This is the second case in a 5-part post series where I breakdown a lawsuit being filed despite there being an accessibility overlay / widget being used. Below are links to the posts for all five cases.
For more background on this series, refer to the Walters v. Venum case.
Williams v. VaporDNA, Case 1:20-cv-02294-JGK in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Law
Title III of the ADA, 42 U.S.C. § 12181 and 28 U.S.C. § 1332
New York City Human Rights Law, N.Y.C. Admin. Code § 8-101
Website
www.vapordna.com
Overlay
No mention of an overlay was made in the filing.
As of July 24, 2020, VaporDNA.com has the AccessiBe icon in the lower right hand corner of its website. I have opened up the toolbar menu of options so you can clearly see this in the screenshot below.
To be fair to AccessiBe, the earliest I can see their presence on VaporDNA.com is May 2, 2020 which is after the lawsuit was filed so they could have been added as a hopeful quick fix after the fact.
Claims
(I’m using mostly the plaintiff’s language.)
- lacks alt text
- failure to add a label element or title attribute for each field
- same title elements on each page
- broken links
Plaintiff’s Lawyer
David P. Force of Stein Saks, PLLC.
Notes
The claims of inacessibility are written the exact same, word for word, as the complaint filed in Cruz v. Rockwell Time, Inc. by Joseph H. Mizrahi of Cohen & Mizrahi LLP.
Maybe there’s a template floating around the circle of law firms filing in Southern District of New York.