Latest ADA Decisions Highlight FOM's Controversial Role
An Illinois judge alleges various CUs' websites violate the ADA, while a Georgia judge throws out a portion of a similar suit.
According to court documents in the two most recent cases, a U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Illinois threw out a lawsuit against Aurora, Ill.-based Aurora Policemen Credit Union on August 7, finding that because the plaintiff was ineligible to join the credit union, he had no standing or injury in the dispute.
“All the information on the credit union’s website is only useful for people who can become members of the credit union,” the judge wrote.
Because the plaintiff was ineligible for membership, “it is simply not plausible that he intends to access the website in the future,” the order said.
A separate ruling a day earlier in a Georgia District Court rejected claims against Hapeville, Ga.-based Family First Credit Union, finding that the plaintiff had not shown a “real and immediate threat of future injury.”
However, that judge did not dismiss the entire case. According to the order, the judge found that the plaintiff was directly exposed to differential treatment as a person with a disability due to the credit union’s website accessibility and the resulting inability to browse for locations, services and membership eligibility. The court gave the plaintiff 21 days to file an amended complaint addressing the threat of future injury.
Family First Credit Union has 12,500 members and about $100 million in assets.
The cases center around claims similar to those made in over 100 other lawsuits against credit unions: that the credit unions’ websites allegedly lacked text that allowed screen readers to describe the sites’ graphics verbally, contained redundant links that created navigation problems for sight-impaired users and had empty or missing form labels, which made the sites more cumbersome for those users.
Most of those cases appear to have settled out of court, but some credit unions have chosen to fight the lawsuits against them instead. Judges in at least seven district courts in five states have so far thrown out at least 10 lawsuits.
“We are grateful for the court’s favorable ruling in this matter,” Illinois Credit Union League President and CEO Tom Kane said. “Credit unions are greatly supportive of members with disabilities, however, these nuisance lawsuits are simply a brazen attempt by an out-of-state law firm to game the legal system to make money. It is reassuring to see that this scheme will not work in Illinois and ICUL and CUNA are committed to defend credit unions against unfounded accusations like the claims in this lawsuit.”
Though a number of factors can determine how judges evaluate disputes, the recent orders in Illinois and Georgia highlight the critical yet controversial role that field of membership has played in ADA cases against credit unions.
“True, the ADA applies to more people than just those who can be described as ‘customers and clients,’” the judge in the Aurora Policemen Credit Union case wrote. “But that does not mean that an inability to be a customer and client — as is the case with [the plaintiff’s] relationship to the credit union — is not relevant to analyzing whether [he] has alleged an injury in fact.”
Some judges — including the one in the case against Family First — have disagreed with the notion of membership eligibility as a condition of injury, noting that website accessibility issues can prevent non-sighted people from browsing locations, services and membership eligibility information that credit unions typically make available to sighted non-members.
“The injury in this case is not the denial of a sought-after benefit, as appears to be asserted by defendant, but the direct exposure to differential treatment of a person with a disability,” the judge in the Family First case wrote.