In 2015, just 57 businesses were sued over website accessibility. Last year, over 2,500 were.
One of the most prolific law firms overstated a client's disability in legal filings and received thousands of dollars in the process. ⬇️
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Frances Kalender is legally blind.
Her condition, retinitis pigmentosa, is eating at her peripheral vision.
She can’t drive but can still read. She doesn't like text-to-speech software because fast, robotic-sounding speech can be hard to understand.
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But in 13 lawsuits filed against online retailers last year, her lawyers gave a different impression, saying Kalender couldn't browse the internet without those tools, known as screen readers.
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Kalender said she never saw the lawsuits that were filed in her name.
When a reporter from Insider read the sections of the legal complaint to her, she seemed confused.
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Website accessibility is a real problem for blind users, and lawsuits can be an effective way to get businesses to update their sites.
The payouts from these cases, which can be tens of thousands of dollars, go mostly to the lawyers who file them.
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Courts have been mixed on whether the Americans with Disabilities Act, which allows people to sue hotels, shops, and other “public accommodations” that discriminate, covers websites and apps.
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People can recover damages from government agencies and employers that discriminate against them, but they can't in public-accommodations cases, disability-rights lawyer David Ferleger said.
In those cases, they can only win payment of their legal fees.
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Some lawyers and serial plaintiffs have created a small cottage industry of these claims, settling for a quick payout and a promise to fix the website.
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In early 2020, Kalender saw an ad on Facebook offering free laptops to blind or legally blind people.
She signed up, took notes on websites that triggered errors at a screen reader training, and was told she could connect with ADA compliance lawyers.
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Kalendar met with Joseph Mizrahi and Yaakov Saks, lawyers who file more website-accessibility lawsuits than almost anyone else in the country.
Just two days after being introduced to Kalendar, Saks' firm was filing lawsuits with her name on them.
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Over several months in 2020, she was part of a slew of litigation — she reviewed the accessibility of websites, lent her name to lawsuits, and received $500 from each settlement.
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Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, said a distortion of disability in a legal complaint in the way Kalender described would be troubling.
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Subscribe to @thisisinsider to read the full story on website accessibility lawsuits and how lawyers get businesses to pay up.
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