This is Getting Doggone Ridiculous!

Another aspect of the article in the Digital Journal that raised a red flag was the fear mongering approach taken to market their product. This was the original reason Ken texted me the article, the first part of the title of that article seems a bit extreme, “265,000 Website Accessibility Demand Letters…”. Why do I say that?

This year, Jason Taylor from UsableNet analyzed the number of web accessibility lawsuits by mid-2021 and extrapolated that there will be just around 4,200 lawsuits filed in Federal Court this year over web accessibility. Accessus.ai claims “recent industry estimates” indicate that there are 265,000 demand letters annually. That’s over sixty-three times as many demand letters! Now granted there will always be far more demand letters than lawsuits (the latter actually cost money to file and serve), but that number seems a bit inflated.

The reality is, unless we talk to every plaintiff attorney or every business in this country, we’ll never know the true number of demand letters. It would have been nice if the article provided a link to the “recent industry estimates” that Accessui.ai is referring. This way we could see how they came up with that number. This “estimate” is questionable because there are only about 1.8 million online retailers in the United States and my guess (and it’s only a guess) is that the vast majority of these are individual micro-sites on services like Etsy, Shopify, etc. To claim that more than one-sixth of these sites nationwide are being hit by demand letters each year seems a bit absurd. 265,000 demand letters is a bold claim to make—and certainly not the kind of assertion that I would push as a headline without a reference to back it up.

In the same article, CEO and General Counsel Gerard Wittstaft goes on to claim that the “average financial settlement for an ADA accessibility demand letter is $25,000 and includes attorney’s fees on both sides along with the compliance remediation to satisfy the demand for injunctive relief.” In our opinion, this claim seems a little larger than it should be. Why do we say that?

At Converge Accessibility, we offer litigation services to help defend against these professional plaintiff legal complaints and our experience has been a bit different. The clients we have worked with rarely pay more than $10,000 to $15,000 in settlements—and often less than that. Even our multinational brand clients (who obviously have a ton of exposure and very very deep pockets) rarely pay more than that. If a plaintiff attorney could just send out 100 random demand letters and pocket $2.5 million in settlements, then clearly the entire bar is in the wrong line of business. If your attorney is even momentarily contemplating paying over $15,000 to settle a web accessibility demand letter, they should contact us or read resources such as our Expert Witness in Web Accessibility Cases blog series. The likely reality is that Acceessus.ai’s claim that web accessibility demand letters are “typically” settled for $25,000 is just another figure pulled out of thin air to support their fearmongering marketing effort.

Yes, there are too many demand letters and American businesses are often facing extortion by professional plaintiffs. But let’s keep things in perspective; for most companies, web accessibility litigation is not going to be the main factor driving them out of business. Instead, these lawsuits are just an incredibly aggravating annoyance.

As we can see from the video walkthrough of Accessus.ai’s own website, the solution they are pushing does not make their site 100% complaint. In fact, the AI used to attached alternate text to the images alone shows that AI doesn’t always get it right. In this case, it likely just causes more confusion to those who are relying on accurate alt text for those images.