Join Natalie MacLees and Natalie Garza for the 29th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. They delve into the significant rise in ADA lawsuits related to digital properties, examining how these lawsuits affect small business websites and government entities. The discussion covers key statistics, including the increase in state-level lawsuits, repeat lawsuits, and the impact of accessibility widgets. They also emphasize the importance of education and proactive efforts in making websites accessible.
Natalie Garza: Hello everybody and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. My name’s Natalie Garza. I’m one of the co-hosts, and with me today is,
Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host.
Natalie Garza: and she is a digital accessibility expert here to answer our questions. Talk to us about today’s topic, which is how accessibility lawsuits have affected small business websites and also government websites.
So we’re gonna go through some statistics and then dive in. So to get started, first one, we found that “Over 4,000 ADA lawsuits related to digital properties were filed in 2024. With a decline in federal cases and an increase in state level lawsuits, particularly in New York and California.” (UsableNet 2024 Report)
Natalie MacLees: I think generally the decline in the federal cases is probably due to the change of the administration at the federal level and the administration demonstrating a different set of priorities around accessibility right now. So we see those cases kind of shifting to the state level.
California has a Civil Rights Act, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, that was passed in 1959. Which does let plaintiffs claim $4,000 per violation, per person, per visit, so that does create an incentive structure for frivolous lawsuits, unfortunately. Not all accessibility lawsuits are frivolous. But there is a problem I think, in the industry with abuse of using the judicial systemfor personal gain.
And there are definitely legitimate cases, and I don’t wanna take that away from anybody, but there are also cases where it seems like nobody actually did go try to use the website, and then they file these lawsuits.
So unfortunately, there’s that incentive for that to happen, and it’s meant to be an incentive for small businesses and government websites and things like that, it’s meant to be an incentive for them to avoid those fines and fees and make their, you know, the, it’s not just their websites, right? That law applies to physical locations, like having a wheelchair ramp for your restaurant and accessible restrooms, like it applies to all different all different situations, but it does include websites.
So it’s meant to be an incentive for businesses and governments to make things accessible. And I think it has accomplished that to a certain degree, but I think it also has this kind of other unfortunate side effect, that we see.
And then in New York, there’s not a specific law in New York that’s causing the extra lawsuits there.
I think it’s just a friendly court district that happens to be in New York, and I know that there are a lot of family-owned wineries in upstate New York that have been for some reason targeted by these lawsuits. Which is also unfortunate that what’s getting targeted are they small family run businesses.
I agree that they should all have accessible websites and accessible premises I think they should be doing everything that they can to make their websites and their shops accessible. But I, I don’t think that filing many, many lawsuits, and having serial plaintiffs for lawsuits is necessarily moving accessibility forward or encouraging the world to be a more accessible place.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, whenever you told me about this, I was very shocked to learn that it’s not a requirement to reach out to the businesses first before filing the lawsuit either. Like you can just find like missing alt texts and that’s enough for you to be like, “okay, well I’m gonna file a lawsuit against you.”
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, it is unfortunate, and we have seen some judges start to push back a little bit, and they wanna see proof that somebody did actually try to use the website and wasn’t able to. Because what does happen in a lot of the cases is a lawyer or, you know, probably a legal clerk or somebody who works for a lawyer will just go on a website, run an automated checker, and if they find issues, they put it on a list.
And that, that these are the people that they’re gonna find a plaintiff for and file a lawsuit against. So it is really, it is really unfortunate that it gets treated that way because, you know, these are laws that were meant to help people, and they were laws that were meant to make the world more accessible for everybody.
So it’s, it’s a little bit sad and frustrating to see it getting abused that way because I don’t think that that’s moving things forward.
Natalie Garza: No. I mean, in my opinion, I think it’d be more helpful and move it forward more if you just reach out to the website owner and say, “Hey, I can’t submit your form. I’m a screen reader user. Or like, I use my keyboard only.” Then if they don’t reply, then yeah, I mean.
Natalie MacLees: I would rather focus on let’s get it fixed, and let’s make everything better. But yeah, I mean, a lot of, you know, a lot of these small businesses, they have either built their website themselves or they’ve hired, you know, just a little freelancer to do it for a couple thousand dollars and nobody in that situation has any idea that this is something that they should be, looking at.
Right? They have no idea that they should need to be thinking about the accessibility of their website. I think it’s unfortunate that the way that they sometimes find out is getting a lawsuit pressed against ’em when I think it’d be more useful if it were somebody getting in touch and saying like, “Hey, did you know that I, I can’t use your website, because it’s not accessible.”
And to have them learn about it that way, and then be able to take steps to fix it. I think it would be the preferred way. And I know, I, I’m aware that not every business is going to suddenly go, “oh no, let’s fix it right away.”
