Episode Transcript
Monica Pitts 0:00
Just in the last year, I have to say there has been a huge growth in the level of awareness about ADA website compliance. We have more and more clients asking questions about it and making it a priority, both at the very beginning of the build process, or in the middle, or at the end, like just retrofitting their websites to be ADA compliant, and I feel like while I would love to have a small pat on the back for doing our due diligence and really keeping everybody educated about this opportunity to have ADA compliant websites that are easier for everyone to use, I really can't take that much of the credit. I feel like this spotlight moment is really courtesy of the Title II deadlines, and it's kind of a double-edged sword. I mean, there are two very different crowds showing up with this knowledge. One, like our clients, genuinely want to build something that everyone can use, and then the other just smells money, and it's kind of gross. See, policing ADA website compliance is different than governing traffic laws. The Department of Justice, we also call that the DOJ, is not going to come knocking on your door on their own accord. There is no federal task force building a file on your website. This isn't that kind of law. ADA website compliance is a civil matter, just like any type of ADA compliance. It's the same as a physical accessibility complaint against a brick and mortar store, and so people can take action in two ways. The first way is a person can file a complaint with the DOJ, and then the DOJ can pursue it, which usually results in a request for you to fix the problem. And then the second, more common way for people to take action is a private individual, often working with a firm that files these types of complaints at scale, would file a complaint directly against your business. Now, none of that means that you just get to wait and see if somebody files a complaint against you. Businesses are already required to comply. Everyone is, regardless of whether you're Title II or Title III. Like a complaint doesn't create the obligation; it just triggers the enforcement of something that you're already obligated to do. So, Title II entities got actual deadlines just a like a year or so ago because they're government entities and someone put a date on a calendar for them. And Title III businesses they never got one, but that doesn't mean that they don't have to follow the rules, and all of that sounds really pretty straightforward, right? And it is, but that doesn't mean the laws are being enforced as anticipated. It's kind of a hot mess. So, in this episode, I'm going to explain to you what that hot mess is, what you can do to protect yourself in a business, and what some states are doing, like our own state of Missouri, to make sure that businesses have the right to remediate their websites and fix things in good faith without getting stuck with a mountain of legal fines. All right, let's get to business. You're on a mission, and you just need more people to know about it. And whether you're brand new to marketing or a seasoned pro, we are all looking for answers to make marketing decisions with purpose. I'm Monica Pitts, a techy, crafty business owner, mom, and aerial dancer who solves communication challenges through technology. This podcast is all about digging in and going digital. I'll share my marketing know-how and business experience from almost 20 years of misadventures. I'll be your backup dancer, so you can stop doubting and get moving towards marketing with purpose. I just want to give a quick thank you before we get started, to our featured resource sponsor, what to put on your website. This is a page by page website content checklist, and it's one of MayeCreate's most popular free resources. It has more than 7000 downloads. It outlines suggestions of what content to put on each page of your website in an easy to understand checklist format, and my nonprofit friends, we've got a special one for you. Just check the nonprofit box, and it will deliver a nonprofit specific checklist right to your inbox. So you can download it for free at resources. Mayecreate.com.
Monica Pitts 4:36
That's m-a-ye-c-r-e-a-t-e.com, or you can just click on the resources tab at the top, or you can click on the link in the show notes. Okay, so first let's talk about how the law is intended to work, and then we can talk about what Missouri is doing to try to make it work that way. Then we'll close out with what you can do to protect yourself. Okay, so. The law is intended to work like this: If a complaint is filed with the DOJ and they decide to pursue the complaint against your business, you get a notice and a grace period to fix the problem before fines or anything else happens. But before the new act in Missouri went into effect, if a private individual sued you instead, which is really nearly how every one of these cases actually plays out, you got none of that. No pause, no chance to remediate first, just straight into the expensive, disruptive legal proceedings. Even if you would have happily fixed the issue the moment you knew about it, and that just doesn't make sense, right? Because the entire point of the accessibility law is supposed to be that everyone can use your website. That's the point of it. It was never supposed to be about who could turn a missing alt tag into a fast settlement, right? So Missouri's new law is closing that gap. It's called Missouri's Act Against Abusive Website or Web Content Access, and it doesn't let anyone off the hook for having an inaccessible site. It just gives a business sued by a private individual the same shot at doing the right thing that they would already get if the DOJ came knocking instead. So you fix it in good faith within 90 days, and then the lawsuit doesn't get to proceed. The law keeps things consistent regardless of who files the case, and it stops attorneys from profiting off catching violations instead of fixing them. And it lets the business that would willingly comply and maybe just didn't know what to do do exactly that. Okay, so before I dig into the details of the landscape of how this all became a necessity, I feel like I need to take a slight step backwards and just explain the basics