In January we ran a small experiment. Twenty cold emails to local Atlanta businesses, offering nothing but a free fifteen-minute accessibility audit of their homepage. No pitch deck attached. No "and here's what we'd charge to fix it." Just: we'll record a screen-share, walk through what we find, send you the recording, and that's it.
Three said yes. Two of them became paid clients inside six weeks. The third referred their attorney's office, which became a third client.
We've since sent four hundred of those emails. The numbers held up.
Why this works right now
ADA Title III web accessibility lawsuits hit another record year in 2025 — over 4,600 federal cases filed, with another sizeable chunk in state courts in New York and California. The plaintiffs' bar has industrialized this. A site gets scanned by an automated tool, a complaint gets filed, the small business owner gets a letter demanding $20K to make it go away. We've now had five clients walk in the door with demand letters in hand.
Every small business owner we talk to has either gotten one of those letters, knows someone who has, or has a vague dread about it. That dread is what makes the free audit work. We're not selling a thing. We're naming a fear they already had.
The outreach script we use
Short version, paraphrased:
Hi [name] — I run a small Atlanta web studio. ADA accessibility lawsuits against small businesses have spiked again this year (Georgia is in the top ten for filings). I'd like to offer you a free fifteen-minute audit of your homepage — I'll record my screen, show you what I find, and send you the video. No pitch attached. If you want to know what your exposure looks like, reply with a good time this week.
Two things matter in that email. The local hook — we mention Atlanta and Georgia, because abstract risk is easy to ignore and local risk isn't. And the explicit "no pitch attached." We mean it. The recording we send back includes nothing about engaging us. If they want to talk about fixes, they ask.
About a third do.
What we actually check in fifteen minutes
Fifteen minutes isn't long enough for a real WCAG audit. It's long enough for the things that show up in 90% of demand letters. We work from a checklist we've refined since last summer:
- Images and alt text. Open the homepage, run axe DevTools, look for the screaming red. Decorative images marked decorative? Informative images with actual descriptions? Logos with the company name in alt? Most small-business sites fail at least one of these.
- Color contrast. WCAG 2.2 wants 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and UI components. We use the Chrome DevTools contrast picker. Light gray on white is the most common kill.
- Keyboard navigation. We unplug the mouse — literally — and tab through the page. Can we reach the menu? Submit the contact form? See where focus is? About half the sites we audit have invisible focus rings or focus traps in a modal.
- Form labels. Every input needs a programmatically associated label. Placeholder text doesn't count. We open the form in a screen reader (we use NVDA on a second machine) and listen.
- Heading structure. Quick check with the headingsMap extension. H1, then H2s, then H3s. No skipping levels. No multiple H1s. No styling-driven hierarchy that doesn't match the DOM.
- Skip links and landmarks. Five seconds. Tab once. Is there a "skip to content" link? Is
<main>in the markup?
That covers most of what plaintiff law firms cite. We don't claim to find everything. We tell the client that explicitly: this is a screening, not a clean bill of health.
The conversion math
Our paid-client conversion rate from a cold contact form before this experiment was roughly 1.5%. From the free-audit funnel, it's running about 9% to a first paid engagement, with another ~5% who book the audit, don't engage us directly, but refer someone within a quarter.
That's a six-times improvement on the same outreach effort, with the bonus that the calls we get on are calls where the prospect already trusts us. We've spent thirty minutes on their actual site. We've found real problems. By the time we get on a call about fixes, the conversation isn't "convince me you're competent." It's "what's the smallest engagement that gets me out of the riskiest stuff first?"
One pushback
A friend who runs a competing shop in Charlotte said this felt cynical: using fear of lawsuits as a sales hook. I think about that. Our answer is that the fear isn't manufactured. The lawsuits are real, the demand letters are real, and the fixes we recommend make sites better for users with disabilities regardless of whether the threat motivates the client to pay. If naming a real risk to a small business owner counts as cynical, the alternative is worse, because the alternative is they hear about it from a process server.
If you run a small agency and you're casting around for outreach that doesn't feel like spam, this is the closest we've come.