156: Manhattan Project Peacekeeper, ChatGPT Wrote My Accessibility Lawsuit

In this episode, the team explores a startling trend surfacing in 2026: a massive spike in pro se accessibility lawsuits fueled by artificial intelligence. While AI tools have helped democratize knowledge and skills in some ways, they are now being used to automate legal filings against businesses for ADA Title III violations, often with hallucinated case citations and “legal slop” that creates chaos in the courts. Our hosts discuss whether this automated legal wave helps hold businesses accountable or if this emerging trend will ultimately damage the accessibility movement.

Beyond the legal drama, the team celebrates a major milestone for the Accessibility Checker plugin and highlights why accessibility professionals are a collaborative superpower within any organization.

And the team covers all this while sipping on Peacekeeper Blonde Ale by Manhattan Project Beer Co., an easy-drinking blonde ale that claims to be both neutral and complex at the same time.

Discussion Outline

Celebration & Milestones: Toasting to the Accessibility Checker becoming the #1 featured plugin on WordPress.org. And no, that’s not a typo.
The Accessibility Superpower: Discussing Jared Cuhna’s article on why accessibility specialists act as essential bridges between engineering, design, and end-users.
The Pro Se Surge: Analyzing stats from the Seyfarth law firm regarding the 69% increase in self-filed lawsuits.
AI Hallucinations in Court: A look at real-world examples of judges striking down filings that contained fake, AI-generated legal citations.
Vibe Coding vs. Legal Slop: Comparing the “vibe coding” trend in software development to the low-quality automated legal filings hitting businesses.
The “Time to Cure” Debate: Weighing the pros and cons of California’s proposed legislation that would grant businesses 90 days to fix issues before a lawsuit can proceed.
Actionable Advice: How businesses should handle vague legal letters and the importance of proactive documentation. (Hint: Talk to your lawyer!)

Links & Resources Mentioned

Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.

Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible.

To learn more about us, you can visit our website.

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Transcript

Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.

Grab a drink, the show starts now!

Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris

Chris Hinds: Hey, everybody.

Amber: And Steve.

Steve Jones: Hey everyone.

Amber: And we are super excited to be here for episode number 156 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast. If you want to get show notes and a full transcript, you can find those if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/156. We always start every episode with a beverage.

What are we drinking today, Chris?

Today’s Beverage

Chris Hinds: We are back to the beers this week after a bit of a hiatus with weird kombuchas and other things. We are trying Manhattan Project Beer Co’s Peacekeeper Blonde Ale. So we’re very gradually moving into Springtime and Summer. And so, starting to think about those beverages that pair well as as the weather gets warmer, so to speak.

But they say that this is going to be, I don’t know how they’re gonna pull this off, I guess we’re gonna find out. They say it’s neutral and complex at the same time, which is what makes it so special. So be looking for neutrality and complexity, I guess, and hidden flavors.

Amber: I have a question. You picked a beverage that’s called Peacekeeper, and says it’s neutral. Do you expect us to be all peaceful and neutral on this podcast episode or are we allowed to get spicy if we want to?

Chris Hinds: Oh, I think with the topic we have coming up here, I think we’re allowed to have some strong opinions because it hits all the notes, right? It’s got AI, it’s got laws and legality, and lawyers and judges, and accessibility. So it’s all things that evoke strong emotion among our three hosts.

Steve Jones: It says on the can, it says it pairs well with patios, gram picks, like in Instagram, and apricot.

Amber: Feel old now that I was like, what does that mean? And then you explained it. I’m like, oh yeah.

Chris Hinds: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Not posing with a graham cracker, Amber.

Steve Jones: Easy at scale. So I guess this goes down easy.

Chris Hinds: Yeah, we’ll find out. I’m gonna go ahead and crack mine open here.

Amber: That also could just mean it’s boring.

Chris Hinds: And while we’re opening these up, and maybe sipping and smelling, I will note it’s 5.2% ABV and super minimalist design on the can. And they have, all their beers have a similar thing where it’s like some kind of emblem inside the atomic symbol with the name of the beer. And then some sort of very muted background illustration which is kind of fun, but…

Amber: Gosh, mine foamed like crazy.

