Retailers and other companies have been increasingly caught up in an explosion of boilerplate claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), focusing on both websites and physical stores (see our previous coverage here, here, here, and here). While the plaintiffs' bar has had a strong run with these claims in recent years, recent decisions in the Southern District of New York, as well as…
Disclaimer: This post is not about lighthouse, other testing tools perform similarly. It's about us developers and our responsibility to not blindly rely on automatic testing. Google's built-in testing tool Lighthouse judges the accessibility of our websites with a score between 0 and 100. It’s laudable to try to get a high grading, but a score of 100 doesn’t mean that the site is perfectly accessible.…
Florida has long been considered a hotbed of lawsuits filed under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Certainly, that practice has continued with the most recent trend of ADA cases, namely lawsuits alleging that websites are not accessible to the legally blind or visually impaired. For those defending website accessibility cases under the ADA, unfortunately three fairly recent court decisions on cases filed…
On January 15, 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision with important ramifications for website and mobile application (“mobile app”) accessibility under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). In Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, the plaintiff asserted claims for violations of the ADA relating to alleged accessibility barriers encountered on the defendant’s website and mobile app. The district court, while noting…
[Graph: ADA Title III Website Accessibility Lawsuits in Federal Court: 2017-2018: 2017: 814; 2018: 2258, 177% increase over 2017. *The number of cases that could be identified through a diligent search.] As we had predicted, the number of website accessibility lawsuits (i.e. lawsuits alleging that plaintiffs with a disability could not use websites because they were not coded to work with assistive technologies like screen readers,…
The Scope of the Issue The Americans with Disabilities Act (the “ADA”) has been the source of a tremendous amount of litigation since President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990. Over the past few years, Plaintiffs’ counsel have developed a cottage industry of sorts by filing thousands of lawsuits alleging that company websites are not accessible to the blind or visually impaired,…
Lawsuits under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, based upon a company’s alleged failure to make its website accessible to the visually impaired or legally blind exploded in 2017 and 2018. In Gil v. Winn-Dixie, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 90204, the only known website accessibility case to actually go to trial, Judge Robert N. Scola, Jr. of the United States District Court…
The internet can be a hostile space for 15% of the world’s population who experience some form of disability. Try navigating a website as someone who is visually impaired: Turn on voice command on your computer (Command ⌘ + F5 if you’re on a Mac, enable Navigator if you’re on a PC) and go to Amazon’s Kindle store. You’ll quickly find out that those who rely on voice commands can’t skip…
The boutique Avanti Hotel is known for its poolside, dog-friendly rooms. Yet its website uses the valuable opening page not to highlight the Palm Springs inn’s amenities, but to explain, in stark black letters on a plain white background, that the Avanti violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Like thousands of other businesses in the United States, the 10-room hotel on East Stevens Road has…
