Accessibility
Your website can get you sued. Most owners find out by mail.
On August 21, a law firm in Encino mailed a small business a three-page letter. It named the specific barriers on their website, gave them fourteen days to fix it, and said the next document would be a lawsuit.
What actually happens
It named three failures: the menu would not open without a mouse, there was no way to tell where you were as you tabbed through the page, and there was no way to skip past the header to the content. The owner did all seven things the letter asked for and notified the attorney. The attorney's reply said the fixes do not matter, because the damages were already owed. That is the part worth understanding before it is your turn.
The letter arrives by mail from a law firm, on behalf of a named person who says they could not use your website. It cites the Americans with Disabilities Act, and in California the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Disabled Persons Act. Nobody has to walk through your door. Your menu is testable from anywhere.
It also orders you to preserve your records: website logs, accessibility testing records, development records, and your contracts with website vendors. Read that twice. If you have no testing records, the absence of them is now part of the file.
And doing everything it asks is not a settlement. The letter reserves all rights and says it should not be read as a complete statement of the claim. There is no offer on the table to accept.
What it costs
In California these claims are generally brought under the Unruh Civil Rights Act, where statutory damages can start at $4,000 per violation under Civil Code section 52(a), and the plaintiff’s legal fees can shift to the defendant. Add to the bill your own attorney, and emergency remediation done on someone else’s deadline rather than your own.
Why after is too late
Most people assume that if they fix the site, the problem goes away. It may not work that way. Statutory damages of this kind generally attach to the moment someone encountered the barrier, not to the state of your website today. Remediating afterward stops the ongoing problem. It may not undo the one already on the record.
That is the whole argument for doing this now, while it is cheap and nobody is holding a deadline over you.
We build websites. We are not lawyers, nothing here is legal advice, and none of it is a prediction about any particular case. If you have received a letter, talk to an attorney.
Six parts paper, one part code
This demand letter asked for seven things. One of them is fixing the website. The other six are policy, process, proof, training, and a named owner. Those are the parts almost nobody has, and after the fact may be too late.
The checklist, in order
The order is real. You cannot date a fix you have not made, and a testing schedule owned by nobody probably won't survive scrutiny.
Run the automated scan. Then stop trusting it.
Scanners are good at contrast ratios and missing labels. They are close to useless on the two things this letter cited: whether the page works from a keyboard, and whether focus is visible. A green score is a starting point, not a defense.
Get a real audit. Keyboard and screen reader, page by page.
Someone puts the mouse down and tabs through every page, then listens to it. This is where the barriers that show up in letters actually live.
Fix what it finds. Date every change.
The fix matters. The dated record of the fix matters as much, and it is the thing people skip.
Publish an accessibility statement with a real way to reach you.
On your site, findable, with an email or phone a person actually answers. It gives someone a route that is not a lawyer.
Put re-testing on the calendar.
Accessibility regresses. Every new page, photo, and plugin can break it. Re-test once a year at minimum, and also after any redesign.
Name who owns it.
One person, in writing. Otherwise it belongs to nobody and nothing will get done.
Keep the file.
Audit reports, the remediation log, your vendor contract, test dates. If a letter ever comes, that is what you hand your attorney on day one instead of starting from nothing. It is also what the letter orders you to preserve.
The two that go quiet
Forward this page to whoever runs your website and ask for two things: your published accessibility statement, and the schedule for re-testing it. Most web people run the scan, see a decent score, and consider the job done. That is usually where the thread ends.
Call it what it is
There is a business model here, and in our opinion it has little to do with accessibility.
A letter arrives saying the client would prefer to resolve this cooperatively. You fix every barrier it names. You do all the things it asks for. Then you learn the fixes were never the point, because the damages are claimed for the day someone loaded your page.
We think firms that work this way are vultures. Worse than vultures. A vulture at least waits for something to die. They are feeding on people who are still working, still hiring, still treating patients, and who would have fixed the problem the day they heard about it if anyone had told them.
They are not preying on the negligent. They are preying on the well intentioned. On the clinic owner who has never turned a patient away in his life and did not know his menu failed a keyboard test. They are after the people who are actually helping people.
The law they are using was written to open doors. It is being used to open wallets.
That is our opinion of a practice, not a statement of fact about any particular firm or any particular person. Accessibility law exists for good reasons and we build to it on every site we ship.
California already calls this abuse, when the barrier is physical
A lawyer sending a pre-litigation demand about a wheelchair ramp is barred from demanding money in that letter under Civil Code section 55.31(c). Section 55.3 requires them to attach an advisory telling you how to report their conduct to the State Bar. Code of Civil Procedure section 425.55 flags plaintiffs who file ten or more of these in a year and makes them plead in detail.
None of it applies to a website. Same lawyer, same demand, the same statutory unit under Unruh, and by their terms those protections apply to construction-related claims, because the barrier is a navigation menu instead of a doorway.
Two attempts to close that gap died in 2026. SB 84 would have required notice and 120 days to fix before damages could be sought. It passed the Senate on June 4, 2025, sat in the Assembly for more than a year, and died on a procedural deadline.
Contact your CA State Assemblymember here: https://www.assembly.ca.gov
AB 2190 went further. It would have given a business an affirmative defense against Unruh statutory damages if it fixed the barrier within 30 days of notice. It was written by Greg Wallis, a Republican, with John Harabedian, a Democrat. It cleared two committee hearings. On May 21, 2026 it was ordered to the inactive file at the author’s own request, and never reached a floor vote.
There is no roll call to point at. That is the point. Nobody had to be recorded voting against this, because it never reached the floor.
Contact your CA State Senator here: https://www.senate.ca.gov
What to do about it
Find your Assemblymember and your State Senator at findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov (opens in new tab). Each one’s page carries their district and Capitol phone numbers. Call one, email both. It takes ten minutes.
Five things to ask for
Revive the AB 2190 affirmative defense.
A business that fixes a documented barrier within 30 days of notice should not owe statutory damages.
Extend Civil Code section 55.31(c) to website claims.
No demand for money in a pre-litigation letter, the same rule that already applies to physical barriers.
Extend the section 55.3 advisory to website demand letters.
If a lawyer sends one, they attach the notice telling the recipient how to report misconduct to the State Bar.
Extend section 425.55 to website complaints.
Someone filing ten or more website accessibility complaints in a year should face the same heightened pleading as someone filing about ramps.
Keep the access obligation intact.
Ask for the cure period and the demand letter rules. Do not ask for weaker accessibility. The obligation to be usable is not the problem.
A letter you can send
Copy this, put your name on it, and send it to both offices.
Dear [Assemblymember or Senator],
I own a small business in your district. Our website is a target for pre-litigation demand letters brought under the Unruh Civil Rights Act. These letters name real accessibility barriers, and we fix them. Fixing them does not end the demand, because statutory damages are treated as attaching to the visit rather than to the current state of the site.
California already recognized this pattern as abuse when the barrier was physical. Civil Code sections 55.3 and 55.31 and Code of Civil Procedure section 425.55 restrict demand letters and flag high-frequency filers. None of those protections apply when the barrier is on a website.
AB 2190 would have addressed this by giving businesses an affirmative defense when they remediate within 30 days. It went to the inactive file on May 21, 2026 without a floor vote. I am asking you to revive that affirmative defense, and to extend the existing demand letter protections to website claims.
I am not asking you to weaken accessibility. I want my website usable by everyone, and we fix what is broken. I am asking you to stop the practice of charging small businesses for the privilege of fixing it.
[Your name, business, city]
Next step
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