Blindsided: Protecting Your Retail Website from Frivolous ADA Lawsuits
Your retail website might be a lawsuit magnet and you don't even know it!
Imagine your website is suddenly the target of an ADA accessibility lawsuit... and you never knew there was a problem! It's one of the fastest-growing legal threats facing independent retailers, with thousands of claims filed every year and many businesses getting hit more than once.
Here, Dane Cohen joins Greg McNeil and Bobby Graczyk of 216digital, to break down why these frivolous lawsuits are surging, who's behind them, what they can really cost your store and most importantly how to protect your business.
In this session, you’ll walk away knowing:
Why retail websites get targeted and the red flags that can make yours an easy mark
What a claim actually costs, from the settlement to the copycat suits that often follow
The practical steps you can take now to protect your site and take the target off your back
-
Webinar Transcript
Blindsided: Protecting Your Retail Website from Frivolous ADA Lawsuits — Webinar Transcript
Dane Cohen: Okay, welcome to another week, another discussion. All Things Retail, presented by us here at Management One. Thanks for joining. We're gonna start out with a little bit of ground rules, as always. First off, the biggest question that we always get, yes, we will be sending this out as a recording, so we hope you stay for the full. discussion, but if you have to jump off, we know how retail is, we will be emailing you the recording, and of course, it's always available on our YouTube channel. Also, we love interactions, so please, the chat is open, the Q&A is open. Ask questions as we go along. If anything pops up, you have a question, for me, for one of our experts. We would love to hear from you. We want to keep this as interactive as possible. So, let's start out in the chat. If you want to just say who's on and say hello, we'd love to hear from you. I'm gonna introduce my guests in just a moment, but this is a really interesting topic today. And it is always our mission here to bring you the latest in what's going on with retail, and today we're going to protect Your blind spot, or a potential blind spot. We're bringing in the experts from 216 Digital to talk about ADA risk mitigation. Now, this may be a new topic for you guys out there, but it's one that could quite literally bite you in the butt. So, let's get ahead of it, let's learn from the experts. We're talking with Greg McNeil and Bobby Graczyk from 216 Digital. Gentlemen, how are you today?
Greg McNeil: Great. And it's great to be here, Dane. Thanks very much.
Dane Cohen: Alright, well, it's great to have you, and I see we have, some people flowing in. We have Andrea, Jennifer, Jennifer Shorter. Andrea, good to see you both. To, to regulars on our podcast, series. So, I'm gonna start out, and humor me for a second here. Okay? I'm just a… I'm gonna speak for a retailer here. I'm not that big of a business, I'm not one of the big box stores, you know, I have a small e-commerce presence, you know, I'm a Main Street retailer. Why do I have to worry about ADA compliance?
Greg McNeil: Oh, that's a great question. And a lot of vendors, a lot of merchants feel that very same way. Why me? Why me? I'm just a small guy here. Well, unfortunately, this is a predatory business practice that is done by a number of law firms. We'll get into the details on it a little bit later, but by our estimates, there's around 48 law firms that have the business model of filing these things day in and day out. And, for the most part, they're targeting small and medium-sized businesses. So, we see, just about every week, mom-and-pop operations getting hit with these things, shamefully so.
Bobby Graczyk: Looks like we might have lost a ding. Give him a second to come back in here.
Greg McNeil: Yeah.
Bobby Graczyk: I saw somebody in chat say they got filed with UNRU. Yeah, that's a really popular angle that these law firms take, especially in Florida.
Dane Cohen: Well, we're live…
Greg McNeil: is?
Dane Cohen: Anything can happen, we're live, so… Sorry about that little computer internet dropped out for a moment. So, you were saying, Greg, I'm not sure where you ended, but, let's, let's get back to it.
Greg McNeil: Yeah, so, a lot of merchants feel as though I'm just small enough that there's no way that they're gonna find me, but the fact of the matter is, that's exactly the people that they like to go after. More than not, they go after small merchants out there. It's only 36% of these cases that get filed against the big boys, and that's only increased over the course of the past few years. So it's your small mom-and-pop operations that are in industries that are selling online, you know, industries such as healthcare, supplements, things like that. We see these people get hit all the time.
Bobby Graczyk: And you said Main Street Businesses Day, and that's a really good way to put it, because a lot of the times, these are just small, you know, local storefronts on a Main Street somewhere, and we actually think these folks will literally walk down Main Street, take notes on who's out there, and we'll see a little flap of lawsuits just on, like, a small town in Colorado, or, you know, a small town in Indiana. And it's like, suddenly we're talking to a bunch of people from a town we've never heard of, but we've got 10 appointments with everybody who sells on that street.
Dane Cohen: So, okay, so I'm gonna admit my lack of knowledge on this topic here. I actually thought, because when I was in a retail working for a family-owned retail business, we did get hit with… with a lawsuit. And I was under the impression that there was, like, a governing committee that was looking out for this ADA compliance, but you're telling me there are just 48 law firms out there, predatory law firms, just coming for small businesses?
Greg McNeil: Yeah, exactly. And these cases, we'll get into the cases a little bit later on that they put together. But, you know, on the surface, if you ever read one of these, they look as though a blind person came to a particular website, they tried to use their screen reading software unsuccessfully and couldn't transact, and therefore they were aggrieved. And decided to sue. But actually, in studying these… all of these cases, what we've learned is it's these 48 law firms, predominantly, they account for somewhere in the neighborhood of about 90% of these law… lawsuits. And they use scanning tools to figure out who they're going to target, so it's very, very gamified. This isn't the way that they're put together. This is not the way that these cases read at all. And so, what they do is they run three scanning programs to figure out who they want to file on. And, they do that day in and day out. And they have a certain number, that we call a threshold, a number of accessibility errors, and if your website happens to be over that number, bam, they hit you. If you're under, they leave you alone. It's that gamified.
Dane Cohen: And so let's just roll back a second, because I think that that was a great point you just make. Like, someone may assume that an aggrieved blind person, or someone who genuinely has a, you know, is trying to use your website, is actively bringing a lawsuit, right? Because they are genuinely impacted, but that is not the case. So, can you just explain for a moment to everyone. what is ADA? Where does this… let's, like, roll back. Let's roll back a second. What is ADA compliance? What are we actually talking about here?
