TestParty

Blog

Breaking: New Bipartisan Bill Would Give Businesses 30 Days to Fix ADA Violations Before Lawsuits

Michael Bervell
Michael Bervell
December 12, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • New bipartisan legislation introduced December 9, 2025 by Reps. Michael Lawler (R-NY) and Lou Correa (D-CA) would require plaintiffs to notify businesses of ADA violations before filing lawsuits
  • 30-day remediation window allows businesses to fix violations or demonstrate "significant progress" before litigation can proceed
  • Targets "drive-by lawsuits" that critics say punish well-intentioned businesses without improving actual accessibility
  • Disability rights advocates have historically opposed similar bills, arguing they remove incentives for proactive compliance and delay access for people with disabilities
  • Does not eliminate liability—businesses that fail to remediate within 30 days remain fully exposed to legal action
  • E-commerce implications remain unclear—the bill's focus on physical accessibility may limit its application to digital properties

On December 9, 2025, Representatives Michael Lawler (R-NY) and Lou Correa (D-CA) introduced the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act, bipartisan legislation that would fundamentally change how ADA enforcement works in the United States.

The bill creates a mandatory pre-litigation notice process: before filing an ADA lawsuit, plaintiffs would need to notify the business directly about the alleged violations, giving the business 30 days to fix the issues or demonstrate significant progress toward remediation.

For e-commerce businesses that have watched ADA website accessibility lawsuits surge to over 4,000 annually, the question is straightforward: does this bill change anything for digital accessibility compliance?

The answer is complicated—and understanding why requires looking at both the legislation itself and the broader debate over ADA enforcement reform.

What the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act Actually Does

According to Congressman Lawler's official press release announcing the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act, the bill creates a three-step process:

Step 1: Direct notification. Disabled individuals would notify businesses directly about ADA violations, rather than filing suit immediately.

Step 2: 30-day remediation window. Businesses receive 30 days to address the violation or demonstrate "significant progress" if a longer remediation period is needed.

Step 3: Litigation only after non-compliance. If the business fails to remediate within the window, the plaintiff can proceed with a lawsuit.

The bill's sponsors frame this as protecting both groups—disabled individuals get violations fixed faster, while businesses avoid expensive litigation over issues they would have fixed if they'd known about them.

"The ADA was created to guarantee access and protect the rights of Americans with disabilities, not to fuel drive-by lawsuits that do nothing to actually fix the problem," said Congressman Lawler. "Our bill creates a simple, fair process for navigating an ADA violation so that businesses get notified and have 30 days to make it right."

We previously covered similar legislative efforts in The 30-Day Lifeline: How a Simple Bill Could Save Small Businesses From Legal Extortion, which explores the economic arguments for notice-and-cure provisions.

The "Serial Lawsuit" Problem the Bill Addresses

The legislation responds to a well-documented pattern in ADA enforcement: a small number of plaintiffs and law firms file hundreds or thousands of lawsuits against businesses, often over technical violations.

The numbers are striking. According to Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III 2024 Year-End Federal Lawsuit Report, 8,800 ADA Title III lawsuits were filed in federal courts in 2024—a 7% increase from 2023. TestParty's own research based on Court Listener data has documented that just 31 plaintiffs and 16 law firms were responsible for half of all ADA website lawsuits filed in the first half of 2025.

We've extensively documented this phenomenon in our series on serial plaintiffs:

The supporting organizations for the bill reflect this concern:

  • AAHOA (Asian American Hotel Owners Association), whose 20,000 member hoteliers have been heavily targeted by "drive-by" lawsuits
  • NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business), representing small business owners who often settle rather than fight
  • National Small Business Association, citing "sue and settle schemes" that exploit small businesses' inability to afford legal defense
  • Associated General Contractors of America, supporting "mutually beneficial opportunity for well-intentioned employers to remedy inadvertent oversights"

The common thread: these organizations argue that litigation has become more about settlement economics than actual accessibility improvement.

Why Disability Rights Groups Typically Oppose These Bills

What the press release doesn't mention is that similar "notice and cure" legislation has been introduced repeatedly in Congress—and consistently opposed by disability rights organizations.

The Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund's (DREDF) detailed opposition to H.R. 620 articulates the core concern:

"Businesses could employ a 'wait and see' approach, continuing to violate the law with impunity and excluding countless people with disabilities from their good, services, facilities, and accommodations until a person with a disability determined that the business was out of compliance with the ADA and provided the business with the proper notification."

The ACLU's "Myths and Truths About the ADA Education and Reform Act" document further explains the disability rights perspective.

The argument has several components:

1. It shifts the burden to disabled individuals. Rather than requiring businesses to proactively comply with a 35-year-old law, notice-and-cure bills require people with disabilities to identify violations and properly notify each business—effectively making them unpaid compliance auditors.

2. It removes incentives for proactive compliance. Why invest in accessibility today when you can wait until someone complains and then have 30 days to fix it? The economic incentive shifts from "comply proactively" to "wait and see."

