A recent video published by the popular Craft Chocolate TV YouTube channel offers an insightful, real life look at how website accessibility lawsuits play out. The video features Dylan, the proprietor of Manoa Chocolate, who shares his personal experience of being sued twice over website accessibility issues.
Dylan’s overall message of being proactive about accessibility will help a lot of website owners, particularly because the video is so honest and straightforward.
Let’s go over some key points from the video along with my commentary.
Table of Contents
You Can Get Sued Again
Dylan candidly discusses how his website was targeted for not being accessible to visually impaired users. Despite addressing the initial issues, his site was sued again for additional accessibility problems. This underscores the importance of knowing the full scope of technical issues and attention to detail.
Importance of Alt Text and Looking Beyond
In his video, Dylan emphasizes the role of alt text for images, a common focus in accessibility lawsuits. While alt text is crucial, it represents just one aspect of the broader technical requirements for website accessibility. Conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA is a best practice because it covers virtually all potential accessibility issues.
However, my ADA Compliance Course is much more focused. This course is razor sharp in that it tells you exactly how to find and fix the accessibility issues that are most likely to lead to a lawsuit.
Completing Checkout
Dylan goes on to talk about making sure screen reader users are able to complete checkout and avoiding broken links. While making the checkout process accessible will capture many potential issues – and broken links are one of the most commonly claimed issues, there’s much more involved. This is why attention to detail is so crucial when it comes to preventing lawsuits.
Cost of ADA Website Lawsuits
Dylan also covered very realistic, if not somewhat conservative figures for settling and defending against claims, stating $15,000 to $25,000 as a potential range. One light silver lining for Dylan was he had insurance, but that insurance still had a $5,000 deductible for each lawsuit.
Being Proactive
The best approach, as Dylan suggests, is to proactively address accessibility issues before any legal action is taken. Dylan’s video will go a long way in boosting awareness and taking action.
How Difficult is Accessibility?
Dylan does go onto say that website accessibility is not that difficult which makes me think he still doesn’t fully understand all that goes into website accessibility, both in terms of preventing demand letters and lawsuits and WCAG conformance.
What heightens the difficulty of website accessibility is there are many people – including digital accessibility companies who claim expertise – that mislead website owners into “solutions” that they don’t need. This only serves to perpetuate confusion and ultimately leads to some website owners being sued again.
Conclusion
The Manoa Chocolate experience in website accessibility will not end up being a complete loss because of the helpful video that was posted on the Craft Chocolate TV channel.
This video will bring more awareness to accessibility and ADA compliance lawsuits and ultimately prevent website owners from being sued.
ManoaChocolate.com is built on the Shopify ecommerce platform and it is one of literally thousands of Shopify websites that have been sued over accessibility.
To learn more about making Shopify website’s accessible, read our guide on Shopify ADA compliance.
And the best path to preventing a lawsuit altogether is to start with our ADA Compliance Course.