of ADA compliance for websites, super super quick. So ADA stands for Americans with Disabilities Act, and part of that act requires electronic information and technology. Your website is included in that to be accessible to people with disabilities. And those tech mandates are not new; they've been around since 1998. Yes, a long time. And ADA compliance-it's not rocket science, but it's also not a five-minute fix either. It's less about difficulty and more about details. There are a lot of small things that add up, like how images are tagged, or how text scales, or how something can be read out loud, or if it can be read out loud in a screen reader. And it's really easy to miss half of them if you don't know what you're looking for. That's where it gets tedious, but don't mistake tedious for unimportant. An accessible website is easier to use for everyone, and it even ranks better in both traditional and AI search. So, in short, an ADA compliant website is not a yucky mandate that you have to comply to. It's an all around win. Now, if you need to know more in depth about ADA compliance, we have other episodes that will take you all the way down that rabbit hole. And if you really need more, you just need to visit w3 dot org. W3 dot org. It gives you an exhaustive list of all the things, some just some light reading, you know, For you, okay. So, who actually has to comply? Well, like anyone who has a website needs to comply. That's that's the long and the short of it. But there are deadlines for some entities and not for others. If you're a government entity, that means you're part of Title II, and your deadline, if you serve 50,000 or more people, was april 24, 2026. Now, if you serve fewer than 50,000 people, or you're in a special district government, then you have to comply by april 26, 2027. Now, if you're a business open to the public, which that makes you Title Three, then you've always had to comply.
Monica Pitts 9:03
There's no new deadline because there was never supposed to be a grace period in the first place. Like the expectation has not changed. What has changed is how aggressively it's being enforced, not by the Department of Justice, but by private individuals. So more than 5000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025. That's a huge jump from the year before, and the overwhelming majority of targets were e-commerce stores, restaurants, and retail businesses. And Missouri businesses-they have not been spared. Roughly 100 suits were filed against Missouri companies in just the first half of 2025 alone, with a small handful of firms being responsible for the bulk of them. And that's where it gets so gross because most of these don't start with someone actually trying to use your website and not being able to get the information that they need out of it. The formula is usually a law firm, a plaintiff, and an automated scanner that flags missing alt text or like a low contrast button. Nobody has to prove that they were personally harmed, and there's no small business exemption. And the good news is that Missouri actually decided to do something about it. They passed a law this year squarely aimed at the shakedown version of this industry, and they titled it the Act Against Abusive Website or Website Content Access Litigation. Super easy to remember, right? And you might see it referenced underneath a couple of different bill numbers depending upon when an article was written, since it absorbed a couple of companion bills on its way through the legislature, but it landed as SB 907 and was signed by the governor and takes effect august 28, 2026. So what this law does is it gives this law does three big things. The first thing is that it gives businesses a 90-day period after receiving notice of a violation to take substantial good faith steps towards fixing it before a lawsuit can proceed, and if a plaintiff pushes forward anyway and loses, then they can be on the hook for the defendant's legal fees plus penalties up to three times that amount, and the third thing it does is the act allows the Missouri Attorney General to investigate and pursue action against attorneys who make a habit of filing abusive claims. One legal group called it the most aggressive anti-abusive legislation statute passed by any state so far, and quite frankly, at mayecreate. We're really proud that our state took action, and we're even prouder that the effort grew out of our very own Camdenton area, sponsored by Representative Jeff Vernetti. Go Jeff! Okay, so and Missouri is even pushing for a federal version now. Congressman Sam Graves, who represents North Missouri, has introduced companion legislation that would bring a similar 180-day cure period nationwide. Now it hasn't passed, but it does tell you which direction that this is heading. What's tricky is that the Missouri State Protection only covers you in Missouri. If you do business outside of Missouri, as of September 2026, exactly two states have a cure period on the books. There's Missouri and there's Utah. Georgia's close, but it's not there yet. So all the other states, even though they have so many lawsuits happening, they just haven't taken any movement to allow businesses the opportunity to remediate their sites now. As these lawsuit numbers are rising, businesses are nervous. They don't want to deal with this. This really sucks, right? So they're looking for a quick and easy way to avoid it, to make their existing website ADA compliant. But there isn't an easy button for ADA compliance. It's like training for a marathon. You can't just download a couch to marathon app. You have to physically take every step along the way to get there. But plugins like Accessibe and Userway, those are two big names. They are touting themselves as like a one-size-fits-all easy button to make your website ADA compliant, but they just sit on top of your website as a layer of JavaScript. They are not an easy button. They don't fix your actual code, your embedded charts, your tables, your graphics, your alt tags. I mean, like I am actually going to stop now before I get ugly with all the things they don't fix. Let's just say that they leave some very real gaps, and the opportunistic lawsuit filing folks know exactly what those gaps are.
