Is your Website ADA Compliant? Owners of websites may find themselves the target of an ADA Website Lawsuit if they have not done enough to make their websites ADA compliant. Avoiding such lawsuits is requires the company to first determine if they may be exempt from such requirements. Companies that have physical stores may be at higher risk, but so too are businesses that only offer online products or services or sometimes just information. The Courts are somewhat divided on the extent to which, or if at all, the Americans with Disabilities Act (DA) applies to websites in general, and if when applicable, if there needs to be an association ( a “nexus”) with a physical location that does business with the public. However, even if a particular website can avoid the requirements of the ADA, it is often in a company’s best interest to make its website compliant with the ADA just to avoid having to deal with the possible threat of an ADA website lawsuit, and assisting potential customers with “readability” by the use of screen readers that can help both the customer and the business in generating sales — a true win-win. If, for example, your website has no physical “nexus,” and your business is located in a state that has adopted what the Karlin Law Firm calls the “No Place, No Case” doctrine, a lawsuit might still be filed in a state that has not adopted the No Place, No Case doctrine. That other state may or may not have “Jurisdiction” over the claim. Even if a case is eventually thrown out, a company still must spend time and money that could be used on improving the business to get rid of the lawsuit.
To avoid ADA website lawsuits, businesses should address four separate areas of concern, only one of which is how the website tests for WCAG 2.0 or WCAG 2.1 compliance using one of the popular testing programs. The other three areas to be addressed are not well known to webmasters and web developers and can only be understood by attorneys with experience in what ADA website Plaintiffs are looking for and what the Courts and the Department of Justice have been saying. The Karlin Law Firm are ADA defense lawyers who have resolved over 1,400 ADA cases and has consulted on over 1,000 more. Over half of the ADA cases now being handled by the Firm are ADA website claims.
Plaintiff’s lawyers filing many ADA website lawsuits include the Pacific Trial Attorneys and Scott Ferrell, Joe Manning and the Manning Law Firm both out of California, Kevin Tucker in Pennsylvania, Joseph Mizrahi of Cohen & Mizrahi in Brooklyn, New York, and Yaakov Saks of Stein Saks out of Hackensack, New Jersey, as well as the Wilshire Law Firm and Kousha Berokim both out of Los Angeles, California