After the Great Polar Vortex of 2018 receded to the north we found a number of new cases under the melting snow. Here is the state of ADA litigation in early 2018.
Website lawsuits
We discussed some of the most recent website accessibility cases in our earlier blog, “What is an ADA accessible website.” In some ways Buchholz v. Aventura Beach Associates, Ltd., 2018 WL 318476 (S.D. Fla. Jan. 5, 2018) is another such case, but the Court’s explicit application of 11th Circuit law is illuminating. The plaintiff alleged that a hotel website was not accessible, but did not allege he ever tried to stay or intended to stay at the hotel. Following earlier 11th Circuit authority the Court began with the premise that a website was not by itself a public accommodation, but that it was required to be accessible if it was a service of a public accommodation. This is based on the “gateway” theory that the website is, like a physical front door, the gateway to the physical public accommodation. The Court then took the next logical step – if the plaintiff didn’t care about going to the physical premises then he had not suffered an ADA injury from the inaccessible website. This goes back to the front door idea. If a plaintiff never intends to go into a store then the inaccessibility of the front door has not injured him. As the case law slowly evolves this decision is an important step on the way to defining just what kind of injury must be associated with an inaccessible website. More