If you run an Ontario business that ships to American customers, you may have seen a hopeful headline this spring: a US state passing a law to rein in the flood of website-accessibility lawsuits. Missouri did exactly that. It is a real law with real teeth, and it is worth understanding, because the way it works quietly confirms the thing accessibility firms have been saying all along. But if you read it as a reason to relax, you have misread it. A single state law does not lift the duty you owe under Ontario's own rules, and it does not shield you in New York or Florida, where most of these cases are actually filed. Here is the honest picture.
Key facts
- Missouri's SB 907, the Act Against Abusive Website or Web Content Access Litigation, takes effect August 28, 2026 (Missouri Senate, SB 907).
- The law gives a sued business a 90-day window to take good-faith steps to correct the barrier. Do that, and a later claim built on the same issue carries a rebuttable presumption that it is "abusive," which a court can use to shift the plaintiff's attorney fees onto the party that filed (Seyfarth Shaw, ADA Title III blog).
- It covers one US state. It does not change Ontario's AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act), and it does not touch the federal ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in any other state's courts.
- For context, US web-accessibility filings hit a record 3,117 federal cases in 2025, up 27% over 2024, and more than 5,000 counting state courts (Seyfarth Shaw; Level Access).
- Ontario's IASR (Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, O. Reg. 191/11), s.14, requires WCAG 2.0 Level AA on public websites at 50 or more employees; the next ACR (Accessibility Compliance Report) is due December 31, 2026 for organizations with 20 or more employees (ontario.ca).
What does Missouri's SB 907 actually do?
The Missouri legislature passed SB 907 in the spring of 2026, and it becomes operative on August 28, 2026. Its target is a pattern regulators and courts have watched for years: a small number of plaintiffs and firms filing large volumes of near-identical complaints, where the apparent goal is a quick settlement to avoid defense costs rather than a genuinely fixed website. To blunt that, the law does three things. It lets the state Attorney General, or an individual resident who has been sued, bring a civil action against the party, attorney, or firm behind an alleged abusive suit. It gives a court the power to make that filer pay the defendant's fees and costs if the suit is found abusive. And, most usefully for an ordinary business, it creates a 90-day correction period: a defendant who receives notice and, in good faith, takes substantial steps to fix the barrier within 90 days earns a rebuttable presumption that any later claim on that same barrier is abusive (Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III blog).
Read that mechanism closely, because it matters more than the headline. The protection is not automatic and it is not a shield for a broken site. It is earned by actually fixing the thing. A business that ignores the notice, or that bolts on a widget and calls it done, gets no presumption at all. The law rewards remediation, not paperwork.
Does it protect an Ontario business that sells to US customers?
Mostly no, and it is important to be clear about why. SB 907 is a Missouri state statute. It governs how these suits are handled in Missouri, and it will help defendants there. But the ADA is a federal law, and the vast majority of web-accessibility cases are filed far from Missouri. In 2025, New York led with over a thousand federal filings and Florida was close behind, with Illinois surging on the back of a single prolific firm, as we covered in the 2025 lawsuit map. None of those forums are governed by Missouri's new rules. If you sell into the US, your ADA exposure across those states is exactly as live as it was before Missouri acted.
And critically, SB 907 has nothing to say about your obligations at home. Ontario's AODA has no private right of action, so no customer sues you under it directly. The live provincial routes are the compliance-report process and a complaint to the HRTO (Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario) under the Ontario Human Rights Code. A US state trimming its own litigation does not move that line by an inch. It also does not change the December 31, 2026 ACR deadline, which is the date your own regulator is watching. The recent federal churn in the US, including the DOJ's own moves on public-sector deadlines that we unpacked in why the ADA deadline shuffle doesn't help you, is a reminder that these headlines rarely reduce a private business's real duty.
What's the real takeaway for Ontario, and how do you get ahead of it?
Here is the quiet lesson buried in a law written to discourage lawsuits: even Missouri's safest harbor opens only for the business that fixes its site in good faith. That is the same standard that protects you everywhere else. A dated record of what you found and corrected is what a court credits, what an honest ACR reflects, and what turns a demand letter into a short conversation instead of a settlement. We wrote the playbook for it in documented remediation as a defense.
The trap to avoid is treating a headline as a substitute for the work. An overlay widget does not "take substantial steps to correct the barrier," because it can't rewrite the code underneath; it sits on top of the same broken markup. And a passing automated scan is not proof of a fixed site, because a scanner misses most of what a real audit catches. Whether you are worried about a Missouri courtroom, a New York filing, or your Ontario ACR, the durable answer does not change: find the real barriers, fix them at the source, and keep the receipts.
See what a customer or a plaintiff would find on your site, free Vayle Report, about 30 seconds: vayle.art. It detects overlay widgets, surfaces real WCAG failures, and tells you exactly what legally applies to your organization in Ontario. No obligation.
Vayle is a remote-first accessibility-engineering studio serving Ontario. General information, not legal advice.