Monica Pitts 13:47
One in four businesses that get sued already paid for an overlay plugin. So, like more than 22% of all web accessibility lawsuits in the first half of 2025 targeted sites that already had one of these widgets inside. Assess B alone showed up in over 250 lawsuits in 2024, and the FTC fined the company a million dollars for false advertising after it turned out that its compliance claims were not holding up, and the National Federation for the Blind has formally opposed the tools, calling their promises misleading. So what stinks is that you think you're putting in place something that makes your website ADA compliant, but now the courts have started treating these widgets on your site, these plugins, as evidence that you knew that there was a problem, not evidence that you actually tried to fix it. This is not good. You actually have to do it the right way, or else it does not hold up. Just it gets expensive. Like if you get a demand letter, which happens well before any lawsuit is filed, small business. Typically, see settlement asks someplace between 5020 $5,000, and they're often bundled with a promise to fix things within 90 to 180 days. So they're saying you have to pay this money and you have to fix it, and then you have to pay somebody to fix it for you. And it's not a big company problem. Roughly 77% of these cases target businesses under $25 million in revenue. A Florida flower shop owner got a demand letter completely out of nowhere and ended up having to pay over $7,000 for an issue on her website that she had no idea existed. And that's not what this law is built for. If it escalates into an actual lawsuit, then the settlements run between 30,000 to $150,000 or more, plus there's separate defense legal fees on top of that. Often another 25,000 to $100,000, and the settlement itself isn't actually the end of it because you still had to fix the website within 90 to 180 days, and have ongoing monitoring for one to three years, and a public accessibility statement. So, if you compare that to fixing it now, a proper accessibility audit could run you someplace between 2500. I mean, we that's usually what we're at, but there are firms that charge up to $10,000 for them. And if you update your site really often or have multiple administrators working on it, then ongoing monitoring and those tools they will add additional monthly maintenance costs. But that's part of a documented proactive effort. And if you have a documented proactive effort and you can show it, then it is cutting your settlement demands generally between 40 to 60% So even if a complaint does happen, it shows good faith instead of neglect. Basically, what I'm saying is that even the cheapest possible demand letter settlement costs probably more than a full audit would have, so you're gonna pay for this one way or the other. So at this point, the only real choice is whether you pay to fix the problem up front or pay to make a lawsuit go away and then still have to pay to fix it later. But having said all this, like you don't need to panic. As I just said, you can take the steps to make your site compliant just one step at a time. And if you're doing that, then you are documenting proactive activity, which will likely, even if you're not 100% compliant, really lower the settlement costs if somebody does decide to be a jerk and file a complaint against you, and if you live in the state of Missouri-not live, but if you operate your business in the state of Missouri-then if you get a demand letter, then you'll have 90 days to remediate. Thank you, Missouri. But if you are questioning where your current site stands. Seriously, you can reach out, and we'll tell you the truth. Even the parts you don't want to hear. If you don't want to talk to us, then download Wave. It's a free Chrome app. Go to your website, click it. It'll tell you where things aren't right. It'll even give you a score, and you can also use Google Lighthouse, and it will give you an ADA score, and it will give you items that you can correct on each page.
Monica Pitts 18:30
Now, neither one of these two things fix everything; they really don't. But they will give you a general overview of what's going on, and then you need a human who knows all the rules and a much smarter software to dig in and audit your site completely. Now, if you need links to those tools or any of the other things that we mentioned in this episode, hop back over to Mayecreate.com. That's m-a-y-e-c-r-e-a-t-e.com, or you can look in the show notes. There's a link over to in the show notes. We have a fully formatted blog post with all the links, so if you need it for reference, you know exactly where to find it over on Maycreate.com. And thank you so much for hanging out with us to tackle this topic today. Honestly, I know it feels a little gloom and doom, but at MayeCreate, we're excited that things are moving forward, and it really feels like this is what needed to happen. It's protecting businesses and it's making the law do what it was originally meant to do, which is encourage people to have accessible websites that everyone can use. And if you liked this episode, consider subscribing so that way you don't miss our next episode, where I'm going to go back big picture and we're going to talk more about how you can prep your online presence with search changing and AI and the big picture, what that means, and how to make sure that you. Found online. So, with that, friends, thank you again, and until next time, go forth and market with purpose.
