I am sharing a split screen with an older complaint filed by the Pacific Trial Attorneys law firm. The signing lawyer is Scott Ferrell, and I’m going to go ahead and read through the accessibility issues that are claimed in the complaint.
- Missing alternative text,
- Empty or missing form labels,
- Empty headings,
- Empty links,
- Empty buttons, and
- Redundant links where adjacent links go to the same URL address.
So I’ve skipped over a lot of the, there’s some additional explanation on why these accessibility issues can create a problem, or allegedly a barrier to access. But the important takeaway is the accessibility issues in and of themselves. Because again, we don’t want to get into a technical argument, whether or not something is actually a barrier to access, or whether or not something is technically does not meet a success criterion of the web content accessibility guidelines.
We want to avoid that path and know what accessibility issues are being claimed in litigation, so that we can remediate our website and eliminate these issues altogether and really preempt litigation.
The Pacific Trial Attorneys are one of the most active plaintiffs law firms in this space, and they are in California. Among California law firms, I think they are the most active. So knowing what accessibility issues the Pacific trial attorneys are claiming, we can go ahead and start remediating those.
Now, this is not to say that every complaint has the exact same issues, they do vary. But if we know generally what comes up over and over again, we can go ahead and take care of that. So that’s what I’ve done with the ADA compliance course.
I’ve taken all of these issues that keep coming up over and over again, and by not just Pacific Trial Attorneys, but by other law firms, I’ve taken those issues and made them the lessons in my course. And so with this course, it really amounts to step-by-step instructions that you can give your web team on how to find and fix the accessibility issues that are most commonly claimed.
And so it goes beyond Pacific Trial Attorneys, but it’s very important to know and to look at what these active plaintiffs law firms are looking for. And so now this is real, this is much more specific than the web content accessibility guidelines. Now we know what plaintiffs law firms are looking for, and we can address that and eliminate these accessibility issues and thereby significantly reduce our risk of litigation.
Because when you start taking care of the accessibility issues that keep coming up with all of these most active plaintiffs law firms, if you can take care of those accessibility issues, you’re really going to eliminate your risk of litigation. It would be highly unlikely that litigation would be initiated if you’ve already resolved all of the accessibility issues that keep coming up in complaints filed by plaintiffs law firms.
So this was the Pacific trial attorneys. I’ve looked at other law firms, and I will link to those videos below. But these are the accessibility issues that give rise to litigation.