Steve Jones: Yeah, mine did too.

Chris Hinds: Oh!

Steve Jones: Mine, mine exploded.

Chris Hinds: Mine, mine did not. Do we need to take a, do we need to take a break to clean off some keyboards or are we good?

Amber: No. We’re good! It went away from the keyboard, but I swear if you were to slow down this video, you might actually see some beer like fly over my shoulder.

I like wanna tilt this down for a second? Look it, foamed up out of the top of the can. It’s not foaming anymore, but it’s almost like they overfilled the can because it’s gone right up to the edge. I don’t know.

Steve Jones: I spilled it on myself, but…

Chris Hinds: Oh no.

Amber: I’ve never had that happen. There’s a first for everything on this podcast apparently.

Chris Hinds: And I’m really enjoying the nose coming out of this one. It’s very like tropical and fruity smelling to me. I think that’s gotta be the hop.

Amber: It just smells like light beer. You smell tropical?

Chris Hinds: Mm-hmm. I do a little bit like passion fruit.

Amber: I guess I get maybe a little bit of fruit…

Chris Hinds: A little citrus.

Amber: But, it’s subtle. I guess that’s the point.

Chris Hinds: Okay. Yeah, the nose had me more excited than… Well I’m gonna, before I say anything else, I’m gonna take one more sip.

Amber: That’s never a good sign when you’re like I gotta taste it again before I decide what to say.

Chris Hinds: I like the smell of this one more than I like the flavor. Like the smell the nose had me really excited ’cause I was getting like all these tropical floral notes, but it doesn’t smell like a heavy beer, right? It smells like something that’s gonna be easy drinking.

And I guess it’s hitting that note, like the easy drinking note when I take a sip. Decent acidity, decent balance. But I am definitely feeling like this one is leaning more towards the neutral and simple than any kind of hidden complexity. Like I’m not getting any kind of super deep or interesting.

I mean, the way they described it makes me wanna look for things, but I’m not finding a whole lot. What do y’all think?

Steve Jones: Well, I mean, you guys kind of know this about me, but this is definitely my style of beer.

Chris Hinds: Mm-hmm.

Steve Jones: I do, like the light beers that are just real easy to drink. I mean, it’s a patio, like it says patio. It pairs well with the patio for sure. If I just mow the grass…

Chris Hinds: Mm-hmm.

Steve Jones: And I want to chill out and have something that is a bit refreshing and you know, has a little bit of kick. This is it. I mean, this is really easy.

Amber: I agree, it’s easy to drink. I don’t feel like there’s much depth to it. I don’t get what they’re saying. There’s like hidden complexities. I don’t think so. will say it’s a little bit hoppier on the finish than I expect a blonde to be.

Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.

Amber: Like, it leans kind of IPA ish. Not like overwhelming like IPAs are like, I’m gonna be incredibly bitter.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber: At the end, but it has a little bit of that more than I normally expect in a blonde.

Steve Jones: It’s, yeah. I would describe it as like more bitter than skunky. Like an IPA is a little more skunky to me. This is just kind of bitter with dry and bitter on the end, which I like.

Amber: Okay, I have a thought now though. I was taking smaller sips and like I do the weird thing, you know, where you like try and move it around your mouth, see do different parts of your tongues taste different things. And I couldn’t really get much, but I just took a really big mouthful and I did kind of get some tropical, a little bit on that, like larger mouthful.

Chris Hinds: I’m not getting a whole lot of fruitiness on the palate. It’s all nose for me with the fruit. But it has a mild like bitter finish that lingers a little bit, but drops off pretty quickly. And yeah, I can see how this would pair well with a patio. I don’t hate it. I just wish they hadn’t told me to look for complexity. Cause that, that I think is the thing that I’m kind of hung up on.

Amber: So where are we all on our super not technical ratings of the thumbs up, thumbs in the middle, thumbs down. Would you get it again?

Steve Jones: Yeah I’ll go first. I’ll give it a thumbs up because this is my style beer. Yeah.