Greg McNeil: Do you want to get into the weeds on it, or stay at a high level?
Dane Cohen: Stay at a high level, but what is ADA? Like, you know, again, we hear the term a lot.
Greg McNeil: Right.
Dane Cohen: But what does it mean? What are we actually… what are they protecting? Whose rights are they… is it supposed to protect?
Greg McNeil: Sure. So, a little bit of history here. In 1990, Bush I passed the ADA laws, right? So this protected people with disabilities so that they got equal access to things. And the intent there was to give them access to things such as restaurants, libraries, what have you. places of public accommodation, right? And that was physical access for them. So they actually, they came up with laws that dictated the size of stalls, things like this, and, you know, physically, exactly what kind of accommodations you needed to have legally.
Dane Cohen: So a great example with this would be, like, a ramp in front of a store to enter into a store. That's a great physical example of…
Greg McNeil: Precisely, yeah. Great. And back about a dozen years ago, through case law, it was deemed that suddenly websites became a place of public accommodation. So they got through into this law. that was created when websites really didn't exist en masse the way that they do today. And so, what they didn't do, though… so all of these websites now suddenly go under these laws. And it's just in a general sense, what they didn't do is go back and legally define what constitutes compliance versus noncompliance. And that's really what's opened up this big can of worms. So, it's just a gray area. And that's where these 48 predatory law firms came in and saw an opportunity. And boy, did they take advantage of it. Today, you've got, over 5,000 of these cases that get filed each and every year. And we don't know how many of them, how many, in addition to that, are demand letters. And demand letters are simply a threat to file, where they put together the whole case, but they don't file it yet. They put a letter on top of the case, and they say, enter into negotiations with us, our poor, blind client couldn't navigate your website, and if you don't enter into negotiations with us in the next 10 days, we're gonna file this thing that's attached to this thing. It's nuts. So we have no idea how many of those things go out every single year. So it's really just a horrible, horrible thing that these guys have figured out that they can do to exploit the system legally. And so, we take a view of, you know what? Let's go ahead and drill down. Let's figure out exactly how these guys are putting together these cases for real, and let's see if we can't beat them at their own game. And it took a lot of time, but that… we feel like we've come up with some keys that anybody can utilize to really help protect themselves, so that they don't get exploited by these bottom feeders.
Dane Cohen: And we're gonna jump into the ways that we could protect ourselves, but I'm gonna come to our first question, and this is gonna roll into one of my questions. So, you're telling me that there are just predatory law firms out there that are essentially blackmailing small independent retailers, or mid-sized independent retailers. And this leads me into a question from Monica, who said, I thought that this was illegal. Shouldn't this be illegal? Why is this not, covered under some protection? Why is this able to happen?
Greg McNeil: You know, and it really should be. But it's… unfortunately, it's perfectly legal. And unfortunately, what happened was, through case law, they just determined one day, they ruled, the courts ruled, that these websites across our country were all subject to the ADA laws of 1990, but they didn't go back and shore it all up. And because of that, you just have this gray area. And, so it is unfortunately very legal, and it's legal extortion, is what I would call it.
Dane Cohen: Legal?
Bobby Graczyk: And beyond that, you said something about enforcement bodies, Dane, so there is no enforcement body for the ADA. Unfortunately, the de facto enforcement body for the ADA has become these litigious plaintiffs, and actually, they try to avoid any visibility to the actual enforcement bodies, being the higher-level courts and federal judges, by intentionally targeting small and medium-sized businesses, because they know that if you do the risk calculus and you do the cost calculus, that it's going to be cheaper for you to settle outside of court. So that case is never going to go in front of a judge. So this is… the validity of what they're bringing to the table is really never called into question, because most of these businesses just have to kind of fold, and you'd rather pay them $8,000 to go away than pay 50 grand to fight it. And so the $8,000 to go away never goes in front of a judge. These folks get to carry on and keep doing this because, you know, it would take somebody to get the wrong per… them targeting the wrong person with really deep pockets to actually fight this. And when that does happen, we see interesting responses from judges, where they say, what are you talking about, that your blind user wanted to buy hiking equipment, and they wanted to buy a bicycle, and they wanted to buy mirrors, and they wanted to buy fishing equipment. Like, they have the most broad interests of anybody I've ever met in my life, for one, but two, it doesn't seem like that's stuff that blind users are really going to get much use out of. And then those guys get chased out of that jurisdiction, they prop up a practice in another jurisdiction.
Greg McNeil: By the way, Bobby has seen it all. He is my chief of staff, and he has led over 1,100 of these projects for us, and he just and his team come back and say, look at what they're trying to buy now, allegedly. It gets pretty funny.
Dane Cohen: So the mirror could be a red flag.
Greg McNeil: A little bit.
Dane Cohen: Just…
Greg McNeil: Absolutely.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so we have some people, and by the way, in the chat section, I would love if you put in if you've been affected by this. I saw, I think it was Fred earlier that was affected, Eric Nelson joining us. He's been hit two times, and then Natalie. Ironically, she got a letter yesterday, so this is great timing, and this just goes to show, this is real. This is impacting real businesses. It's not some theoretical scare tactic that we're talking about. This is actually happening. But… I want to talk about something that Eric mentioned here, and we're going to get into a little bit of a controversial topic. So Eric says, the second time I got hit with the lawsuit, I had an ADA compliance application. And so… here's what I'm gonna get from a lot of retailers here, and I'm gonna speak for some of our retailers. You know, maybe you're using Shopify, maybe you're using another point of sale, or another back, you know, another hosting service for your e-commerce. But there are tons of widgets out there, right? I've downloaded an application, I have the, you know, we've all seen it on the website, the little pop-up at the bottom. I'm protected, right? Eric here just got hit a second time. Why is Eric getting hit? He's protected. He's got the widget.
