Accessibility
The letter nobody expects to get.
A small business owner opened this in August. It gives them fourteen days to respond before a lawsuit is filed. The three problems it names take an afternoon to fix if the site was built properly, and are expensive to retrofit if it was not.
What these letters are
A pre-litigation demand letter is sent by a law firm on behalf of a person with a disability who could not use your website. It arrives by mail, names specific barriers, and sets a date. Miss the date and the next document is a complaint.
They are not rare and they are not aimed only at large companies. Small local businesses receive them constantly, because the barriers are easy to find from anywhere. Nobody has to walk through your door to notice that your menu does not work with a keyboard.
In California a website claim can also be brought under the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which carries statutory damages per violation. That is what turns a technical problem into a financial one.
Fixing the site afterward may not end it. Statutory damages of this kind generally attach to the moment someone encountered the barrier, not to the state of the site today, so remediation can stop the ongoing problem without undoing the one already on the record. That is the argument for doing the work before a letter arrives, and here is what that looks like.
We build websites; we are not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice. If you have received a letter, talk to an attorney.
Read the actual letter
Published with the recipient’s permission. Their name, the claimant’s name, and the website address are blacked out. Everything else is exactly as it arrived.
See the full letter
Page one, plus a link to all three pages. It takes about two minutes to read and it is the clearest picture of what this looks like in practice.
The three things it actually complains about
Read them in plain English and none of this is exotic. These are ordinary build decisions that a template or a page builder gets wrong by default.
“The main navigation menu in the website header is not keyboard accessible.”
You can only open the menu with a mouse. Anyone navigating by keyboard cannot reach the pages inside it.
“The majority of interactive content lacks a focus Indicator.”
Nothing visibly highlights where you are as you tab through the page, so a keyboard user is moving blind.
“Lack of a skip to content link above the header.”
Every visit starts by tabbing through the whole menu again before reaching the actual page content.
Every site we build ships with a working skip link, visible focus on every interactive element, and a menu that opens from the keyboard. Not as an upgrade. As the starting point.
Seven things it demands
Note that only one of these is the actual fix. The other six are process, policy, and proof. That is the part people underestimate.
- Hire a qualified accessibility consultant for a full audit, automated and manual
- Build and carry out a remediation plan targeting WCAG Level AA
- Fix the identified barriers within a reasonable time
- Adopt and publish an accessibility policy
- Set up procedures for ongoing testing and quality assurance
- Train the people who design, build, and update the site
- Name someone responsible for accessibility on an ongoing basis
Cheaper to build right than to fix under a deadline
Retrofitting accessibility into a theme you do not control means fighting someone else’s markup, and you are doing it on a lawyer’s timetable while also paying the lawyer. Building it in from the start costs nothing extra, because it is mostly just doing the job properly.
Every site we build targets WCAG 2.1 AA, ships with an accessibility statement, and gets re-checked periodically with the findings sent to you. That is included in the monthly rate rather than sold as a rescue package.
What an accessibility audit actually checks, and what the scores mean
Next step
Worried about your own site?
Send us your web address and we will tell you, plainly, whether the three barriers in this letter exist on your site. No cost, and no call unless you want one. Or call 415.350.3663.