Don’t Get Sued Because of Your Website

Chris Beytes

Websites and other digital tools have to meet Americans With Disabilities Act regulations and there are green industry businesses being targeted with lawsuits for not doing so. This is especially critical to know about with the rise in the number of plant and garden
e-commerce sites due to the pandemic. At least 30 horticulture businesses have been targeted by these nuisance lawsuits (all from the same New York plaintiff and law firm) since the beginning of the year; one estimates they’ll be spending $30,000 to $40,000 to settle their suit.

AmericanHort hosted a webinar March 11 on this topic titled “ADA Website Compliance—the Do’s and Don’ts” featuring Jeremy Horelick, VP of Business Development for the company ADA Site Compliance. In this excellent webinar, Jeremy discusses ADA website compliance, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), current and past litigation that highlights these cases, and some primary websites criteria for your site to become website compliant. He says there have been at least 4,000 such suits filed in the U.S., many of which copy and paste language verbatim from one another. He adds that these attorneys set up the suit to make you prefer to settle out of court—paying their fees in the process, of course.

You can find the archived webinar at hortknowledgecenter.org. GT