An explosion of lawsuits is not making websites more accessible
Bill Dengler is trying to become an Italian citizen. He has all the documents ready to go. But Mr Dengler, an American software engineer who was born fully blind, cannot make an appointment with the Italian consulate in San Francisco. Its booking system uses a colour-based calendar, which is not legible to his screen reader, a device that delivers a website’s content in audio form. And, perhaps because slots fill rapidly, rules prohibit him from hiring someone to make the appointment on his behalf.
What are Mr Dengler’s options? This being America, he could, of course, sue. The government largely relies on private citizens and their obliging lawyers to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the federal law passed 33 years ago to protect the civil rights of disabled people. This deputisation has resulted in tonnes of litigation, some of which has done more for lawyers than for disabled people. In the past five years, website-accessibility lawsuits have surged to comprise about a fifth of such claims. According to UsableNET, a company that both tracks litigation and sells services to help clients prevent it, plaintiffs have filed more than 16,700 digital-accessibility lawsuits in state and federal court since 2018.
The ADA only permits plaintiffs to recover attorneys’ fees. But New York and California, where the vast majority of cases are brought, allow plaintiffs to tack on state-level claims to their federal cases and sue for damages. The financial incentives for both plaintiffs and lawyers are hard to ignore. “I think that this was a gravy train that people jumped on,” says David Stein, who defends businesses. The country’s most active law firm, according to UsableNET, appears to have been founded in 2020; the fourth-most-prolific opened in 2021. Serial plaintiffs abound. In a single month in 2018 a blind man in Queens filed 43 lawsuits. In the year from January 2022, six people,…
2023-08-31 08:03:12
Original from www.economist.com
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