Bobby Graczyk: Yeah, so there's a class of products called Accessibility Widgets. There's a ton of them, like you said, and what they claim is that you can do, you know, a little bit of… a little bit of money every month and install a JavaScript snippet, and then you have this all-in-one Swiss Army Knife-type solution that's gonna give, that's gonna make it easier for people with multiple different types of impairments to use your website, so… Obviously, that sounds great. These are all well-funded companies, they have great salespeople, they're very polished. We were actually partners with a lot of these overlay providers when they first started entering the market, because what they sell sounds really great. We ended up talking to blind users and judges and lawyers about this, and what we found was primarily that blind… Not just blind users, but anybody with a specific disability is gonna have their own assistive technology that they love to use. So, for instance, blind users have screen-reading software like VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS. Very difficult for them to learn how to use these tools, but these tools have been developed over, you know, a decade, and they're very hardened, they're very feature-rich, and blind users have a very strong preference in which ones they like to use. For instance, like motor impaired users, users that can't use the mouse, just like blind users might be using alternative input devices, or users with cognitive impairments might have certain assistive technologies. So, these solutions try to pack all of that into one product, but the problem is, they don't do really anything super well. And beyond that, they intercept a user with a disability's ability to use their own assistive technology. So, if I'm a blind user. I love NVDA, I've purchased the license, I've learned how to use it for the last 10 years, and I'm really comfortable with it. If I go to a website that has one of these screen overlay softwares or accessibility widgets, I can't use my own assistive technology, and that's gonna make me very upset. It's gonna make me offended that you've removed my ability to use the assistive technology that I know and love. So, beyond that, they've just… frankly fallen out of the good graces of these judges, they've fallen out of the good graces of these plaintiffs, and we believe they're actually getting people targeted with these lawsuits, because the way these folks are figuring out who they want to target is really straightforward. They're going to websites that can kick out lists of URLs in certain industries on certain platforms. So, for instance, they'll say, give me a list of everybody who sells in the United States on Shopify with revenue less than $50 million annually, and then they're gonna go run all of those URLs through their automated scanning tools. Well, now you've given them another parameter. You can… they can say, go give me a list of everybody on Shopify in the States, $50 million annually or less, and they have an accessibility widget installed. And then you have another vector of which these folks can approach you, because they know you've taken some kind of shortcut, whereas Really, what good web accessibility looks like is a human being going in and auditing these websites and making improvements to the source code of the website and the content.
Dane Cohen: Yeah, we have a lot to unpack here. Okay. So, you're actually telling me… That downloading one of these screen overlays, using one of these apps, using one of these widgets, can actually put you More at risk?
Greg McNeil: Zoomie badge.
Dane Cohen: Say that one more time.
Greg McNeil: The little man? It's a Sumi badge. The little man at the bottom of the screen is. Effectively, that's what it turns your site into. And here's the reason why. It's because 48 of these law firms, they all know that. They all know that when you've got the widget on board, that means that you've taken a shortcut, and it means that the underlying code hasn't been fixed. So, for them, they're like, oh, yeah, they're seeing green whenever they see the little man. And one of the law firms that we're going to talk about a little bit later, I'm going to introduce the top 10 of filing these things. One of them in particular, 63% of all of his ADA cases are against companies that have the widget on them. So they're doing their research, just as Bobby said. They're going to build with, they're looking by industry, and looking to see who has widgets, and bam, there's their list. They just give it to the admin, let the admin work it up, and they've got their case.
Dane Cohen: Okay, and I do want to… that's… that's insane, insane, especially because retailers are going there thinking they're gonna get helped, right? This is a solution, so that is, really powerful information, guys. So, before we.
Greg McNeil: One more piece to that, to that. We can either do it now or later. But here's the thing. You bring on one of those, and you think, okay, now I'm good. They told me I'm good. The vendor that sold me this, I'm good, I'm good. This is great. I'm never going to get sued again. And then you go through this, you go down this road of negotiating your settlement agreement for this current one that you installed it for, right? And then, so… so you… you discuss, you agree upon what the price is gonna be, they give you the paperwork, and guess what it says in that paperwork? that you're going to comply over the course of the next 18 to 24 months, you're going to make your website as reasonably conformant to WCAG as you possibly can. And what does not qualify for this Compliance is a widget. Now what? It's double… double jeopardy, right?
Dane Cohen: Oh, so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Okay, so we're gonna get into it, you know, we're gonna kind of transition into some solutions. We want to give, you know, we really want to give the attendees here, and anybody watching on replay, the best guidance on what they can do moving forward. But I do just have one quick question before we get there. Can you give us a range of what we're talking about in terms of cost to a retailer? And the cost of a business?
Greg McNeil: So, do you mean, what they ask? What these law firms ask.
Dane Cohen: If you get a demand letter, if you're getting sued, if they're trying to, you know, you don't want to hire a lawyer, you're just gonna settle, you're gonna negotiate, what are we really looking at?
Greg McNeil: So their initial ask in these federal cases is $75,000.
Dane Cohen: Woo!
Greg McNeil: Yeah. And the reason for that is that's the max that they can ask for in these kind of cases. So it's… it's… now, these don't… we haven't heard of any that have settled that high, but still, some have settled for a little less than half of that, and it's… it's crazy. The numbers are just crazy. And so, what we believe this is all about is really, understanding the game that these 48 law firms are playing them, and playing on this… all retailer, these small and medium-sized retailers, predominantly across the country, and then beating them at their own game.
Bobby Graczyk: Perfect.
Dane Cohen: Wow. Okay, I do have a question, but Paul, first, Paul says, they want 5K from me, he knew someone that settled for a lot more, so this is a real cost, but Eric asks, right. is it too cost prohibitive to do this in-house with source code changes? Maybe it's just a better idea just to settle and move on, but how many times could you get hit with a lawsuit like this? Is it… is there a limit, or could it just keep going?