Chris Hinds: Yep. I’m thumbs up as well. Like I, I know I harped on it for the muted palate, but it’s a solid beer. Like I would be totally happy drinking this again.

Amber: So I’m the in the middle because I don’t think it’s bad. I would definitely drink it if someone gave it to me. I tend to buy the more interesting or like stronger flavored stuff. So yeah, I think I’m kind of just in the middle on it. I’m not sure if I was walking the store, this would be the one I would pick.

We’re number one! We’re number one!

Amber: Well. I know we have a little mini thing we were gonna talk about, but can I also give one shout out? And I honestly, I was like, wait, do I have a party hat? I wanted to show up to this recording with a party hat because our plugin is the number one featured plugin on WordPress.org right now, and I feel like we have to say something about that even though it might not be that way when this episode comes out. I have no idea how long they stay. But it’s a cool achievement and I’m excited, so I feel like we need to like have a toast to that or something.

Chris Hinds: To literally being the number one on the plugin repo everywhere. Thank you, Steve, for a timely DM to the right person at the right time.

Steve Jones: That’s right.

Accessibility People are a Superpower

Amber: So, before we dive in really deep, we have kind of a fun article that we’ll share in the show notes called Accessibility People Are a Superpower from Jared Cuhna. And he’s talking about why people should take more advantage of the accessibility folks on their team and not just think of them as the little people in the corner who guarantee compliance.

And he talks a lot about how people who have accessibility knowledge frequently have really broad skills that go across multiple disciplines. And a lot of times, teams that have accessibility folks on them are more collaborative, which is really neat. And I don’t know if you guys had any thoughts about this, but I think it’s a cool article that would be useful for people to take a look at.

Chris Hinds: We absolutely will link to this article. I think it’s a great thing to promote and get out there because he even brought up some things that I didn’t think about initially. Like the idea of an accessibility specialist as a natural bridge between different groups of stakeholders.

Like engineering teams, design teams, and end users, and how they kind of are these people that are in the middle of all three of those and may have skill sets in those disciplines as well. And I like that idea that us and our profession and the people on these teams kind of act as these bridges to help everybody pull in the same direction and understand one another.

I think it’s really cool.

Steve Jones: I mean, I think it, it hearkens back to, you know, the whole shift left philosophy that we talk about where treating these people as part of the process as early on in the process as you possibly can is where they become that superpower. I think where a misuse of an accessibility professional in an organization a lot of times is to just see them as somebody that comes in after the fact that does QA when everything’s done.

Because that point, the remediation is, is costly to the product and probably doesn’t make the product as good as it should have been to start out with.

Chris Hinds: Yeah, or to silo them off in their own little room or department and not let them talk to anyone. That’s another one that we see sometimes.

Amber: I think kind of an underlying thing about this too that is interesting is he talks about, you know, accessibility professionals having like varied skillset across different, what can be siloed in an organization. And it made me think a little bit about us and I think part of what has made us strong is like, Steve’s a developer, but he has a design background and he understands design in a way. And so he’s capable of doing a lot more and he knows accessibility.

And I’m an accessibility person who understands development, right? Like more code probably than the average person. And I do think that when you have people like that in your organization that have skills that reach across multiple parts of a phase of a project or of a software product that you really should make use of them. Because they’re gonna bring so much more than someone who’s I can only write code, or I can only design things in Figma.

Steve Jones: Yeah, and it creates somebody with context that spans across multiple departments of your company. And that could be like, well, you know, this team that’s working on this feature, we were talking about this the other day, so if you’re gonna implement this, then maybe we should get together with them and have a conversation. Like it literally helps be that glue in the organization.

Chris Hinds: Well, it’s time to switch over to today’s main topic, which I’m calling ChatGPT Wrote My Accessibility Lawsuit. But before we get into that, we’re gonna take a short commercial break.

Brought to you by Accessibility Checker

Steve Jones: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.

