Sharing the split screen with me is a complaint filed by the Acacia Barros Law Firm in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Miami Division. And this is a part of a mini series where I’m going through the different plaintiffs law firms and looking at the material claims of accessibility that they have included in their complaints.
And so let’s go through this starting with letter A, it says on the product page, the images have the same label parenthesis ID-alt or the images are not labeled. Instead, each image should have a meaningful description of the image plaintiff and screen reader users cannot understand. So this is your standard missing alt text duplicate alt text claim.
B at quote unquote store page. The map is inaccessible and there is no store address plaintiff cannot locate the stores. So the map is inaccessible is a very broad claim and it provides us no idea of how the map is inaccessible, it says, and there is no store address. So it appears that is a separate claim, but I don’t know how is the map inaccessible. And this illustrates how sometimes these claims are very broad and they don’t give us anything to go off of. And the other claims in this complaint are more specific and provide us more context. But on letter B, we just don’t have that. And this is common amongst plaintiffs law firms. Sometimes they’re very vague and broad and then other times they are more specific.
Letter C on the product page, the price is skipped. There is the price before and the sale price, but both have no quote unquote focus and screen reader skipped the price and I’m reading directly from the complaint. So letter C is curious to me. I would have follow up questions to this claim, but we’ll continue on.
When plaintiff clicks add to bag, a pop-up windows shows up but is not announced. And plaintiff does not know if it was added to bag or what happened and how to check out. And then the paragraph following the specific claim says the plaintiff encountered the following barrier when plaintiff was unable and impeded to access and unable to learn one defendant’s store locations open in his area, two, the cost of defendant’s products, three, buy a jacket on the website and pick up at curbside or at the nearest stores. And then it continues on. So I’ll stop there.
But I wanted to go through this complaint and along with several others from the most active plaintiffs law firms so that you have a better understanding of what exactly plaintiffs lawyers are looking for and what they are actually claiming in litigation. Because when you are more aware of these claims, then you can start addressing them on your website and remediating them and then hopefully eliminating them.
Now this is only one complaint, right? From one law firm. So it doesn’t mean that we know all of the different accessibility issues, but we do have a better idea. And if you go through this series, you can start to get a really good idea of the claims that plaintiffs law firms are claiming. And sometimes we see issues that are more one-offs, but then, but, but usually we see the same claims coming up again and again. So for example, missing all text that’s almost in every single complaint. I would say, I would say 85% plus of the time there will be a claim for alt text in some way, form or fashion.
And so this is why I created the ADA Compliance Course so that if someone wants to, they can have their web team go in and find and fix the most commonly claimed accessibility issues in litigation. So it really is an SOP or step-by-step instructions where some website owner can give to their team and say, Hey, follow this course, follow the lessons in this course so that we can significantly reduce the risk of litigation.
And the course is comprised, the lessons are actually comprised of all of the most commonly claimed issues in litigation. And this is from the most active plaintiffs law firms.
So as you can start to unpack the logic here is that if we are, if we are finding and fixing the accessibility issues that the most active plaintiffs law firms are claiming in litigation, if we take care of those, then we, as we go through this course, we are going to significantly reduce the risk of litigation because then
what would be left, right?
We are taking care of, we are fixing the issues that plaintiffs law firms are looking for and actually claiming in litigation.
And so that’s why I have this mini series is so that everyone can see this is exactly, these are exactly the issues that plaintiffs law firms are claiming.
And so in this instance, we were looking at the law firm of Acacia Barros, and we were looking at this complaint and this complaint was filed in 2023. And I think it was in January, yes, January, 2023.