Bobby Graczyk: It's happening indefinitely, and in fact, you're a bigger… unfortunately, you're a bigger target once you get hit by one. I think about 41% of the lawsuits this last year in 2025, were against somebody who had been targeted before, which is… Really unfortunate. I mean, you're just on a shorter list once you get hit with one, and they're pretty much gonna keep coming back to that same pool of targets. Is it too prohibitive? You know, if you… if you try to approach this as, we want to make our website completely accessible to anybody with any type of disability, that is unreasonable for almost all small businesses, and that's why we recommend taking a different approach of, if your business outcome, your intended business outcome is, I don't want to get sued for this, then approach it from that angle of, what can we do to mitigate our legal risk? And we're gonna have some takeaways for you, here in our slide deck, but, If you try to… if you try to do the whole kit and caboodle and achieve WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 AA conformance, yes, that's out of reach for most small or medium-sized businesses, so it's more pragmatic to understand the approach that these plaintiff lawyers take, and again, like Greg said, kind of beat them, or they have their own game and kind of rug pull them.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so, I'm feeling a little hopeless, I'm feeling a little helpless, but I know that the team at 216 Digital is gonna help give me, at least some, guidance on what we can do. So why don't we get up the slides, and let's give Let's give some, you know, actual, tangible things that small businesses can do in order to protect themselves, or if it does, that letter does come to you, you know, give a little bit of understanding of what your options are. Alright, so let's talk about how we protect against these lawsuits. Okay, so we have these boilerplate lawsuits, I'll let you guys jump into it, and I'll ask questions along the way.
Greg McNeil: Yeah, so the first thing to understand is these all read the same. They're boilerplate. They all read as if a blind person came to a website, tried to use their screen reader, couldn't, and therefore they got mad and decided to sue. But realistically, you can forget about even reading most of the lawsuit. It comes down to just a few bullet points in this. After they've figured out that they're gonna sue somebody, because this is all, these all happen because of these 48 law firms that do this day in and day out, and they all have a handful of plaintiffs that are plug-and-play. These people just, are used as contractors, and they're named in these suits. And after these people have decided that they're going to sue, then at that point, and only at that point, do they go out to the website and just Spend about 10-15 minutes on it, and with a screen reader, to just collect a few informa… a few points to put into their case, to make it look legitimate. But these are boilerplate. On the next slide, we get into the meat of that, which is really that it's all driven by these law firms. Now you've got the 10 top law firms that are probably responsible for about 90% of these. these cases. And number 8 there on your list, those are the guys that I was referring to a little bit earlier when I said 63% of all of the ADA cases that they file are against companies that use those screen readers, those screen overlays. So, but this is a predatory practice, you know, the blind people that couldn't get a, couldn't transact with you, forget about that, because that's a fairy tale, the way that these are constructed. They're constructed very quickly, and they decide to, to, They figure out who they're going to file on, really very specifically, based upon running these simple scanning programs to, and if you're over the limit, over these numbers, they'll file. If you're under, they move on to the next.
Dane Cohen: And so, just remind me, what are those limits?
Greg McNeil: What are those limits? Yes. The numbers?
Dane Cohen: If you're over the limit, just what are we referring to there?
Greg McNeil: Yeah, so, Bobby's going to talk about that in just a second. I want to kind of frame this just a little bit more in terms of the threat, and then I'll pass it over to Bobby to talk a little bit about dividing that down, you know, the whole task in terms of all of the issues that have to be addressed on a site. And he'll talk through that, of narrowing the scope, but before we get to that… So, we start off with, you've got these 48 law firms, and the fact of the matter is, they're all looking at who their neighbor sues, right? And those become the number one prospects for them. So that's the reason why you see these numbers go up and up and up of copycat lawsuits. Meaning, these guys, they're just looking at who their neighbor is gonna sue, and then suddenly their neighbor that got sued and didn't do anything to really, appease these scanning tools. and didn't do anything to make sure that they wouldn't look like a good mark later on, unfortunately, they get sued again. It's kind of like quicksand. If you don't understand what these guys, how these predators are working, and the scanning tools that they utilize. and clean up all those reports to make them look good, you're gonna be hit again, probably.
Dane Cohen: So this is a compounding issue.
Greg McNeil: It is.
Dane Cohen: Yeah, and… and this is really fascinating, that if you get sued by one, you could get sued by another, because they're actually use… they're playing off each other. So they're… oh, yeah, yeah, okay, let's go.
Bobby Graczyk: They're very insular, very Kabbalistic, they're definitely all in bed together. Yes. So that comes to my part of what you were asking with, like, what are the scanning tools these folks are running. So just to kind of, again, reframe this. these conversations are always… you'll hear WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.2 kicked around a lot. If you're having conversations about web accessibility, people are going to talk about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So that's a really nice set of standards that's, it's an open source, community-developed set of standards in tandem with the folks who create the internet and users with disabilities. And they've come up with this awesome gold standard of how to make websites perfectly accessible and really accommodating to anybody with any type of disability. Now, as people in the chat have said, that's not possible for most small and medium-sized businesses. That's an insane amount of work to achieve it, and to maintain it is nearly impossible for any company of any size. So, we've put together this pyramid graphic to kind of demonstrate what you should go after here. So you see at the bottom, at the foundation of this pyramid, is ADA risk mitigation. So about 40% of the accessibility barriers on any given website can be detected by automated scanning tools, but they represent about 95% of your legal risk, because these folks are not sending human beings to these websites to do human manual audits. They're using automated scanning tools to quickly and easily evaluate these websites because they're in the business of volume, and because they want to file as many of these as possible and just get as many settlement dollars as possible. So they're not doing very much due diligence. They're doing very little work, they're running these automated scanning tools. So what we know is, for small and medium-sized retailers, that it's much more pragmatic to just focus on the exact things that these law firms are looking for, rather than trying to conform with this kind of pie-in-the-sky standard that, by the way, the WCAG guidelines are not a legal guideline. There's nothing in any, in any communication from any judges or federal courts that say that that is what constitutes web accessibility.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so… so what we're saying here is that we actually want to beat the scanners. That's the… that's the mission here.
Bobby Graczyk: That's exactly right.
Dane Cohen: Okay.
Bobby Graczyk: And then, in our takeaways, we're gonna have some specific scanners that you can actually go, you can use, they're public… they're popular tools, they're free tools, and they're actually really reputable tools, that if you run them on different views on your website, you can get ahead of it.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so we have Linda in the comments saying, is there any hope for small businesses? And Linda, it sounds like there is. There's some… there's some silver… well, I wouldn't say silver lining, but there's some… there is some actions to take, and I… I love this, you know, kind of… forward-thinking, let's beat the scanner, so we're not even coming up on their radar in the first place. Okay, so what are these three simple scanning tools? What can we tell our people to… to look into? Is that… is that now, or are we… are we.