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ChatGPT Wrote My Accessibility Lawsuit

Chris Hinds: We’re back! So, steve and Amber leading up to this episode, I shared a couple of different articles with you and I want to go into them one at a time. So the first article that I found, which was from October of 2025, was from Seyfarth, which is a law firm, and they were observing this trend at the end of last year, going into this year where there was roughly a, I think 69% increase in pro se lawsuits happening in their area of service. And a pro se lawsuit for the uninitiated is someone who is self filing. So they’re not an attorney, they haven’t retained a lawyer. But they’re filing these lawsuits.

And some of these lawsuits were related to the Fair Housing Act or FHA, but there was also a massive uptick in ADA Title III, which is what caught my eye. And they speculate based on the filings and based on some early case dismissals from judges and findings from judges, that there’s heavy use of AI happening in the filing of these lawsuits.

And before I get into this too much further with this shift we’re seeing from maybe human led lawsuits with a partner between a human and a law firm, to humans and AI leading these Title III lawsuits, probably also using automated tests to find the issues. I’m wondering what your high level reaction is for that. Would a automated legal wave help or hurt the cause of accessibility overall, do you think?

Amber: You know what’s, oh, go ahead, Steve. What do you think?

Steve Jones: Before I give like a full reaction, I would one, question how does this work without standing. Right? Like in a legal complaint, you have to have standing. Meaning that you have to show that somebody with the disability that needs to utilize a screen reader, could not actually use your website. So how does AI actually implement standing?

Amber: And that they actually intended to patronize the business. ‘Cause I know there was a lawsuit against a realtor that didn’t have alt text for all the pictures of the houses. And that got dismissed because the person lived in another state and the judge is like, you’re not really thinking about buying a house in this state.

It is weird because some of that standing stuff is it’s pretty broad. And I’m sure that if I, you know, we have a version of Accessibility Checker that can scan anything. I could just go scan like every restaurant website in my town and find problems on them. And then I guess go and be like, I’m gonna sue literally every restaurant in my town because I could have gone to that restaurant for dinner. Now it might be a little harder because they’d be like, no, you’re vegetarian. You would’ve never eaten at my barbecue restaurant. But I don’t know. Standing is kind of broad, right?

Steve Jones: Well and, what’s the outcome? Like, if a letter is sent to a company, is the goal of the person doing this to scare them, to get them to pay some fee to make ’em go away before they even reach litigation?

Amber: Circling back to your original question, Chris, on, is this good or bad? I think ultimately it’s probably bad because I think that it creates animosity. I’ll be totally honest, we had a kickoff call for a user testing session with a company that has eCommerce. They’ve been sued multiple times and they’re frustrated and they have been doing a lot of work, and they’re trying to document it.

And that’s why, you know, they’re like, we want real users to test our website, which is amazing. But they’re like, we feel like the people just want our money , because when we fix the problem, they identified, they don’t say, okay, nevermind. You did what I wanted. They’re like, no, you still owe me money.

And so I feel like it’s horrible, ’cause part of me is like this kind of making it faster and easier, it’s gonna create so much bad will around accessibility that it will ultimately hurt the accessibility of the internet as a whole. Like that, that’s what I think is going to happen.

Now, do I wish that it would help? Yes, because I wish that people would be like, oh, this is actually the reality is some people are motivated by fear. Or the legal risk more than they’re motivated by the, I want to be a good person and make sure everyone can access my stuff. And so, you know, I’m like, maybe if there’s more and more of these, then they will see more risk and then they’ll take it more seriously. And that’s what I would hope, but I don’t know if that will be the reality. Like I feel like more lawsuits, especially from serial plaintiffs who questionably actually wanted to use the website, doesn’t help accessibility’s case.

Steve Jones: I think I would agree. I think you’re right. I think it’s a bit of a double edged sword. More accountability is good, but at the same time, what starts to happen is this starts to become noise at scale. I think you’re completely right, I’m gonna echo that I think it could have an incredible negative impact on accessibility as a whole if it’s not treated right. Or if companies don’t learn the right way to combat it.

Amber: What do you think, Chris?

Chris Hinds: Well, I tend to agree with both of you. I think that this is going to create blowback and I kind of wonder if this is something that’s going to tip the scales on the legislation side of things. I know that a law was under discussion at one point and maybe has since gone away in California that was going to mandate a time to cure for any ADA lawsuit whatsoever. Like a 90 day time to cure before someone could actually take them to court or ask them for any money whatsoever.

