What should an ADA demand letter response timeline look like for a Shopify brand?
A demand letter response should run on a written timeline: acknowledge within days without admitting liability, investigate each claim yourself within two weeks, remediate the real findings in priority order, and assemble the evidence package before you respond substantively. Speed matters, but only after accuracy. Promising a fix you have not verified is worse than saying nothing.
Days 1 to 3: acknowledge and preserve
The first job is to stop the clock from running silently. Acknowledge receipt through counsel, confirm you take accessibility seriously, and say you are reviewing the claims. Do not admit the claims are accurate, do not promise specific fixes, and do not argue. The acknowledgment is procedural, not substantive.
Preserve everything at the same time. Freeze the current site state: save the theme version, the app list, recent deploys, and the accessibility evidence you already have. If your monitoring has historical scans, export them now. Evidence that exists today may not exist in two weeks if the team starts changing things.
Days 4 to 14: investigate every claim yourself
Test each claim in the letter independently. Demand letters often include findings from automated scans, and automated findings need human verification: reproduce each one, determine whether it is real, and note which template or component it affects. Some claims will be stale, some will be wrong, and some will be real.
Scope the findings beyond the letter's examples. A letter that cites three pages almost always describes patterns that affect thirty. Finding the full scope yourself, before the other side does, is the difference between a remediation plan and a surprise. Document the investigation the way you would want it to read later: dated, specific, honest.
Weeks 2 to 4: remediate in priority order
Fix the real findings in the order that matters: revenue-path barriers first, then template-wide issues, then the long tail. The goal of this phase is not perfection; it is demonstrable, good-faith progress on the actual barriers a user would hit.
Keep the remediation log detailed: what was found, what was changed, when it shipped, and how it was verified. Screenshots before and after, scan exports, and test notes all belong in the log. This log is the core of your eventual response, and it is far more persuasive when it was written during the work rather than reconstructed afterward.
Weeks 4 to 8: assemble the evidence package
Before responding substantively, assemble the package: the investigation record, the remediation log, the current scan results, and the forward-looking plan for what remains. The plan matters as much as the fixes. A brand that fixed eight issues and has a dated schedule for the next twelve reads very differently from a brand that fixed eight issues and stopped.
Have counsel review the package before it goes anywhere. The technical team writes the facts; counsel decides the framing. Keep those roles separate so the engineering log stays a clean factual record.
What not to do
Do not ignore the letter. Silence does not make claims expire; it makes the next letter more aggressive. Do not fix only the cited examples while leaving the same pattern live on forty other pages. And do not let anyone on the team post about the situation publicly.
Do not promise what you have not verified. A promise to be fully compliant by a date you chose under pressure becomes the standard you are measured against. Commit to the process and the schedule you can actually keep, and let the evidence package do the persuading.
After the response: keep the practice running
The worst outcome is treating the demand letter as a one-time project. The monitoring, the evidence log, and the remediation cadence that you built during the response should keep running afterward. Most repeat letters target brands that fixed the cited issues and then let everything regress.
Schedule the next full audit before you close the file. A brand with a living accessibility practice is a harder target and, more importantly, a better store. The timeline that started with a demand letter should end with a program.