That’s, that’s not what’s gonna happen. And, and I think it’s okay to, to move forward in those cases and try to, force the issue, I guess, and try to push a business into making their website more accessible.
But I do think there’s some amount of education and outreach that should happen first.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, especially if it’s a customer who truly was trying to purchase something or get in contact or learn something from their website. If you reach out and honestly just say, like “I was trying to buy this product and I couldn’t check out with your form” or something, they would be very inclined to fix that ’cause they want your business, they want your traffic, they want you to interact with their website.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, and, and I can understand from the other side too that people with disabilities, they get worn out trying to do that kind of thing, right?
Most websites have some kind of barrier on them. And can you imagine like if your day was just reaching out to every website you try to use to tell them it wasn’t accessible, like it’s gonna take up half your day, you got other stuff to do.
Like, so I can understand it from that point of view too. It’s a frustrating and unfortunate situation I think all around and I hope the answer is to educate people and to make them understand why it’s really important and that would hopefully provoke them to take action on it and make the situation better for everybody.
Natalie Garza: I almost feel, though, like the website owners, like the business owners, like this should have gone back to the developers. Go check out our other episode on accessibility and website development [education].
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. And then it gets hard to even put it on the web developers because it’s not getting included in curricula when they’re taking courses and learning how to do web development. It’s not being included, which kind of communicates that, “hey, that’s not something that’s that important. If you’re interested, you’ll go learn it on your own.”
And so, it’s just a big cycle of, I think a lack of education and a lack of awareness that this is something that needs to be done. That hopefully we can break that cycle and start getting more web developers educated about it, more business owners educated about it, and then that just becomes the way you build websites.
Like it’s not even a question, should we make an accessible website or not? It’s of course it’s going to be accessible, just like it’s going to be responsive and it’s gonna be search engine optimized.
Like you wouldn’t ask a customer, right? “Well, do you want search engines to find your site?” Well, of course they do!
Why else do they have a site? So I think it would be just like that. Like it’s not even a question, it’s just an assumption that this is how we’re gonna do it. I think that would be the ideal situation to get to.
Natalie Garza: Exactly. But, alas, we have the laws of the land that we have right now.
Natalie MacLees: And the imperfect world that we live in.
Natalie Garza: Next statistic that I found. “Repeat lawsuits are common, with one in four lawsuits filed in 2024 involving companies that had already been sued in the past.”(UsableNet 2024 Report)
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I think sometimes companies are very quick to settle these cases, right? Just settle out of court and pay a certain amount of money to the person, who brought the suit against them.
And I think that unfortunately sets up another incentive structure, right, to just say like, “oh, well we can sue those people and they’ll just give us money and won’t even make us go to court.”
So we are unfortunately, I think setting something up like that, and I don’t know how often. Those businesses are actually taking action. The businesses that are getting sued, again, like, I would hope that that was because they had refused to do anything about their website, but I don’t know if that’s actually the case or if it’s something where they’ve started working on it and they’ve started making improvements.
But, you know, it’s not like you can overnight make a website, go from inaccessible to accessible. And so I do wonder if sometimes it’s like, unfortunately they’re already trying and they’re already working on it, and they’re not really getting the room to do that in time. So it’s another tough situation, I think.
Natalie Garza: And not only are there repeat cases for the same companies, there’s repeat filers.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So the same person coming back again.
Natalie Garza: And that leads into the next statistic, “24.5% of ADA lawsuits in 2023. So a year before were against websites with accessibility widgets.” (EcomBack 2023 Report) So if a company gets sued, they’ll settle it. And they could either go two ways: actually try to fix it, or maybe try accessibility widgets, which are not a good idea.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, because they’ll probably see some marketing that says, “oh, make your website accessible in five minutes”, which is very misleading. And then they do that, and then they get sued anyway, because that doesn’t actually work. That’s unfortunate.
And I do think we’re starting to see a little bit of evidence that maybe those widgets actually make a website a target for a potential lawsuit because they are like, you wouldn’t have put that on your site if you didn’t have accessibility issues.
And we know that that widget isn’t fixing a hundred percent of your accessibility issues.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, and they’re easy to scan for.
Natalie MacLees: They’re, they’re very obvious when they’re installed on a site. It’s not a secret.
Natalie Garza: All right, so those are just a few of the statistics. We didn’t get to go over all of them. will make a part two to go through the rest. So with that said, we wanted to introduce a little accessibility testing tool called AAArdvark.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so if you are responsible for a website for a small business or a government entity, and you wanna know what’s the state of the accessibility on that site, come on over to AAArdvarkAccessibility.com. You can scan the homepage for free, find all the issues that are on there, and get instructions on how to fix them.
Natalie Garza: Yes, and with that, we will talk to y’all next time.
