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The Curve Has Flattened for Federal Website Accessibility Lawsuits
By Seyfarth Shaw LLP on April 29, 2020
Posted in Title III Access, Website
By Kristina M. Launey & Minh N. Vu
We’ve sheltered in place and finished our tally. The numbers are in for total website accessibility lawsuit filings in federal courts in 2019, they show a small decrease from 2018. The total number of website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court (i.e. lawsuits alleging that plaintiffs with a disability could not use websites because they were not coded to work with assistive technologies like screen readers, or otherwise accessible to them) in 2019 was 2,256 — two fewer than in 2018. In short, the number of suits appears to be leveling out after businesses saw an explosive 177% increase in these suits from 2017 to 2018.
[Graph: ADA Title III Website Accessibility Lawsuits in Federal Court 2017-2019: 2017: 814; 2018: 2,258; 2019: 2,256. *The number of cases that could be identified through a diligent search.]
In fact, the number of federal ADA Title III website accessibility lawsuit filings decreased in the fourth quarter of 2019, contrary to our prediction that the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to review [...]