Arx Fit Website Not Accessible to the Visually Impaired Class Action

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) tries to ensure that handicapped persons are able to have the full enjoyment of goods and services of any place of public accommodation. The complaint for this class action alleges that Arx Fit, Inc., a maker of fitness equipment, has a website that is not accessible to blind or visually impaired persons who use standard screen readers. This case is brought under the ADA and also under New York City Human Rights Law.

The class for this action is all legally blind individuals in the US who have tried to access Arx Fit’s website and as a result have been denied access to the equal enjoyment of goods and services, during the appropriate statutory period. A New York City Subclass has also been defined.

The ADA is quoted in the complaint as saying, “No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation.”

The legal definition of blindness, according to the complaint, is “a visual acuity with correction of less than or equal to 20 x 200.”

Visually-impaired people need access to the Internet, which the complaint says has become “a significant source of information, a portal, and a tool for conducting business, doing everyday activities such as shopping, learning, banking, researching, as well as many other activities…”

Fortunately, screen reading software now exists that can help the blind and visually impaired gain access to websites that can, for example, read and vocalize alternate entries for website elements, for example pictures. The complaint says, “For screen-reading software to function, the information on a website must be capable of being rendered into text.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that set standards to achieve accessibility for the blind and visually impaired. Big businesses and government agencies generally use this standard.

Unfortunately, the complaint alleges that Arx Fit does not. When plaintiff Josué Paguada visited the website in January 2021, the complaint claims, he “was denied a user experience similar to that of a sighted individual due to the website’s lack of a variety of features and accommodations…”

For example, the complaint says, “many features on the Website lacks alt.text, which is the invisible code embedded beneath a graphical image.” Without this, he could not determine what products were on the screen. Other features “fail[ed] to contain a proper label element or title attribute for each field” so that the screen reader cannot “communicate the purpose of each element” and the user cannot know what to enter in the various fields.

Also, because some pages contain the same title elements, which means that the screen cannot “distinguish one page from another.” Broken links were another problem.

The complaint asks that the website be made accessible to visually-paired persons and the blind.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Civil Rights
Tags: Accessibility, Americans with Disabilities Act, Blind or Visually Impaired, Civil Rights