Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery Website Use by Blind ADA Class Action

Visually-impaired or blind people must use screen readers to use websites. However, websites must be constructed so that screen readers can make full use of them. The complaint for this class action brings suit against Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery, Inc., under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), alleging that its public website has not made accommodations for its use by blind or visually-impaired people.

The class for this action is all legally-blind individuals in the US who have tried to access Golden Krust’s website but have been denied access to the equal enjoyment of goods and service, during the appropriate statutory period.

The words “blind” or “visually impaired” apply to people with visual acuity of 20 x 200 or less, the complaint says, whether they have limited vision or no vision at all. The complaint refers to a US Census Bureau report to claim that 8.1 people in the US are visually impaired, with 2 million of them being blind. Some 400,000 visually-impaired people live in the state of New York.

The complaint alleges that Golden Krust’s website, www.goldenkrust.com, is not “fully accessible to and independently usable by” blind and visually-impaired people, which it claims is a denial of its goods and services to such people.

People now use the Internet for information and doing business, including for shopping, learning, banking, and research. Blind and visually-impaired people now have the ability to use the Internet as well, with screen readers that speaks out loud the visual information of websites or displays them on a refreshable Braille display.

However, certain measures must be taken in putting together websites to enable screen readers to use them fully. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards organization, has published a 2.1 version of its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) to aid website owners in doing this. The complaint alleges, “These guidelines are universally followed by most large business entities and government agencies to ensure their websites are accessible.”

The plaintiff in this case, Elbert Dawkins, who is visually impaired, has visited Golden Krust’s website a number of times but has not been able to shop on it as a sighted individual can. The website has a number of barriers to use with screen readers, the complaint alleges, among them the following:

• Lack of alt. text code for graphical images.
• No label element or title attribute for various features, so that the purposes of elements are unknown.
• Many pages with the same title elements, so that the screen reader cannot tell one page from another.
• Broken links, which interfere with navigation.

The complaint “seeks a permanent injunction to cause a change in [Golden Krust’s] corporate policies, practices, and procedures so that [Golden Krust’s] website will become and remain accessible to blind and visually-impaired consumers.”

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