Bobby Graczyk: We're finally there, here's some things you can do here today, yes.
Dane Cohen: Alright, we're there. Let's… Linda, we have hope for you.
Bobby Graczyk: So, I mean, first things first, what you can do is, the only thing on your website that you want to acknowledge web accessibility at all, again, yank a widget if you've got it, you do want to post an accessibility statement. So, if there's anything on your website that acts as just a really quick ward against these lawsuits. You want to post an accessibility statement. Now, you do not want that statement to claim that you're conformant with any set of guidelines or standards, but instead, you want to say, we care about your experience, here's a phone number and an email address you can reach out to if you've encountered any difficulty making a transaction. We'd love to either remove the barrier you've encountered or help you facilitate that transaction. So, we do know that the simple presence of an accessibility statement on your website can be very powerful. If you don't have one, you can get one from your defense attorney if you have a general counsel you work with, or there's tons of boilerplate ones online that are perfectly fine. Just, again, ensure that you're not claiming conformance with any guidelines or standards.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so let's tell the people, what are they looking for if they want to, you know, just grab something that's a boilerplate on the internet?
Bobby Graczyk: You want it to be brief, succinct, and again, you don't want to claim, sorry, go ahead, Dan.
Dane Cohen: Well, what I'm actually specifically asking is, I love the brief and the guidance, but I'm gonna do a search, I'm gonna ask AI, I'm gonna do a Google search, I'm looking for an accessibility statement for my website.
Bobby Graczyk: That's correct, yes.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great.
Greg McNeil: give you a copy.
Dane Cohen: Oh, that…
Greg McNeil: If any of your listeners would want a copy of one, we can send out an example.
Dane Cohen: That would be great. That would be great. Okay, so that is… number one. Number two, Greg or Bobby.
Bobby Graczyk: So, yeah, finally, the tools you should be using when you're figuring out… when you're trying to reduce your risk. So, the three most popular tools these guys use that are publicly available free tools are WAVE by WebAIM, that's created by a non-profit organization that… we love that tool, it's super accurate. Lighthouse, that tool is built into every Chrome browser. maintained by Google, and again, it's a very reputable, accurate tool. And then Axe, that's created by a company called Deque. They're probably the biggest players in the accessibility space, and they offer that tool as a courtesy. So what you want to do is you want to go to the most important views of your website, or the most important templates. So you don't need to go to every single page on your website, because that's what we're trying to avoid, is doing less work, not more. You want to figure out a subset of pages on your website that represent your entire website. So, for most e-commerce websites, that's going to be the home page, a category landing page, a product landing page, the cart, and the checkout. You want to run these three tools on every single one of those pages, and you want to simply remediate any of the barriers that are discovered by these automated scanning tools. Now, in many cases, it's going to find issues that are going to require a developer or a programmer to go in and fix them, but in a lot of cases, it's going to find issues with simple content, simple content assets, whether that be a product description, a blog post, you know, a little bit of copy on your homepage, and they're going to be really simple things, like go write alternative text on this image, or, you know, this button needs a little bit more context. So there's gonna be plenty of stuff that you can go do, or if you have a developer on staff, they're gonna know what to go fix. as well.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so Bobby, you're throwing a lot out of us, so I wanna… I wanna try to take this in as, as, you know, kind of… layman's terms as possible. So, we're saying that we have these, 3 or 4, you know, kind of… tested scanners that you could put onto the website. Now, we're gonna have to do a follow-up here, because we are, we're having such a big response in the chat of people asking for that copy, asking for these tools, so we're gonna work with 216 Digital and get you a tearaway sheet that we'll send out after this, because the response is huge in the chat, so we're gonna cover you. We will get you these resources. So let's go to number 3, perform manual testing.
Bobby Graczyk: So, some of these law firms do actually… they'll send a plaintiff to your website, whether or not you look… you look bad on these scanning tools, and just do a really cursory human test. So they're spending about 2-3 minutes just quickly using screen reading software. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you guys, this, like I said, these tools are difficult to learn, they're not extremely straightforward, but if you want to be abundantly cautious, I would say it's worth, whoever's doing the current work on your website, whoever is maintaining your website, adding a requirement that they try to do things with a screen reading software and with their keyboard. So, they're actually going to be sending… some of the… a subset of these law firms are sending a blind user to the website, and again, just spending a couple minutes. So, if all that is, is having somebody go and try to make a purchase without their mouse, that'll get you very far in understanding how accessible your website really is, and where your gaps are. I know that's a really confusing concept, because most people have never considered even… that people are trying to interact with their website without a mouse, right? For sighted users, it's just kind of a completely alien concept. But these folks are using their keyboard and screen reading software to navigate your website, so if you want to be abundantly cautious, there are free tools, like VoiceOver already exists on your Mac computer or on your iPhone. NVDA is a really popular screen reading software that you can go install for Windows and Mac OS. And you just try to use your website with your eyes closed, and it'll give you a really good sense of, like, maybe your navigation is not working properly, like, there's a drop-down in your navigation that, requires a mouse to hover to use, whereas a blind person isn't able, or a motor-impaired user isn't able to use the mouse to hover over that. It'll quickly uncover any of these really critical issues that commonly exist on websites. Just in case, you know, if you want to be abundantly cautious, one of these law firms decides to visit your website anyway and give you an actual manual check.
Dane Cohen: Okay, and then, finally… We want… and this is the most surprising one to me, we actually want to avoid those screen overlays and accessibility widgets.
Bobby Graczyk: Yeah, we've gone into great detail on that one, so probably don't need to go much deeper, but the last thing I'll leave you with is you're better off without them. Whether… if you take anything away from this call today, it's that you should probably remove your accessibility widgets. That's the most impact… if you are a current consumer of one of those accessibility widgets, the most impactful thing you can do right now to reduce your legal risk Would be to yank that widget.
Dane Cohen: Okay, you heard it here, you heard it here first, folks. Okay, we do want to move to, some Q&A. I'm seeing the questions come in on the chat, so is there anything else, on the slide deck that we want to review before we move over to Q&A?
