San Diego County CU Must Face Claim Over Website Accessibility, Court Rules
California's Fourth Appellate District overturns a trial judge who had dismissed the complaint shortly before the scheduled trial.
A California state appeals court has revived a visually impaired man’s disability discrimination case against San Diego County Credit Union over its website accessibility, an issue that broadly has presented liability issues for credit unions.
The plaintiff who brought the lawsuit in July 2017 has relied on special software that can turn visual information on a computer screen into sound. The complaint, which asserted a claim under California civil rights law, alleged the credit union’s website was incompatible with the software and posed “numerous access barriers.”
California’s Fourth Appellate District on Friday overturned a trial judge who had dismissed the complaint shortly before a scheduled trial. The appeal court’s decision doesn’t resolve the broader question of whether a website is a “public accommodation” within the meaning of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA.
The appeals court concluded “ADA Title III liability can attach if the plaintiff shows a connection between the alleged disability discrimination on a website and the plaintiff’s ability to access and/or enjoy the benefits of the entity’s physical location.”
Lawsuits brought under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act alleging website inaccessibility have exploded in recent years. But the rising tide of federal litigation appears to have flattened, according to a recent report from the management-side law firm Seyfarth Shaw. In 2019, there were 2,256 ADA website-accessibility lawsuits filed in federal courts in 2019, just two fewer than the number of complaints filed in 2018. The report did not track the number of ADA-related suits in state courts.
A representative from San Diego County CU, which has $8.3 billion in assets and 422,000 members, was not immediately reached for comment Monday morning.
The plaintiff, represented by Pacific Trial Attorneys, is seeking an injunction that would require San Diego County CU to take steps to make its website “accessible to and usable by visually-impaired individuals.”
The California appeals court acknowledged that courts have “not yet articulated a single clear standard” on the ADA’s public-accommodation element.
Still, the court panel said, “most of the federal circuits and one California Court of Appeal have held a disabled plaintiff can state a viable ADA claim for alleged unequal access to a private entity’s website if there is a sufficient nexus between the claimed barriers and the plaintiff’s ability to use or enjoy the goods and services offered at the defendant’s physical facilities.”
The U.S. Justice Department has broad authority to issue ADA regulations, but the agency has not provided specific guidance about website accessibility. “The fact that the DOJ has not yet issued specific regulations does not bar the courts from addressing these issues,” the appeals court said in its ruling.
San Diego County CU’s lawyers at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton had urged the court to uphold the dismissal of the lawsuit. The attorneys argued, among other things, that federal lawmakers have not embraced website accessibility standards.
The lawyers argued, as summarized by the appeals court, “that courts have no jurisdiction to require a private entity to alter its website to comply with the ADA because the United States Congress has the exclusive role to establish website standards, and Congress has not established such standards.”
“Even without these standards, the courts have the authority to interpret applicable ADA provisions and apply them to website accessibility issues,” the appeals court said.