Finger Lakes Times: Wineries face ADA website woes

By: Michael J. Fitzgerald

Spring in the Finger Lakes usually prompts lengthy conversations among winery owners about weather, prospects for the growing season and when tourists will start packing tasting rooms.

But this spring many of those same owners added a potentially costly and worrisome coffee-klatch topic: A blizzard of nuisance lawsuits filed because their winery websites are allegedly not compliant with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

A few of the wineries have reportedly settled the cases for sums of between $10,000 to $15,000 to avoid the costs of lengthy litigation.

On the advice of legal counsel, most of the targeted winery owners are declining to say much publicly.

But examination of the lawyers’ tactics filing these ADA-related lawsuits makes it seem more like ambulance chasing than an attempt to fight for justice for the disabled.

If it was about justice, the wineries each should have received a polite letter alerting owners about the claimed problem and asking them to fix it.

Instead, winery owners have discovered a federal lawsuit filed against them.

Are these winery websites out of compliance with ADA rules about how a website should be set up for disabled access?

Unlikely.

“There are no clear guidelines,” said Adam Morey of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York. “And there is no requirement in the law to let them know something is wrong.”

Most people think of the ADA as the federal law that requires curb cuts on streets, elevators in public buildings, wheelchair access, braille signs and a long list of other well-known assists for disabled persons.

But the 1990 law was enacted a year before the World Wide Web even became publicly available and has yet to be adjusted to a world that now relies so heavily on the internet.

Overall, the ADA works well to the benefit of many people.

But in the last few years court decisions in New York, Florida and California have held that the ADA applies to websites, too, opening the floodgates for enterprising, aggressive law firms.

The problem is that without any clear federal guidelines for how the ADA applies, it has spurred an open season to file legal challenges against nearly any website.

Morey said nearly every industry is facing ADA website-compliance lawsuits.

“Universities, even Apple, have been sued,” he said.

As an added kicker, there is no guarantee any business or entity can’t be sued a second time even after settling one lawsuit, he noted.

The lawsuits are proving lucrative for attorneys who reap the vast majority of the funds from these settlements. It’s also spawned a booming market for website developers who contract to rejigger websites for businesses to make them — supposedly — ADA compliant. But without federal guidelines, these web entrepreneurs may be repairing websites in ways that still leave businesses open to legal challenges.

The solution seems obvious.

The federal government should immediately draft regulations and guidelines for what websites need to do to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, giving a reasonable amount of time for businesses to make needed alterations.

Period.

That this hasn’t been done so already is unconscionable given the thousands of ADA website lawsuits and settlements already filed and settled.

And the lawyers currently wearing out printers cranking out lawsuits against vulnerable businesses? They should pull up their legal briefs and do something more useful.

They could sue the federal government, for example, demanding clear, reasonable website guidelines be added to the ADA.

Or even better, the attorneys could aim their legal talents in the direction of the Mexico-U.S. border where they could help the growing thousands of asylum seekers in need of legal representation.