Single Plaintiff Filed 37 Inaccessible-Website Class Actions Since June

The website of the online kitchenware store Food52.com is rife with barriers that make it inaccessible to those who are visually impaired or legally blind, in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, alleged Manhattan resident Ramon Fontanez in a class action Wednesday (docket 1:22-cv-09584) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York.

When Fontanez tried to shop the store in June and again in October to buy a spatula for his wife, he was unable to do so because the Food52.com website was “not properly designed” to accommodate his screen reader, rendering it impossible for blind and visually impaired users like him to “navigate a website on their own,” it said. Among the deficiencies, Food52.com “is not properly coded to read all of the information located within the links,” said the complaint.

Court records show the Food52.com class action was the 37th that Fontanez filed through the same Manhattan law firm, Mizrahi Kroub, since mid-June, all in the Southern District of New York. The docket activity in those cases shows that while a few progressed toward discovery, many more were settled within a few weeks of being docketed. Fontanez, for example, sued one of his largest defendants, L’Oreal USA, on June 29 (docket 1:22-c-v5534), and the case was settled July 22.

Instead of reading a product’s entire description, the Food52.com website is coded foronly portions of the descriptions, the class action said. This prevents the blind and visually impaired from making informed choices about products to purchase as “a sighted New York customer would,” it said.

Improper coding also prevents the screen reader from navigating the website using the cursor, "as doing so will cause the narrator to skip over text on the page," said the complaint. This causes the blind and visually impaired delays "that are not experienced by sighted New York customers," it said. It also impedes their ability to make informed buying decisions, because their screen readers are deprived access to the same text available to sighted New York customers, it said.

Plaintiff Fontanez "has been repeatedly denied the ability to make a purchase" at Food52.com, said his class action, This denial of access demonstrates that Food52.com "is engaging in acts of intentional discrimination," especially because "simple compliance" with the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.1) of the World Wide Web Consortium would provide the blind and visually impaired "equal access to the website," it said. Food52.com did not respond Thursday to requests for comment.