I kind of wonder if with this accelerating influx of individually filed lawsuits using automated testing tools and AI and things like that, is going to kind of tip the scales towards us seeing more legislation like that get introduced.

Just to share a couple of additional stats from this article that again we’ll link to. In 2024 there were 1,774 federal lawsuits alleging Title III violations that were filed pro se by an individual. And in the first nine months of 2025, that that was 1,867.

So it’s a clear acceleration. There were still three months left to go in 2025, and it had already exceeded the total count for the prior year. So it’s definitely increasing. But I have a follow up question that I want to get to, but I think it, it’s good to give a reference related to that first. So I have open on my screen and I’ll share a screenshot for this and for the listening audience and the viewing audience. But basically this article from this law firm linked to a finding from a judge that cited plaintiff’s submission of fake hallucinated case citations.

And it says here that the court has reviewed defendant’s motion to strike DE 82 and has independently checked the cases cited in plaintiff’s discovery motions and replies. The court found that the fo the following issues. First, plaintiff cites Perez v Miami-Dade County 2 97 FFR D 6 26 25, and Jacobs v Atrium Med Corp 2020 WL and a big string of numbers, and all these others. These cases appear to be non-existent.

And it keeps going and it cites more things. And so this is the other part of this that kind of exits the sphere of accessibility a little bit, which is does this just turn accessibility into a spam problem for courts and lawyers rather than a human problem for users?

Amber: You know what I would say though, I have seen news articles about this happening, not just to non-attorneys. So I get that this is especially bad because non-attorneys are filing these cases and citing fake laws or fake court cases? I have also read about attorneys using AI to generate briefs and citing fake cases. I think, and Chris and I have had a separate conversation about this with how much our kids’ school is like freaking out about AI. Especially in middle school, like the middle school teacher’s like we’re not actually having them do assignments outside of class. Now she’s having them write them all there ’cause she doesn’t want them to use AI.

And I’m like, I don’t think we should be telling them not to use AI. We should be telling ’em how to fact check AI.

Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.

Amber: That’s what you need.

Steve Jones: Yeah, we’re all learning how to live in this new AI world and I’ll kind of, I’ll liken this to my experience with AI and it’s very development driven. Um, because of course we’re a development company making software. There’s this weird phenomenon with AI and it’s you know, it’s called vibe coding.

The whole vibe coding thing where you have an idea for something, you go to the AI, you punch it in, and you sit back and you let it run. And then you go to test it without even looking at the code and you’re like, oh man, this kind of works. This is amazing. I didn’t do anything. I just sat here for five minutes and why the AI vibed away and now I have something that works.

And it gives the appearance that you’ve done something, but in reality, a piece of software, if I were to release that, it would be very bad. So, we’ll do that as a proof of concept for a feature and software, but then we spend a month refining it, going through the code making sure that it actually did what it said was gonna do and that it’s not gonna have any implications throughout the rest of the application.

That it doesn’t break any of our tests, our unit tests that we have set up and just making it something that is production ready. That’s something, as senior developers that have been making software for 20 years can put our name on. And I think the same thing’s happening to these lawyers. I’ll put it in quote ’cause I don’t know, if they’re actual lawyers, but. They’re putting a URL to a website in, and they’re, you know, they’re probably saying something about, you know, ADA or WCAG or whatever. And then it comes back with results.

The AI wants to give you results, but they’re not going those additional steps to validate that information is correct and that it is right. And then they’re basically submitting legal slop to the courts, so it creates all this noise. It’s gonna create fatigue with judges as well. So that can be another huge unintended consequence too, is do judges become fatigued by this?

And anytime they see anything related to accessibility, they’re like, get this outta my court.

Amber: Now, on the flip side though, I think something to think about that is really interesting is that for some people, being able to use AI as long as they figure out how to fact check it appropriately. And us, us as here in America, the fact that we have the right to create a lawsuit without being forced to pay someone is very helpful because there might be people, including maybe a lot of people with disabilities who are underemployed, who couldn’t afford to hire an attorney. And so this makes it even more equal access because we’re not gatekeep by, oh, I can’t afford to pay you $5,000 to get you to write a brief for me.

