I came across an article dated February 7th 2023. What’s interesting is that it reads like it’s from 2018. It reads like ADA website litigation is brand new. So I’m going to paraphrase a few selections from the article.
A legal complaint against a brewery claiming its website is inaccessible to the blind is what one attorney calls the next iteration of lawsuits taking advantage of the ADA.
And then later in the article: if these suits get traction, the attorney said he could see other firms doing this. Unlike more notorious ADA lawsuits, where the plaintiff must physically go to the establishment to prove that the business is out of compliance, one only has to have internet access.
And then the attorney also said this is kind of the Wild West. I don’t have a lot of appellate court decisions on their tactics. They’re trying to impose these private group recommendations on websites. And, of course, he’s referring to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG.
And this is really standard litigation that the article is talking about. And so a demand letter is sent, a complaint is filed, and the plaintiffs’ law firm, Pacific Trial Attorneys, which is one of the most, if not the most, active plaintiffs’ law firms in this space.
So, in other words, this is nothing new. But what this article does highlight is there are still pockets of people who are unaware of the need for website accessibility and the risk of litigation that exists.
And just the other day, I was on, I was in this meeting and when I said what I do, so many people were, they didn’t- they weren’t aware of it. They weren’t- this was something that they had not contemplated before and that they had never heard of before.
And so I find out about this because some people have- they’ve thought about it before, but they still don’t; they’re not aware that there’s so much litigation in this space.
And there are still a large amount of people who have not heard of website accessibility and didn’t know that you could make a website accessible to people with disabilities.
So that’s the purpose of this video, just to share that this is something that there are still people finding out about website accessibility and the litigation surrounding website accessibility.
So make sure that everyone else around you knows because it’s not something you want to find out about through litigation.
