Missouri Just Passed a Law Targeting “Abusive” Accessibility Lawsuits — Here’s What It Actually Means for Your WordPress Site

On August 28, 2026, Missouri becomes the first state to give businesses a legal weapon against “drive-by” website accessibility lawsuits — the kind filed by a single plaintiff or law firm against dozens of small sites with boilerplate complaints and a settlement demand attached. Senate Bill 907, the “Acts Against Abusive Website Access” law, lets Missouri-registered businesses countersue plaintiffs and their attorneys, empowers the state Attorney General to intervene, and creates a 90-day cure period before a lawsuit can even proceed. If you run a WordPress site and you’ve been hearing about this law as a reason to stop worrying about accessibility, you should read the fine print first — because that’s not what it does.

What Missouri’s Law Actually Does

SB 907 targets a specific, well-documented problem: a small number of plaintiffs and law firms filing large volumes of near-identical lawsuits against businesses, where the practical goal is a quick settlement rather than a genuinely more accessible website. Reporting on the bill noted that one plaintiff represented by a single firm was responsible for every one of the 121 website accessibility lawsuits filed in Missouri in 2024 and 2025 — a pattern that state lawmakers decided crossed from advocacy into abuse.

The law defines “abusive litigation” as a suit whose primary purpose is extracting a payment tied to the cost of defending the case, rather than genuinely improving access. If a court agrees a suit fits that definition, it can:

• Let the sued business file its own civil action against the plaintiff and their attorneys
• Allow the Missouri Attorney General to bring or join an action against the abusive suit
• Order the plaintiff and law firm to pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees and costs
• Impose punitive damages up to three times the awarded attorney’s fees

Crucially, the law also builds in a 90-day cure period: before a suit can be found abusive (or, in many cases, before it can proceed at all), the business gets 90 days to take substantial, good-faith steps to fix the alleged violations. That cure period is the part WordPress site owners should pay closest attention to — because it only helps you if you can actually produce real fixes inside that window.

Who Is — and Isn’t — Protected

It’s worth being precise about the law’s scope, because it’s narrower than the headlines suggest:

• It applies to Missouri residents and businesses. If your business isn’t registered or operating in Missouri, this law doesn’t cover you at all.
• It has a sunset clause. If the Department of Justice ever issues formal federal standards for website accessibility under the ADA — something it has never done — the law’s protections expire for corporations and government entities. It’s a stopgap, not a permanent shield.
• It doesn’t touch federal court. Nothing about SB 907 changes ADA Title III exposure in federal litigation, which is where a large share of accessibility suits are still filed.
• It doesn’t excuse inaccessible sites. The law penalizes the litigation tactic — mass filings aimed at quick settlements — not the underlying claim that a site has real barriers. A well-documented, individually litigated case over genuine access problems isn’t what this law is built to stop.

In other words, SB 907 is a response to litigation abuse, not a verdict that accessibility compliance no longer matters. If anything, it raises the stakes on being able to demonstrate good-faith effort quickly, since the entire framework hinges on what you can prove you fixed in 90 days.

Why This Matters Even Outside Missouri

Missouri isn’t acting in a vacuum. It follows a wave of similar “anti-abusive-litigation” proposals introduced in other statehouses over the past year, and it arrives at a moment when overall ADA website litigation volume keeps climbing — 2025 closed with over 3,100 federal filings, up roughly 27% year over year, plus thousands more in state courts. Lawmakers in other states are watching how SB 907 performs before deciding whether to copy it.

That combination — rising lawsuit volume plus growing political appetite to curb abusive filings — puts WordPress site owners in an unusual position. The legal environment is simultaneously getting tougher on genuinely inaccessible sites and more skeptical of plaintiffs who file suits without real evidence of harm. The sites that come out ahead in that environment are the ones that can show, quickly and credibly, what accessibility work they’ve actually done — not the ones betting that a state law will make the issue disappear.

What “Good-Faith Steps” Should Actually Look Like

If a 90-day cure period is your safety net — in Missouri or in settlement negotiations anywhere else — you need to be able to move fast on real, verifiable fixes. That means:

1. A documented scan of actual code-level issues. Missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, insufficient color contrast, broken heading structure, keyboard traps — the kinds of WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA failures that show up in nearly every lawsuit complaint.
2. A record of what changed and when. “We fixed it” isn’t credible without a before-and-after trail you can hand to your own attorney or the court.
3. Fixes to the underlying markup, not a widget layered on top. Accessibility overlays that visually adjust a page without touching the HTML have already drawn FTC scrutiny and don’t hold up well as evidence of substantive remediation — a court asking whether you made “good-faith” changes wants to see the code, not a toolbar.
4. Ongoing monitoring. A one-time fix doesn’t stay fixed. Plugin updates, theme changes, and new content can reintroduce the same problems a month later.

None of this guarantees a lawsuit won’t be filed, and no tool can promise full legal immunity — that’s true whether you’re in Missouri or anywhere else. But being able to produce a real remediation record fast is the single biggest factor in whether a cure period, a settlement negotiation, or a demand letter response goes well.

Take Action

Laws like Missouri’s SB 907 target bad-faith litigation, not bad-faith accessibility — the underlying obligation to make your WordPress site usable hasn’t changed. LEWCA scans your site for real, code-level WCAG issues and helps you fix them at the source, not with an overlay that just masks problems from a scanner. Pro adds AI-powered code fixes, scheduled scanning, and compliance reports you can hand to counsel if you ever need to document good-faith remediation quickly. See pricing plans or download LEWCA to get started.