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ADA Lawsuit Watch: A Bank and Two Colleges Join a Wave of New Website Access Suits

By Ryvo Team

AccessibilityADA LawsuitsRetailFinanceEducation

What's new

Up to now, this series has followed a pretty steady story: online stores and apparel brands, filed mostly in New York and Florida. This batch stretches that story in two directions we have not seen before. A bank shows up in Bryan v. M&T Bank Corporation, and higher education appears twice, in Djaghouri v. American University of Antigua Inc. and Chambers v. District Board of Trustees of Hillsborough College. Money and schooling, not just shopping carts.

The other shift is sheer volume and the names behind it. A plaintiff listed as Knowles accounts for a long run of these newly surfaced filings, from Knowles v. Better Baseball, Inc. to Knowles v. Biltwell Custom Motorcycle Corp., which points to filings arriving in coordinated groups. Luxury names turned up too, including Jimenez Arroyo v. Richemont North America, Inc. and Gazonni v. TUMI USA, LLC.. And the map crept west again: Rice v. Mayo Retail Internet Services LLC was filed in Wisconsin.

What the lawsuits claim

If this is the first post of ours you have landed on, here is the short version. These are lawsuits filed under the ADA (the Americans with Disabilities Act). Each one is an allegation, not a decision by any judge. The common thread is a claim that a company's website puts up walls that stop a person with a disability from doing what everyone else can do online.

The filings in this group do not lay out the code line by line, but suits like these typically raise the same recurring complaints. Here is what each one means in everyday terms, tied to the businesses in this batch:

  • Pictures with no spoken description. A blind visitor uses a screen reader, which reads a page aloud. For a retailer like TUMI or a golf brand, a suitcase or a jacket photo with no text behind it in the code becomes silence, so the shopper cannot tell what is even for sale.
  • Forms that assistive software cannot read. Suits commonly claim that account fields, login boxes, or application forms are not labeled clearly. At a bank, that can mean a screen reader user cannot tell which box holds the account number. At a college, it can mean an applicant cannot finish an enrollment form without help.
  • Pages you cannot move through with a keyboard. Many people never touch a mouse. If a menu, a course catalog link, or a checkout button only responds to a click, they get stuck partway through the task.
  • No headings or page landmarks. Screen readers lean on headings to jump around a page. Without them, a long tuition page or a product listing turns into one endless block a listener has to sit through.

Banks and colleges hit these problems harder than most because their most important tasks are online and time sensitive: paying a bill, checking a balance, submitting an application before a deadline. When the front door of the website is hard to use, there is often no easy offline substitute.

Who should pay attention

Based only on the pattern in this batch, retailers of all kinds still draw the most filings, especially specialty and luxury sellers whose sites are packed with product photos and multi-step checkouts. Those pages are quick for anyone to test: open a product, try to buy it with a keyboard and a screen reader, and the result speaks for itself.

What is worth noting this time is the reach beyond shopping. A bank and two colleges in the same group suggest that any organization where customers or students handle important business online, forms, payments, applications, can land on a plaintiff's list. And with a filing now in Wisconsin on top of the usual New York and Florida courts, being outside the busiest states offers less cover than it used to.

What to do about it

You do not need to write code to close most of the gaps these suits describe. You can do this yourself or hand it to whoever manages your site:

  • Add text descriptions to every meaningful image. Write a short line of alt text for each product photo, logo, or diagram so a screen reader has something to announce. This directly answers the missing-description claim.
  • Label every form field. Make sure each box on your login, checkout, contact, or application forms has a visible, connected label. This closes the gap where assistive software cannot tell one field from another.
  • Try your site with the keyboard only. Unplug the mouse and move through your key tasks using Tab, Enter, and the arrow keys. If you cannot reach a button or finish a purchase, neither can a keyboard-only visitor.
  • Add clear headings to long pages. Break tuition pages, policy pages, and product listings into labeled sections so a screen reader user can jump straight to what they need.
  • Turn on a screen reader and shop your own site. Use the free one built into your computer or phone and attempt a real task start to finish. The spots where you get lost are the spots a customer flags.

For a fuller walkthrough in everyday language, read our plain-English accessibility guide. When you are ready to see where your own site stands, you can run a free scan of your website.

This post summarizes allegations from public court filings. It is not legal advice, and no outcome described here has been decided by a court unless stated.