3. Damages aren't the issue—injunctive relief is. A technical point that's often overlooked: Title III of the ADA doesn't authorize monetary damages at all. The large settlements that drive headlines come from state laws (like California's Unruh Act, which provides $4,000 minimum per violation). A federal notice-and-cure requirement wouldn't affect state law claims.

4. The "serial plaintiff" framing is misleading. From the disability rights perspective, serial plaintiffs exist because serial violations exist. If businesses were compliant, there would be no violations to sue over.

H.R. 620, the ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017, passed the House 225-192 in February 2018 but faced opposition from over 200 disability rights organizations. Senator Tammy Duckworth led 43 Senate Democrats in a letter vowing to block the bill, and it died without a Senate vote. The ADA 30 Days to Comply Act will likely face similar organized opposition.

What This Means for Digital Accessibility

Here's where it gets complicated for e-commerce businesses: the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act appears primarily focused on physical accessibility, not digital accessibility.

The supporting organizations quoted in the press release—hoteliers, construction contractors, small business associations—are concerned about physical premises issues: parking spaces, signage, ramps, restrooms. None specifically mention websites or digital properties.

This matters because website accessibility lawsuits operate differently than physical accessibility lawsuits in several ways:

Different legal landscape. While courts have increasingly ruled that websites are covered under Title III of the ADA, there's no federal technical standard for website accessibility (unlike the ADA Standards for Accessible Design for physical spaces). Cases typically reference WCAG 2.2 from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative as the de facto standard, but it's not codified. For a full breakdown, see our guide on What's the Difference Between ADA and WCAG?

Different plaintiff pool. Website accessibility lawsuits have their own set of serial plaintiffs and law firms, operating somewhat separately from physical accessibility litigation. We've profiled many of them in New Players in the ADA Shakedown: Gabriel Levy, Sanjay Gohil & Noor Saab Join the Serial Plaintiff Gold Rush.

Different remediation timeline. Fixing a website accessibility issue often takes longer than 30 days—or can be done in hours, depending on the issue. The timeline may not map cleanly to digital remediation. See How Long Does Website Accessibility Take to Fix? for realistic timelines.

State court prevalence. According to Seyfarth Shaw's tracking of federal court website accessibility lawsuits, ADA website lawsuits are increasingly filed in state courts (particularly New York and California) rather than federal courts. A federal notice-and-cure requirement might not affect state court filings under state accessibility laws.

Until we see the full text of the bill and any accompanying legislative history, it's unclear whether the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act would apply to website accessibility claims at all.

The State-Level Parallel: California's SB 84

While federal notice-and-cure legislation has repeatedly stalled, California is moving forward with its own version.

Senate Bill 84, introduced in January 2025, would create a 120-day cure period for construction-related accessibility claims against businesses with 50 or fewer employees. The bill passed the California Senate in June 2025 and is pending in the Assembly.

Key differences from the federal proposal:

  • 120 days vs. 30 days for remediation
  • Limited to businesses with 50 or fewer employees
  • Specifically covers construction-related accessibility claims (explicitly not digital)
  • Includes anti-circumvention provisions preventing plaintiffs from reframing claims to avoid the notice requirement

California's approach explicitly excludes digital accessibility, which suggests that even if the state's notice-and-cure law passes, website accessibility lawsuits would continue unchanged.

The E-Commerce Reality: Lawsuits Continue to Rise

Whatever happens with the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act, the underlying reality for e-commerce businesses hasn't changed. We track these trends continuously in our 2025 ADA Website Lawsuit Statistics resource.

Lawsuit volume is increasing. The first half of 2025 saw 2,014 ADA website lawsuits filed—a 37% increase over the same period in 2024, according to industry tracking.

E-commerce remains the primary target. TestParty research based on Court Listener data shows 77% of ADA website lawsuits target e-commerce sites, making online retail by far the most-sued industry.

Overlays don't provide protection. Over 1,000 businesses were sued in 2024 despite having accessibility widgets installed on their websites, representing more than 25% of all cases. The FTC fined accessiBe $1 million in January 2025 for false advertising claims about their overlay's ability to achieve compliance. We've covered this extensively in:

Small businesses are disproportionately affected. 77% of ADA website lawsuits in recent years have targeted companies with under $25 million in revenue.

Geographic concentration persists. New York, Florida, California, and Illinois account for the vast majority of filings, but lawsuits are expanding to previously quiet states.

What Should E-Commerce Businesses Do?

Whether or not the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act passes—and regardless of whether it applies to digital accessibility—the strategic calculus for e-commerce businesses remains the same. For a comprehensive walkthrough, see Why Am I Getting Sued for Website Accessibility?

1. Don't wait for a lawsuit to become compliant.

Even with a 30-day cure period, receiving a demand letter or lawsuit creates costs: legal fees, staff time, business disruption, and reputational risk. The ADA is 35 years old. "I didn't know" stopped being a defensible position long ago. See Preventing eCommerce ADA Compliance Lawsuits With Accessibility Audits.