Greg McNeil: Just to put an exclamation point on that, I think you've got one slide on the overlays?
Bobby Graczyk: Yeah, we had one more slide on the overlays. I can pop it up right here, just so y'all can see it, but again. It's just demonstrating that the amount of these lawsuits filed against somebody with a widget is on the rise. Like, we're seeing that number go up. The percentage of the share of these lawsuits against somebody with a widget goes up every single year to the point where now it's one in three of these lawsuits is against somebody with one of these widgets.
Dane Cohen: Okay, and if we could just go back one slide… So, I just want to recap this real quick. We're going to send this out as a tearaway sheet to give, kind of, explicit understanding for anyone. We'll put out that statement, we'll give you those links to the scanning tools. And then we, we know that the number one, avoid those screen over, overlays. Okay, now let's, let's get to the questions. Okay, so my first question here, we did have a lot of, of comments about insurance. So I have it here, I just gotta scroll back up. Our cyber insurance policy had a rider that would protect against future litigation. So how does insurance policy factor into all this?
Bobby Graczyk: But.
Greg McNeil: So, normally the way that it works is they will cover the legal costs, but generally they do not cover any of the web development costs. That's been our experience. And usually they want to use their internal, you know, lawyers. The insurance companies do.
Dane Cohen: Gotcha, so it's not going to prevent against the lawsuit, it would just, you know, help you kind of get some of that insurance money if you do get sued and you need to hire lawyers. It'll help cover those costs. Okay, great. Okay, let's move on. We have a question… from… Okay, from Stephanie, there is now a Claude plugin to Shopify, which is an incredible tool. Can we use the Claude plugin to fix some of these issues, or give us guidance on how to fix the plugin that goes into Shopify?
Greg McNeil: Bobby?
Bobby Graczyk: Yeah, I think Claude would do an amazing job improving the inclusivity of your website. I think that it's certainly going to fix some of the issues that are going to be found in some of these automated scanning tools. It's important to know… it would be important for Claude to have the context of the exact outputs of these specific automated scanning tools, because this is truly so gamified that improving the inclusivity of your website is not always what these scanning tools are looking for, because they're automated tools. all of these always require human reviews. Automated tools can generate false positives, they're very picky, they don't always correctly interpret the code, so you can do everything right and end up with issues on automated scanning tools. So, so long as you're using those automated scanning tools as the source of truth, and Claude has the context of what specific fixes those tools are looking for, I think that's a great idea.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so it's a… go.
Greg McNeil: For your listeners, for those of you that would like to have us take a look at their sites, we'd be happy to do that. That's a complimentary thing that we'd be more than happy to do. We'd run a scan for you, and then show you exactly how you look to these predators.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great. And Nico, could we get the contact info for 216 Digital in the chat there? So we're saying that you'll actually do a free scan, for our attendees here, and they could actually, you know, discuss with you and understand what the scan results mean.
Greg McNeil: Yeah, we would scan it, and then we'd do a Zoom meeting with them, a little 10-15 minute meeting, to talk through the results of it, to show them the exact… the accessibility thresholds for errors, and then where they stand in relation to those, and what they can do about it.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great. Thank you guys. That's a… that's a great, little perk here. Alright, I have, Bobby, I think you're gonna probably have to take this one. It's a pretty, specific question. To what extent is IP, or region blocking, an effective strategy for stores that are more brick and mortar, or regional e-commerce? Focus versus nationwide internet sales.
Bobby Graczyk: That's a really good question, and it's one we get all the time. So, basically. If your e-commerce website, if somebody can possibly make a purchase, you know, in other jurisdictions, like New York, Florida, California, then you've got to follow those rules. Even if you don't get a lot of customers coming from those locations, you still gotta… you still gotta abide by that. Now, if you're geofencing, and you're not allowing users of certain regions to go there, I will say there's new markets for these lawsuits opening up every day, and most of the country has some law firm or some set of law firms that are filing in those jurisdictions. So almost all 50 states have law firms that are doing this predatory practice. Obviously, the vast majority are in New York, Florida, California, and Indiana, but still, every single day, we're seeing new law firms pop up. all throughout the country, because they're being chased out of more of bigger jurisdictions, and they're having to prop up practices in smaller jurisdictions. Now, one thing you don't want to do is you do not want to block scanning tools from scanning your website altogether. When these folks are determining who they're going to target, to them, that appears dishonest. And so that's basically a green light to file against you. So if these people know you have a web presence, they go to scan your website, and their scanners return no issues, or they're blocked, then they're gonna go ahead and move forward with preparing a claim.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so the… listen, guys, this is a tricky, a tricky situation to navigate, so, you know, thank you so much for bringing some clarity to this. If there's any more questions from the audience, I'm going to ask you to put it into the chat now, so we can make sure, while you have the experts on. I do have a question from, Eric, Eric is saying, so what services does 216 Digital offer?
Greg McNeil: So, what we do is we scan your site, and if you have a case, for those of you that do have a case or a demand letter, we review the case or demand letter, and then we talk about it with you. So, we run the targeting scanning tools that the predators run. And we do a Zoom meeting with you to show you exactly where you stand. And then we talk about putting together a very small project to remediate all of those errors. And then, at that point, if you do have a case going, you're going to have the maximum amount of leverage to go up against these guys and get your best settlement. Our clients, after we finish crushing these errors that these cases are based upon, and the false positives. Routinely, they settle their cases for between $3,000 and $6,000. So, the gentleman that spoke up a little bit earlier with his comments, $5,000, he did really well in settling his case. Our clients, though, after we finish our work, it normally takes us about a week. At that point in time, they've got all the leverage they need to, number one. Just club these guys, crush these guys, in their negotiations. But number two, they're no longer gonna look like a good mark for the other 47 law firms that are out there and circling the waters. And that's a really probably the most important point for this group. It's because our process is one that we… and I don't want to make this too salesy, but we're really proud of what we've put together over the course of the past 9 years. Because we see a lot of fat cats that are getting rich, putting together big projects on this. That's not what this is about. What this is about is being pragmatic and understanding all of the errors that either could get or have gotten people sued. And remediating those as quickly as possible, and then teaching you how to maintain your site and stay below these thresholds to never have this happen again. So we set you up on a little monitor, and that monitor is a dashboard that we built that incorporates all of their scanning tools, and it kicks off and it runs in the cadence that you decide, whether it's a month, every quarter, whatever it happens to be. And it reports to you if you happen to be close to being a mark, close to these thresholds. And if you happen to be, you're gonna get an email, we get an email, and that way, right. And so that's worked out really, really well, because, as Bobby said earlier, you know, last year you had 42%, somewhere between 42% and 45% of these cases were copycat lawsuits, meaning the people were stuck in quicksand, they keep getting hit, you know. And so our clients, after we do this process and we train our clients on how to maintain this, they don't get sued again. And that's what we're really proud of. And, well, a big one that we're also really proud of is the fact that we've kept hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the coffers of these predator law firms.