So that’s what makes it a little hard. I don’t wanna say that I think this is all bad because if a real person who has tried already to get a business to support them, and maybe they live in a small town, it’s the only pharmacy. They have to be able to get their medication from here. They don’t have another alternative or whatever, like they should be able to file a lawsuit and if AI can help them do that, then I think that, you know, it is a good thing. But there’s this whole, the whole underlying of what is the actual motivation behind the people, think is a lot more worrisome.

Chris Hinds: So what may actually end up taking place over time is the opportunists who are using this to make a quick buck are going to ruin a real avenue of recourse for the people who are experiencing actual harm and maybe have actual standing. Because they’re just gonna get lost in the deluge of AI slop lawsuits as Steve coined it.

Whereas they, you know, maybe in a different time could have been heard by a judge if they were, you know, a real plaintiff with a real problem that they tried to get addressed in the normal channels and had to turn to the legal system for relief. So there’s a follow up to this, right?

The other article I found is from NBC and they they were covering a slightly different story, but it was it was related to pro se legal filings and it followed 15 different plaintiffs who were using AI to try to help with their legal defense or dealing with legal issues that they were experiencing, like with landlords or with business disputes or things of that nature. And kind of the pitfalls of that.

And I’m, I’m just wondering like high level was the intersection of accessibility and AI in litigation on your 2026 Bingo Card that you wrote at the end of last year? Because it really wasn’t on mine like this caught me completely off guard.

Steve Jones: It totally was not on my radar.

Amber: I mean, I saw some of the articles, like I mentioned before, about attorneys doing it, but I guess it didn’t really occur to me that people like, attorneys are people too, non-attorney people…

Chris Hinds: Are they though? No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Steve Jones: Yeah, are they?

Amber: Sorry to Laney Feingold and some of the attorney’s we’ve had on this podcast.

No I guess I didn’t really see that as a thing, but maybe, you know, also, we’re in our little bubbles and I’m in a bubble of privilege. There haven’t been many places when I’ve been like, I feel like I need to sue somebody. You know?

I, in that article, I mean, that was the thing where I was saying, okay, it does sort of seem like this could be beneficial and helpful because there was a woman who successfully used that to get an appeal through when the initial case work out the way she thought. And it saved her like tens of thousands of dollars in rent that she actually should not have had to pay. At least according to the article.

It’s weird, it’s mixed. I see good for this, but I also see potential concerns. You know, I’d be curious to know what you guys think about, if we all decide that all these ADA for websites are bad, what is the alternative? Or how do we make them stop, right? Like I know that proposal in California is back it’s back on the dockets maybe be talked about again.

Which is you won’t be able to sue the business. You’ll have to sue the developer who built the website.

Chris Hinds: Yeah.

Dealing with AI Accessibility Lawsuits

Amber: You know, there’s also like the European Accessibility Act. It’s not really about lawsuits, it’s about fines from the government. So it’s like a weird, if we don’t like this path that people can use AI to generate lawsuits. Like what is the alternative, or how do we solve the underlying problem that makes people even want to do this?

Steve Jones: I mean, that is the million dollar question, right? This play out so many different ways when it comes to legal claims, right? There’s companies that actually have enough revenue to, to take on the legal risk as a COG, as a cost of doing business. So to them, it doesn’t matter, right? As long as the money’s there, they can get out of it.

They just pay the fine and move on. This is not a new thing, right? Like it’s just being accelerated with AI and kind of our questioning is is it gonna dilute the thing or is it actually gonna allow some, smaller players to actually be heard. But it’s like my take on a lot of legal stuff when it comes to accessibility, I don’t personally like it. And in a perfect world, don’t think we should be suing each other for money. ‘Cause anytime the money enters the situation, it changes. And at the end of a lot of these lawsuits, the winner is not the person that needed to use that website to get their food or to get their drugs, their prescriptions. The winner is the lawyers or the courts, the government. Rarely do we see the little guy that actually was put out, get the net benefit from this.

