For decades, California has stood at the forefront of civil rights innovation. From environmental protection to consumer safeguards to employee rights, the state has consistently set standards that the rest of the nation often follows. Disability rights have been no exception. California’s accessibility laws, including the Unruh Civil Rights Act, have long served as a meaningful enforcement mechanism to ensure that equal access is not merely aspirational, but real.
What AB 2190 Does in Plain Terms
Assembly Bill (AB) 2190 is a bill introduced in the California Legislature that proposes changes to how internet accessibility claims are enforced under existing civil rights laws, including the Unruh Civil Rights Act. The Unruh Act is one of California’s foundational civil rights statutes. Enacted in 1959, it guarantees that all individuals, including people with disabilities, are entitled to full and equal access to businesses and services. It has long served as a key enforcement mechanism for accessibility, including in the digital context.
In simple terms, AB 2190 would allow businesses to limit their liability for accessibility barriers if they can show that they made “good faith efforts” to comply with accessibility standards. These efforts may include conducting accessibility audits, working with third-party vendors, or publishing accessibility statements or remediation plans. The bill also promotes the use of accessibility reports to document barriers and outline timelines for addressing them.
Proponents of AB 2190 argue that the bill is intended to reduce unnecessary litigation and encourage businesses to proactively improve accessibility. They contend that providing a framework for fixes and recognizing good faith efforts will lead to more collaboration and faster progress toward accessibility.
However, this framing assumes that documenting effort is a reliable substitute for achieving access. As the rest of this discussion explains, that assumption does not hold in practice.
A Bill That Moves Us Backward
AB 2190 threatens to reverse that trajectory in a way that is both subtle and profound. It does not openly dismantle accessibility law, nor does it eliminate the language of equal access. Instead, it reframes what enforcement means. It shifts the focus away from outcomes and toward process, away from whether access is achieved and toward whether effort can be documented. That is not a step forward into a more inclusive technological future. It is a step sideways into a framework where accessibility can be described, reported, and certified without ever being fully realized in practice. California’s leadership has always been rooted in advancing real, enforceable rights. This bill risks replacing that legacy with something far less certain.
Technology Is Moving Faster Than Accessibility
At a time when technology is evolving rapidly, and when disabled people are already struggling to keep pace, this is not the moment to weaken enforcement; it is the moment to strengthen it. Accessibility is not improving at the pace of innovation. If anything, modern design trends, dynamic interfaces, and automated compliance tools have made meaningful access more fragile, not less. The more complex our systems become, the more intentional and enforceable accessibility must be.
The Major Problem with ‘Good Faith’
AB 2190 moves in the wrong direction. By elevating “good faith efforts” as a defense, it risks replacing enforceable rights with process-based narratives, thereby empowering defendants to control the narrative. It shifts the inquiry away from whether a system actually works and toward whether a business can demonstrate that it tried. That distinction is not merely semantic; it determines whether accessibility is treated as a civil right or as a compliance exercise.
What Enforcement Experience Shows
My experience enforcing California’s accessibility laws across multiple industries—cruise lines, airlines, hotels, transportation providers, and e-commerce platforms—has consistently revealed the same pattern. Businesses often respond to accessibility complaints by invoking “good faith efforts,” promising remediation, and pointing to internal processes or third-party tools. Yet meaningful fixes frequently do not materialize until after escalation. The language of effort becomes a buffer against accountability rather than a pathway to access.
My experience in the courtroom further illustrates how the concept of “good faith effort” introduces a level of subjectivity that can obscure whether meaningful remediation has actually occurred. Judges, who are not accessibility engineers and are not provided with objective usability benchmarks, are often asked to evaluate not whether a system is usable in practice, but whether a defendant has demonstrated sufficient effort through audits, vendor relationships, or stated remediation plans. In several matters, defendants have represented to the court that they acted in good faith to address accessibility barriers, and those representations carried significant weight in the outcome. Yet in at least one instance, the same barriers remained unresolved years later, despite those assurances. This dynamic places courts in the difficult position of weighing narratives of effort against lived experiences of inaccessibility, without clear, objective standards tied to functional usability. The result is that “good faith” can operate less as a measure of progress and more as a shield that delays or avoids full remediation.
The Cycle Does Not End After Resolution
Even when disputes are resolved, the underlying problem often persists in a different form. In several cases, after entities committed to full remediation, accessibility barriers reappeared over time. This reflects a deeper structural issue: accessibility is treated as a one-time project rather than an ongoing obligation embedded in design, development, and quality assurance. Without sustained accountability, progress is temporary, and disabled users are forced to repeatedly assert their rights simply to maintain access that was already promised.
A Real-World Example
I have brought several enforcement actions between 2022 and 2024 addressing digital accessibility barriers, including Gebre v. Google (2022), which involved the accessibility of reCAPTCHA. These cases reflect a consistent pattern: meaningful change does not occur simply because a company claims to be making “good faith efforts.” It occurs when accessibility is treated as a functional requirement that must be met in practice. In each instance, policies, audit reports, and compliance claims existed, yet the underlying usability issues remained. It was only through enforcement and escalation that meaningful remediation took place.
Why This Matters for Braille Users
For Braille users in particular, this shift is deeply concerning. Many accessibility failures are not captured by automated tools or surface-level compliance checks. They emerge in real interaction—when focus shifts unexpectedly, when navigation breaks down, when context is lost, when controls may be adequately described in audio but appear as “unlabeled” in Braille. These are not minor inconveniences. They are barriers that prevent independent use and completion of essential tasks. Yet under a “good faith” framework, such issues can be minimized, deferred, or dismissed as having limited impact.
What California Should Do Instead
California has never led by lowering standards or redefining rights in ways that dilute their meaning. It has led by insisting that rights be enforceable, measurable, and grounded in real-world outcomes. If anything, the state should be moving toward stronger enforcement mechanisms that emphasize functional usability, continuous accountability, and durability of access over time. Accessibility must be evaluated based on whether people can actually use systems independently, not whether those systems have been audited, reported on, or certified by third parties.
In Closing
Disabled people do not experience barriers as abstract compliance issues. They experience them as obstacles that shape whether they can participate fully in everyday life. A system either works, or it does not. A right is either meaningful, or it is not. California has long understood that distinction. It should not abandon it now. Tell your representatives in the California Legislature to reject AB 2190 and strengthen the Unruh Civil Rights Act.