Dane Cohen: Right, which is a… we don't want them getting any richer, that's for sure. Okay, we have Barry… Barry asks, and this is, I think, on the lines of what you were just saying, does a settlement… I think you may have mentioned this in there, but just very quickly, does a settlement prevent future claims?
Greg McNeil: No, it does not. You have to be vigilant on this, and that's one of the things that we'll talk about for those of you that do want to take us up on, you know, having us do a scan, there's no cost or anything for that, to do a scan and meet with you and just share your exposure on this. We'll also talk about, you know, how that looks and what it means to protect yourself from ever, ever having to deal with one of these things again. But it is just that simple. This is gamified. They've got admins, these 48 law firms, they've got admins that run these scanning tools all day long, so their cost is really low to put together these cases. And we want to make sure that you're not really, really a good-looking mark out there. And that's kind of what we do on this.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great. In your, okay, we have one more question. I'm gonna try to… we got a lot coming in, so I'm gonna try to rapid-fire through some of these. I'm guessing I know the answer to this one. Bobby, maybe you could take this for Shopify sellers. What about tools like Alttext.ai? I'm guessing that may be a screen layover?
Bobby Graczyk: No, it's, there are, like, automated bots that go in and they write all text on your photos for you. Honestly, I don't have any issue with those tools, just… These scanners aren't very smart. They don't know if you've written correct alt text on images, they only know if you've written alt text on images. So your homepage could all say, image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and, you know, image of Paris, France, and it could have nothing to do with that, and the scanners aren't going to know any better. So yeah, if that allows you to quickly and easily write alt text across images across your website, that is probably something you can do.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great. Fred asks, in your opinion, why has the government not addressed this issue?
Bobby Graczyk: I believe they have. There's just been a lot of changes of guard in the last, you know, few years. There's been a lot of regime changes, you know, and so one administration will start to get far along on it, and they'll lose their progress, another administration will take over, they'll have a different opinion on what this should be or should not be, and then another administration will take over, so… There has been movement, it's just there's… none of these efforts really have enough time to get enough momentum for something to actually happen within 4 years, for the most part.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so we gotta be self-reliant on this one. Okay, how often… okay, we had this answered. Eric asked, how often do we need to scan the website for remediation? We answered that.
Greg McNeil: So, if I could jump in on that. It depends upon how often you update your site. If you update it less often, then great. Maybe it's quarterly. If you update it all the time, you're very active on it, then monthly.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great. Does… does demos… does demonstrating… Work that you are actually trying to resolve it and strive for compliance do any good.
Greg McNeil: No.
Dane Cohen: Monica, the…
Greg McNeil: That's a short answer.
Dane Cohen: That's the answer.
Greg McNeil: I mean, you can show goodwill all day long, but the fact of the matter is, all these guys want, the 48 law firms, they want their payday. That's really what they want. Hey, you've done a good job, now pay me a lot, and we'll go away.
Dane Cohen: So, dang, Monica says dang. So, so again, it sounds like the best course of action is really trying to beat the scanners, so that you don't even pop up on the radar in the first place. Okay.
Greg McNeil: So, to put it just a little bit differently, I liken it like this. So, what it comes down to is when all of the errors that their case is based upon, you've effectively pulled the rug out from underneath these guys, right? when you go to negotiate with them, after all of these are done. So, at that point in time, they've got a decision to make. They either spend more time on this and more money, well, they don't have an appetite for that, or they drop their ask. And that's kind of the way that these things go when it comes to getting your best settlement in these.
Bobby Graczyk: When it comes to prevention, Specifically, what you want to do is… I don't think we've talked… we've talked a lot about responding to litigation. Preventing them in the first place is the exact same exercise. It's still running those same scanning tools. Getting ahead of it is smart. You just need to make sure that you're attacking it from the right angle. You know, if you put a bunch of effort into it, and you're not looking at these scanning tools. The answer is no. If you're being preventative and you're working with somebody who knows the answers to the test, basically, and you're putting effort in the right place, then it will help prevent a lawsuit in the first place. Now, once one's been filed, they're gonna get their payday, like Greg said.
Dane Cohen: Gotcha, okay. Emily asks, she missed the first few minutes. Don't worry, Emily, we gotcha. She asks if this is mostly targeted at e-commerce websites, or is it also, informational websites that are targeted?
Bobby Graczyk: It's almost entirely e-commerce, but it's a little bit more nuanced. If you offer… if you offer public information on your website, so sometimes that's investor portals, sometimes that's your public entity covered under Section 508, then they might come for you, but I would say 95% of these lawsuits are against e-commerce websites.
Greg McNeil: I was hoping that that question would come up. It's, 91% is against e-commerce and food service industry. You've got 2% in healthcare, 2% in fitness and wellness, entertainment and leisure is 1%, and it goes down from there. So, the vast majority of them are e-commerce sites and food industry.
Dane Cohen: Okay, well, that makes sense, right? It's more complicated, more pages, more room for errors, right? An informational website, you could probably have it read off, pretty cleanly with a… so that's good to know, though. Okay, great. Oh, Barry asked, this is an interesting one, maybe we, have an idea here. Have any of these law firms been sued for their uncompliant websites?