Chris Hinds: Yeah it’s a huge issue and I’ll even harken back to the conversation that Amber briefly alluded to that we were having this morning with a customer who’s coming on for some services, and he straight up said, the owner of this company, the next lawsuit that comes in, and they’ve had several, I’m not paying it.

And I have enough of a legal war chest or cash reserves that I’m gonna fight this on behalf of my industry. Because he’s in the unique position of, at least he feels, we’ll see if we can validate his claims, right? But he feels his website is accessible enough that anyone who wants to do anything on it should be able to, even if they experience an inconvenience, it should be a relatively minor one that isn’t a blocker, is kind of how he put it.

And if I’m a business owner wearing the business owner hat, and that’s the true reality of my website, that anyone who comes to it, regardless of what tech they’re using, they can get through the user experience, they can do what they need to do and they can move on with their day. And maybe there are little minor issues, I would probably also feel that I shouldn’t be able to be on the receiving end of a five figure lawsuit because of a minor inconvenience. Usually those should be reserved for serious issues or blockers or a refusal to cooperate or whatever it is.

Just a, as far as like a moral thing. You know, if you’re missing alt text on an image unless it’s a truly essential image, probably the user can get the information somehow, right? And it shouldn’t be, oh, you’re missing alt text on one image and your website’s otherwise perfect. So here’s a lawsuit for 10 grand, right?

I don’t think anyone would find that to be reasonable that someone would go and demand money for that.

Amber: Any sort of concept that says you have to you have a period of time in which you can try to solve the problems, whether that’s before you get a fine or before you get sued. I mean, I do feel like, in an ideal world, there’s some sort of process where every website has an accessibility statement.

It tells people how to get help. If there is a problem a user can report, get the assistance, and then the website will fix the problem. So it won’t exist for future people. And if there’s some sort of process there, then you know, there shouldn’t need to be lawsuits and fines. But of course, you know, then we are in the land of not everybody thinks that way.

So I don’t know. It’s hard.

Chris Hinds: Having some kind of formal process that you had to have gone through in order to be able to rise to the occasion of demanding money or getting in front of a judge, I think would be good. You know, there has to be some sort of track record of, I submitted a complaint, they didn’t cure it for three months, and didn’t provide me a meaningful resolution. Therefore, I sue you.

I think that’s at least some of the stuff that’s coming out or that had been discussed previously in California and proposed, and I guess it didn’t really go anywhere like that 90 days to cure stipulation. I’d love to see that come back. I think that would be a good starting point for a deepening of making these lawsuits not impossible to file but certainly to try to cut out the noise and get to the real people experiencing real problems. That aren’t being cured.

But I’m also curious without advising on anyone’s specific website or case, if this changes how we would approach a conversation with customers who may be experienced one of these pro se or individually filed threats. Would our advice to them change at all as far as like accessibility statements, automated scanning, like auditing and all the things. Would we pay more attention to what the person is actually claiming in their lawsuit filing versus if it came from a law firm? What do y’all think?

Amber: Versus if it comes from a law firm. No, I don’t think the type of lawsuit matters. I know that when we do audits, if someone has been sued already, we ask them what are the problems that they mentioned? And we would of course go fix those first, even if sometimes they’re like, not what I think are the most important problems. I don’t think, you’d do that any differently, whether it was a law firm or an individual flying the lawsuit.

You of course, wanna fix a problem someone flagged first.

Steve Jones: Yeah, but I would caution, or I probably would lean in that, you know, if a case like this did come across our desk, one of these pro se cases that we could kind of tell was AI generated. I think a lot of times when people are threatened with a letter, they don’t go out and validate what the law is and what their threat level of compliance is. I think it’s worth taking a step back and saying, well, what’s my compliance requirements? I need to evaluate this legal language in this AI generated document. I can’t tell if it’s AI a hundred percent, but maybe it is. It feels like it is. It kind of smells like AI slop, so you then have to step back and say, well, is this actually legal?