2. Don't rely on overlays or quick fixes.

The data is unambiguous: accessibility widgets don't prevent lawsuits. Over 1,000 businesses learned this the hard way in 2024 alone. Source-code remediation that addresses actual WCAG violations is the only approach that reduces legal exposure. Learn more in Automated Accessibility Remediation: Everything You Need to Know.

3. Understand your specific risk profile.

Are you selling to customers in New York, California, or Florida? Do you have over $25 million in revenue (which affects plaintiff targeting)? Is your site built on Shopify, WordPress, or another platform that's been heavily targeted? Your answers shape your priority level. For Shopify merchants specifically, see Is My Shopify Store ADA Compliant?

4. Build accessibility into your development process.

Reactive compliance—fixing issues after they're identified—is more expensive than proactive compliance. Integrating accessibility testing into CI/CD pipelines catches issues before they reach production. We explain how in Don't Sh*t-Left: How to Actually Shift-Left Accessibility and Building Accessibility Checks Into Modern CI/CD Workflows.

5. Document your efforts.

If you do receive a lawsuit or demand letter, demonstrating good-faith compliance efforts matters. Keep records of accessibility audits, remediation work, and ongoing monitoring. If you've already been sued, see I Got an ADA Website Lawsuit: Your 48-Hour Action Plan.

The Bigger Picture: Compliance vs. Litigation Reform

The debate over the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act reflects a fundamental tension in disability rights law: is the goal to fix accessibility barriers, or to ensure businesses face consequences for creating them?

Notice-and-cure proponents argue that the goal should be fixing barriers. If a 30-day window results in more barriers being fixed faster, everyone wins—even if some businesses that would have been sued instead remediate without penalty.

Notice-and-cure opponents argue that this misses the point. Businesses have had 35 years to comply with the ADA. Creating a system where they face no consequences until a disabled person identifies and reports each violation—and then get a grace period to fix it—effectively decriminalizes non-compliance. The National Federation of the Blind's 2021 Resolution on Accessibility Overlays and the Overlay Fact Sheet signed by 700+ accessibility experts both emphasize that quick fixes don't work.

Both perspectives contain truth. Serial litigation that enriches law firms without improving accessibility is a real problem. So is the fact that, according to WebAIM's 2025 Million Report analyzing the top 1 million websites, 95.9% of home pages still have detectable WCAG failures—averaging 51 errors per page.

For e-commerce businesses, the practical takeaway is this: don't wait for the law to force compliance. Whether through litigation, legislation, or market pressure, accessibility expectations are only increasing. The question isn't whether you'll need to make your site accessible—it's whether you'll do it proactively or reactively.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act?

The ADA 30 Days to Comply Act is bipartisan legislation introduced on December 9, 2025 by Representatives Michael Lawler (R-NY) and Lou Correa (D-CA). The bill would require plaintiffs to notify businesses directly about ADA violations before filing lawsuits, giving businesses a 30-day window to fix issues or show significant progress toward remediation.

Does the bill apply to website accessibility?

This is unclear. The bill's supporting organizations (hoteliers, construction contractors, small business groups) focus on physical accessibility. Until the full text is available, it's uncertain whether the 30-day cure period would apply to website accessibility claims under Title III of the ADA. See our analysis of legal requirements for website accessibility for current obligations.

Will this bill pass?

Similar notice-and-cure legislation has been introduced multiple times in Congress but has never become law. H.R. 620 passed the House in 2018 but died in the Senate after opposition from over 200 disability rights organizations. The ADA 30 Days to Comply Act will likely face similar opposition.

Does this mean I can wait to make my website accessible?

No. Even if the bill passes and applies to websites: (1) you'd still face lawsuits after failing to remediate within 30 days; (2) state law claims (which provide monetary damages) likely wouldn't be affected; (3) the business disruption and legal costs of receiving demand letters remain significant. See The Hidden Cost of Audit-Only Web Accessibility for why proactive compliance is always more cost-effective than reactive compliance.

How many ADA website lawsuits are filed annually?

According to Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III tracking, 2,452 website-specific accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal courts in 2024, with thousands more in state courts. E-commerce sites are the primary target, representing 77% of cases. The first half of 2025 saw a 37% increase in filings compared to 2024.

What should I do if I receive an ADA demand letter?

Consult with an attorney experienced in ADA defense immediately. Document your current accessibility status, begin remediation of identified issues, and preserve all communications. For guidance, see:

Understanding ADA Lawsuits

If You've Been Sued

Compliance Strategy

Implementation

Why Overlays Don't Work

Sources

Last updated: December 9, 2025

Don't wait for legislation to determine your accessibility compliance strategy. Get a free accessibility audit and see how TestParty's automated remediation can bring your e-commerce site into WCAG 2.2 AA compliance—before the next demand letter arrives.

Stay informed

Accessibility insights delivered
straight to your inbox.

Contact Us

Automate the software work for accessibility compliance, end-to-end.

Empowering businesses with seamless digital accessibility solutions—simple, inclusive, effective.

Book a Demo