Greg McNeil: That's an interesting question, because we oftentimes… that comes up, you know, for the people that have been sued. that we talk to in the meeting, the first meeting, invariably, they'll say, now, I went out to their website and looked at it. They should be sued. They should be sued. They're not compliant. And it's pretty funny, but no, not that I know of. I really don't believe that anybody's followed through on that. But, but we really haven't looked super deeply in that. Bobby, have you heard of any? Any cases?
Bobby Graczyk: No, and I think the reason… the reason is because people start to come down from and start to see reason after they're stopping seeing red, after getting filed on, and they realize that that emotional victory is gonna cost them quite a lot of money to actually file the suit and fight it, so they end up backing off.
Dane Cohen: Okay, and hey, Barry, maybe you could be the Erin Brockovich of ADA compliance.
Bobby Graczyk: We're rooting for anybody who wants to do that, for the record.
Greg McNeil: Yeah.
Dane Cohen: Alicia asks, what parts of the food industry? Is it food industry sites with e-commerce?
Bobby Graczyk: Usually, if you have some kind of ordering or booking system, you can reserve a table, you can order food, even if that's external, which is kind of frustrating, because a lot of these, against food service industry… food service companies, they're gonna say, well, what can I do? I used Toast, or I used some third-party service provider that basically the entire experience is managed by them. that's why they're gonna target you. It's because they know that there's nothing you can do. So, yes, if you can buy something there, if you can buy a gift card, if you can reserve a table, basically if there's any form of interactivity or accommodation on that website at all.
Dane Cohen: Okay, and we are coming up to the end here, so I have one more question from Ryan. I believe we did not answer this yet, and then I have one last question for you guys. Is it always best to settle versus fighting? If you do get one of these lawsuits.
Greg McNeil: Yeah, that depends, but for the most part, I would say yes. Unless you've got really deep, deep pockets to fund this, because ultimately, you know, if you really kind of believe in beating them at their own game, ultimately you're going to settle your case somewhere around 3K to $5 or $6K, right? If you go to the wall against these guys, you could easily drop 100K and more.
Dane Cohen: Wow. Okay.
Greg McNeil: So, for a small business, that's cost prohibitive.
Dane Cohen: Gotcha. Okay, and my last, question, which I wanna… leave with, wait, hold on, we got some more. They keep coming, guys, they keep coming. Alright, this is your last chance, guys, we got 5 minutes left, so, okay, our college was sued for compliance, so that instruction is working hard to remedy that side of things. Okay, great. So that's Monica, and then Ryan says, but settling just puts you as a bigger target in the future. Like you had mentioned. So, well, it sounds like, right, and from what I'm getting here, and I'm just gonna put this into, you know, my layman's terms again, it sounds like settling is more… From the perspective of cost, right, it's gonna be a much… much more cost-effective than actually getting into a big lawsuit, but it does open you up for future lawsuits, but I'm assuming if we take those steps, if we scan the websites, if we get those right codes up, then we're less likely… if we take the widgets off, then we're less likely to pop up again in the future on the radar of these guys?
Greg McNeil: Well, just to reposition, the act of settling really doesn't make you more vulnerable to one of these lawsuits in the future. What does is the fact that you got filed on, right? So if you get filed on, then it's public record, and that's the thing that gives you the visibility.
Dane Cohen: Oh.
Greg McNeil: Once you settle the thing, that kind of doesn't matter in this whole equation there. So… Gotcha.
Dane Cohen: So it's not the settling or fighting it, it is just the fact that the lawsuit was brought up in the first place.
Greg McNeil: Right, that's what turns you into a prospect for the other guys, because they're all reading the same emails out of these, you know, feeders that provide them data about who was filed on the prior day.
Bobby Graczyk: And they will still go check, and check your… they will still run those automated scanning tools, even if you're somebody who's been filed against, you settle, maybe you are on a shorter list, they're still going to evaluate your website and make sure they're catching you off guard, or making sure you're an easy target. So, really, the most important thing is not the outcome of the lawsuit, whether or not you settle or fight, it's do you stick to the script? Do you keep those automated scanning tools looking clean? That is the most important thing with prevention.
Dane Cohen: Okay, so Barry, I'm gonna recommend, because I see Barry has a few more questions coming in, I'm gonna recommend that you take, 216 Digital up on their offer, and take that, complementary scan, so I think you'll be able to get a lot of answers there, because I… again, I know this is a complicated topic, it's a topic that is familiar to some, new to some. So that's gonna be an amazing resource for you. Book that time with 216 Digital. We have Greg's email right there in the chat, and then this way, you could get some answers. We could get… we could get you some concrete answers.
Greg McNeil: Dane, it's pretty easy to book the meeting, also. Open a browser and simply type BookADABriefing.com. That's it. That's all you need to do.
Dane Cohen: ADA Briefing, let's put that in the chat. Nico, if you could assist, I'm trying to put it in here, but my… Setup does not allow me to, at the moment.
Greg McNeil: On the bottom of this screen, BookADABriefing.com.
Dane Cohen: BookADABriefing.com. It does not get easier than that. And if someone does search 216 Digital and comes to your website, can you book it from there as well?
Greg McNeil: Absolutely.
Dane Cohen: Okay, great. So, we have two ways for you to get there. We could email Greg, we could book adabriefing.com, 216digital.com. we're gonna get you that great resource, and again, that's what we like to do to bring our retailers resources that can really help them, protect them, and keep your profits to you, right? We don't want them going to these shark law firms. Alright, well, listen, I think we covered a lot. Again, we are going to send out that takeaway tear sheet, so that you can follow some of these steps. We encourage you to book. To book some time with 216 Digital. Bobby, Greg, thank you so much. I think that this was one of the most interactive with lives that we have done. A lot of questions here, a lot of clarity here. We really appreciate it. Thank you guys for being with us, and thank you for being a partner.
Greg McNeil: Dane, thank you, and thank Management One. This, it was really terrific. If your group wants to have a follow-up, we'd love to do that.
Dane Cohen: Alright, we certainly will. And everyone for joining, thank you so much. Again, we will send this out, as a recording, so you can play it back, visit our YouTube, and we thank everyone for being here. Signing off, that was Management One Live.