Got sued for $75k over an ADA website claim. Didn't give in. Didn't settle. Won | Hacker News Reader

Got sued for $75k over an ADA website claim. Didn't give in. Didn't settle. Won

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Says in the thread that it only cost $15k in (unrecoverable) legal fees.

we need to be prosecuting cases of barratry more often and with much stiffer penalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry_(common_law)

"This unscrupulous conduct is particularly evidenced by Plaintiff and her attorneys who, in the last two years alone, have filed at least 74 different boilerplate (and virtually identical) complaints in state court."

Good grief.

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docInde...

Eh, if you have to pay 15k to get a no-op settlement that doesn't sound like a win.

Maybe a draw but being down 15k still sounds like a loss. The other side also lost but that doesn't make you a winner.

Here were their claims. screen reader couldn't:

  * determine when an item was in the cart
  * describe the various payment options
  * find navigation links
  * describe images (no alt-text)

My first thought - why are screen readers so bad in 2024? We have amazing OCR and great image-to-text models. Will this style of lawsuit exist in 1 year?

What, are YOU working on the next-gen screen reader that we need to hear about?

If the web were semantic, as it was initially promised to be, then we wouldn't be having a lot of these issues. But alas, the web has mostly been about display without a care about machines being able to read and comprehend its content.

Now we have a celebratory post from a person happy they were able to dodge the bullet of making their site accessible to their disabled customers. Think about that. Take all the time you need.

Keep in mind that in these cases, it’s rare that anyone makes any kind of good faith request for the site to be fixed beforehand, instead jumping straight to the lawsuit.

Generally, that’s how you can tell that this is just a sneaky cash grab and not any kind of legitimate ask.

Keep in mind that in these cases, the people have made good faith requests and have been routinely ignored and now no longer waste their time doing so. Don't blame others for YOUR failure to adhere to the law.

I read a similar story on reddit yesterday [0]. It looks like these lawyers have taken a page off of patent trolls by engaging in similar extortion schemes, suing thousand of small business in hopes the businesses will settle to avoid costly legal battles. But these kind of predatory practices can just straight-up kill a new business who can't afford to them pay off.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1femkbo/sued...

ADA is a well-intentioned but ultimately horrible piece of legislation; it needs to be repealed and replaced with something else less ripe for abuse.

A quick search of the law firm that filed the NY lawsuit led me to a different firm that maintains an interesting list: https://www.karlinlaw.com/plaintiffs-filing-ada-lawsuits/

Context?

https://trellis.law/case/36047/524049-2023/nunez-yugely-v-be...

Same case without the paywall: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/DocumentList?docketI...

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