are widely criticized by actual users with disabilities. There is no plugin absolution; there's only the work.

If the letter has already arrived

Don't ignore it, don't panic-pay it, and don't email the plaintiff yourself. Talk to a lawyer with ADA digital experience — many letters settle far below the ask, and remediation is negotiable. Then do the remediation for real, because the second letter after a signed settlement is a much worse document. None of this is legal advice; it's triage logistics from people who build the fixes.

Accessibility isn't a tax the law invented. A third of a million Houstonians have a disability — the work is called "reaching customers," and the legal shield is the byproduct.

Want to know where your site stands? We'll run the look and tell you plainly what a scanner would flag — ask for the accessibility read. If you're building new, it's already included; that's the point of it being a baseline.

The five failures scanners flag first

Demand-letter exhibits repeat with numbing consistency: images without alt text (the scanner's easiest catch), form fields without labels (placeholders don't count), text contrast below 4.5:1 (gray-on-white minimalism, mostly), missing page language declarations, and controls a keyboard can't reach — menus that only open on hover, carousels with no buttons. None requires rebuilding a site to fix; all require someone actually doing it. If you fix only the top five, you've exited the bottom of the sort where the letters concentrate.

What verification actually looks like

"We care about accessibility" is a sentence; verification is a procedure. Ours, published because the standard should be inspectable: automated checks plus a human pass at three screen widths in both color themes — every control operated by keyboard alone, focus visible everywhere, zoom to 200% without breakage, reduced-motion honored, contrast measured (not eyeballed) on every text/background pair. The result is written down, and on Care Plan sites, re-run quarterly — because the menu PDF someone uploads in June can fail what passed in March.

Texas specifics worth knowing

Most website ADA suits land in federal court, but Texas plaintiffs also use state accommodation law, and Texas's business volume keeps the demand-letter pipeline fed in both directions. Local government entities in Texas are separately on the clock: the DOJ's 2024 rule gives them hard WCAG deadlines, which is steadily normalizing "WCAG AA" as the expected floor in every contract that touches the public — including, increasingly, vendor and franchise agreements private businesses sign. The standard is arriving through paperwork even where the statute stays vague. Being early costs little; being named costs plenty.

Watch on YouTube: Ownership — ADA website compliance explainedCurated search — opens the best current videos on this topic

Written by Rizwan Prasla, Spring Web Designer — the Houston studio behind 100 demo builds with zero repeats. When you’re ready: start a project or get your number in ten seconds.

ADA Website Compliance in Texas: What Owners Must Know in 2026.