A Morrisburg side business turns a complaint into a fixed website before it escalates

The situation

The fix itself ended up costing a few thousand dollars in developer time — a manageable sum for a business this size. What loomed larger at the start was a deadline: the complaint gave the company thirty days to respond with a plan to fix the problem or explain why it would not, and by the time Rizki called our office, nineteen of those days were already gone, spent with a lawyer who had since become unavailable to finish the file. What was left to work with was, in plain terms, eleven days and a website nobody on the team fully understood.

Rizki drove long-haul routes for a living, and had started the online store a few years earlier with Dimitri, a pharmacy technician, as something to build on the side — a small retail business selling specialty outdoor and camping equipment, run mostly evenings and weekends, bringing in somewhere under a million dollars a year. Neither owner had a background in web development or in the compliance side of running a business; both had learned the retail and shipping side of things by doing it, and the website had largely run on autopilot since it was first built. A silent investor, a family friend who had put in early capital in exchange for a small ownership stake, had no role in day-to-day operations and was not involved when the complaint arrived, and neither owner wanted the situation escalating to the point where that investor had to be brought in to weigh in on a legal problem.

The complaint came from Thalia, a customer who used screen-reading software and had tried to complete an order on the company's website without success — product images had no descriptive text, the checkout form could not be navigated without a mouse, and several pages were structured in a way that made the site effectively unusable for her from start to finish. She had first emailed customer service, received no substantive response for weeks, and then sent a formal written complaint referencing accessibility obligations that apply to businesses operating in Ontario, along with a clear statement that she intended to pursue the matter further if nothing changed.

Rizki and Dimitri had hired a lawyer to respond, but that lawyer had left practice partway through, after drafting only a partial response and gathering none of the technical documentation the reply would actually need to be credible. What Rizki inherited was a half-written letter, a looming deadline, and very little clarity on what the company's website actually needed to change, or how much it would realistically cost to fix on a small company's budget.

The complication

The first complication was simply picking up a file mid-stream. Reviewing the previous lawyer's partial draft took longer than starting fresh would have, because it was not clear which parts reflected a considered legal position and which were placeholder language never finished, or worse, a position taken without confirming the underlying facts first. Rather than build on uncertain ground and risk repeating the same gap, the response effectively had to be rebuilt from the underlying facts, with only eleven days left before the deadline arrived.

The second complication was that nobody at the company, including Rizki and Dimitri, had a technical inventory of what was actually wrong with the site. The complaint described specific problems Thalia had encountered, but a business this size did not have in-house web development staff — the site had been built years earlier by a freelance developer who was no longer available or responsive to calls, and neither owner could say with confidence how the site was structured or what a proper fix would actually involve, technically or financially.

The third complication was scope. Accessibility obligations for a business of this size are real, but they are not identical to the more extensive requirements that apply to larger organizations, and an overcorrected response — promising a full technical overhaul the company could not realistically deliver on the original deadline — would have created a new problem: a written commitment the company then failed to meet, which tends to look worse to a regulator than an honest, achievable plan does. Getting the scope right meant understanding what the company was actually required to do, distinct from what would simply be good practice to have anyway, and being honest with Thalia and, if it came to that, with any regulator about a realistic timeline for the work.

The last complication was that a customer complaint like this one, left unresolved, does not stay contained to one customer. A written complaint referencing accessibility requirements can be escalated to a provincial oversight body if the company does not respond adequately, and a poorly handled response — or an unresolved one that dragged past the deadline a second time — was the difference between a single unhappy customer and a formal regulatory matter with its own separate timeline, cost, and administrative burden for a two-person operation already stretched thin.

What we did

1. Reviewed the previous lawyer's file in full before drafting anything new, to identify what could be salvaged and what needed to be discarded, since building on an unfinished response without checking it carefully risked repeating whatever gap had gone unaddressed the first time and losing more of the eleven remaining days establishing facts that should already have been settled well before the file ever changed hands.
2. Contacted Thalia directly, with the company's agreement, to confirm the specific problems she had encountered and request a short extension to respond properly, explaining plainly that the file had changed hands — this bought a few extra days and, just as importantly, signalled that the company was taking the complaint seriously rather than stalling for time or hoping she would simply stop pursuing it.
3. Retained an accessibility specialist to audit the website against recognized technical standards, producing a concrete, prioritized list of what needed to change rather than relying on general impressions of the problem, which gave the company something specific and genuinely achievable to commit to in writing instead of a vague promise to look into it that a regulator would have little reason to trust.
4. Distinguished required fixes from optional improvements in the audit results, working through the list item by item with Rizki and Dimitri, so the company's written plan promised only what it could realistically deliver on a defined timeline, avoiding the trap of an overpromised response that later failed to materialize and made the situation worse than an honest, narrower commitment would have.
5. Drafted a written remediation plan for Thalia and, if needed, any regulator, setting out specific fixes, a realistic completion timeline of a few months given the company's size and budget, and a named point of contact for any follow-up questions either of them might have, so nobody, including Rizki and Dimitri themselves, was left guessing later what had actually been promised.
6. Coordinated the actual website fixes with a developer retained for the project, checking progress against the plan at set intervals so the company's written commitments and its actual progress stayed aligned rather than drifting apart as the weeks went on, which would have been the kind of quiet slippage that turns a good-faith plan into a broken promise nobody noticed until it was too late to fix quietly.
7. Reviewed the completed fixes against the original audit before calling the work done, to confirm each priority item had actually been resolved and not just partially addressed, which mattered because a plan that looked finished on paper but was not finished in practice would have undermined everything already accomplished and left the company no better protected against a further complaint than it had been before any of the work started.
8. Kept Rizki and Dimitri informed at each stage with plain-language updates rather than legal correspondence alone, so both owners understood exactly what was being promised in their name and could speak to it confidently themselves if a customer or the silent investor ever asked, without needing to call the office first for an explanation every time the subject came up.
9. Sent Thalia a completion update once the priority fixes were finished and verified, closing the loop directly with her rather than waiting for her to escalate or follow up first, and inviting her to flag anything that still did not work as expected, which closed the file cleanly instead of leaving it to quietly go stale and resurface as a complaint months later.

The outcome

Thalia accepted the remediation plan and, later, the completion update, and confirmed in writing that she considered the matter resolved. No complaint was ever filed with a regulator, and the company avoided the separate cost, delay, and formal process that would have followed if the matter had escalated beyond a direct exchange with the customer who raised it.

The fix itself cost the company a modest sum in developer time, in the low thousands of dollars, spread over a few months rather than all at once, which kept it manageable for a business of this size and did not require drawing on the silent investor's capital or explaining the situation to them at all. The company also picked up an ongoing habit it did not have before: a basic accessibility check whenever the website changed, built directly into how Dimitri managed vendor updates going forward, so the same gap would not simply reopen the next time the site was redesigned.

What made the outcome a prevention story rather than a mitigation story was the timing. The company's response landed before Thalia had any reason to escalate, and before any regulator was ever involved, which meant the matter never generated a formal complaint file, a public record, or a separate compliance process running alongside the customer relationship. Rizki, reflecting on it afterward, noted that the most expensive part of the whole episode had been the nineteen days lost before the file changed hands — a reminder that a complaint with a deadline attached needs continuity of representation as much as it needs the right eventual answer, and that a half-finished response can be worse than no response at all if it leaves a business unsure what it actually promised.

Dimitri later said the audit turned out to be worth more than just resolving the complaint — it gave the two owners a plain-language picture of their own website that they had never had before, and a checklist they now used whenever a vendor proposed changes to the store.

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