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Court rules grocery store's inaccessible website isn't an ADA violation:
A federal appeals court struck a significant blow against disability rights this week when it ruled that a Florida grocery store's inaccessible website did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ruling contradicts a 2019 decision by a different appeals court holding that Domino's did violate the ADA when it failed to make its app accessible to blind people.
[...] Winn-Dixie is a grocery store chain with locations across the American South. Juan Carlos Gil is a blind Florida man who patronized Winn-Dixie stores in the Miami area for about 15 years.
A few years ago, Gil learned that the store offered customers the ability to fill prescriptions online. Ordering online saves customers time because prescriptions are ready when the customer arrives. Gill also preferred to order prescriptions online because it offered greater privacy. In court, he testified that ordering in person as a blind man made him "uncomfortable because he did not know who else was nearby listening" as he told the pharmacist his order.
Unfortunately, the Winn-Dixie website was incompatible with the screen-reading software Gil used to surf the web, rendering it effectively useless to him. Incensed, Gil stopped patronizing Winn-Dixie and filed a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Gil argued that the inaccessible design of the Winn-Dixie website discriminated against blind customers like him because it forced them to order prescriptions in person, a process that is slower and offers less privacy.
In his lawsuit, Gil also said he couldn't access two other features of the Winn-Dixie website: a store locator function and the ability to clip digital coupons and automatically apply them at the register with his loyalty card.
[...] The ruling runs directly contrary to a 2019 decision by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, which covers California and several other Western states. In 2019, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Domino's had violated the ADA by failing to make its online ordering system accessible to blind customers. Plaintiff Guillermo Robles claimed that this violated his rights under the ADA, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.
[...] Hence, while the website itself might not be a place of public accommodation, an inaccessible website impedes blind customers' access to the Domino's restaurant—which clearly is such a place.
This situation—where two different appeals courts take divergent positions on the same legal question—is known as a circuit split. For now, businesses in Western states will be required to follow the Ninth Circuit's broad interpretation of the ADA and make their websites accessible. Meanwhile, businesses in the three Eleventh Circuit states—Alabama, Georgia, and Florida—won't have to worry as much about making their websites ADA compliant.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @02:55PM
OK, their website sucks because they sucked the AJAX pipe too long. Got it.
This person was not refused access or service - he just had to go through another process and Winn-Dixie was happy to give him his stuff and take his money.
What he complained about was the equivalent of being told that to get into the fancy restaurant in his wheelchair would require him using the wheelchair ramp, rather than by the stairway. It's as if he wanted some new kind of stairway that were somehow wheelchair accessible.
If Winn-Dixie had said something like: "Working eyes or GTFO!" or "All orders must pass through our javascrippled system!" or something like that, then there would not have been reasonable access, but that's not what happened here.
Asking for subtitles in movies: plausible. Asking for talkies to be banned because deaf people can't take in the subtle intonations of Tom Cruise's voice: idiotic.
(And yes, before the outrage brigade start wetting themselves and weeping great hand-wringing tears, I am disabled, and other people in my family have other disabilities, I'm well aware of how tragically hard this whole thing is and how we're oppressed by the demented shitlords that run our lives for their own amusement. Go get your tragedy-porn elsewhere, I don't give a fuck.)