Maybe you do need to reach out to a real lawyer to validate it. And then the compliance side. You need to have some way to evaluate the legal and the compliance side of things to see if this is a credible claim against your company. I think the way that this is gonna be combated a little bit, the AI stuff is I think that by people actually pushing back a little bit and saying, you know, you need to validate these claims. Like you made these big claims. We hired Equalize Digital. And they’re saying that, you know, you’re not actually correct in some of these claims. And I think a little bit of pushback is probably gonna be good to combat some of this, and I think in their own industry, in the courts, I think they’re gonna get pushback too. Like I said, I think judges are gonna get tired of dealing with slop and these soft claims sometimes could be incorrect claims. And we’ll probably put a little bit of shame towards the lawyers and maybe even in our own industry. I know in the software industry, like are, we’re all vibe coding, but there’s a whole negative con connotation with vibe coding as well. You know, it’s oh, this is AI slop, right?

I think some of these things will self-correct, but I think we need to hold each other accountable on many levels.

Amber: Yeah. You know, my advice, I’m sitting here thinking of this is I agree with Steve. I think you need to, if you get a letter, you probably should go talk to an attorney. I don’t think you should ask ChatGPT about your letter. Go find a real attorney.

Chris Hinds: That’s like a weird Ourobouros situation.

Amber: Yeah, I know, right? I got this is it right? ChatGPT’s like oh, I wrote that for this other person. Yes, it’s perfect.

No, go listen to our podcast episode with Richard Hunt. Who is an attorney who defends businesses against these kind of serial lawsuits. He had a lot of interesting things to say. And definitely like reaching out to an attorney for legal advice. ‘Cause we’re talking about the law right now. But we’re people, we’re not attorneys. So, you know, we’re not giving you any legal advice right now. But that’s what I would say. And I think as far as the website. Regardless of where a lawsuit or a complaint might come from, the best thing you can do is be proactive. Make accessibility part of your process, document what you’re doing. Like, and that could be as simple as we have an accessibility label in our GitHub repo, which then makes it really easy if I ever need to pull up a list of every accessibility issue I’ve resolved.

If you can show, oh, our website got this much better as far as automated issues. Documenting when you are doing things like having users test, like we were talking about, this other company is gonna do. I think any of that is probably best thing, but really. Yeah, I don’t know. The lawsuits are weird.

Chris Hinds: Well, my advice would be if one of these lawsuits, or letters comes in. ‘Cause usually it starts with a letter, right? They don’t go immediately to court filings, ’cause court filings cost money. Usually the courts charge a fee for filing something.

If you get one of these letters with the blessing of your attorney and after an attorney has reviewed it, one thing that I have had success with previously responding to, like copyright trolls, which is entirely separate domain, but like people that go find images on your website and say they want thousands of dollars from you because you’re violating copyright for some copyright holder they represent. I will go back and forth with them ad nauseum, asking for deeper and deeper levels of clarification on the exact copyright holder where the copyright was held and registered, the exact image mark and the exact URL where they found it and blah, blah, blah. And I will just waste their time, basically.

But basically, you know, I think everything starts with the advice of an attorney. But for some of these, if you get like a vague letter my first step would be force them to do the work to actually prove that what they’re saying is true.

Steve Jones: I kind of have a personal rule of thumb. It’s people talk to people, and lawyers talk to lawyers. If you get a letter from a lawyer, find a lawyer to talk to that lawyer. If you get a letter from a person, could probably talk to ’em.

Chris Hinds: Yep, yep. If there’s one takeaway, consult your lawyer.

Amber: Well thanks for the interesting conversation, Chris. I think it will be, you know, interesting over the years as we continue to watch more and more AI get added into our collective culture and community see all the different things that it impacts and, it’s gonna touch some part of our jobs in many different ways.

Chris Hinds: Now this kind of thing is gonna stay on my radar for a while now. I’m gonna be looking for more headlines about pro se filings for Title III, and maybe we’ll do an update episode in a year or so and see if anything changed.

All right, well thank you both for being here and we will go ahead and wrap up there. And we’ll see you all on another conversation episode in a couple weeks. Bye.

Steve Jones: See you.

Amber: Bye.

Chris Hinds: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at Equalizeigital.com.