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A California federal court has considered whether to certify as a class action a lawsuit brought on behalf of the blind against the Target Corporation (“Company”) because the Company’s website, Target.com (“Website”), was allegedly inaccessible to the blind and so violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”).
The National Federation of the Blind (“NFB”) claimed in a lawsuit against the Company that the Website was not accessible to blind individuals. According to NFB’s lawsuit, designing a website which is accessible to blind individuals is technologically simple and not overly expensive. Websites can be made accessible to the blind by adding an invisible code on the webpages that can be read by screen reader software installed on a blind individual’s computer.
NFB alleged violations of the ADA as well as the California state civil rights laws. Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination against disabled individuals in places of public accommodation and seeks to provide disabled individuals equal access to public facilities. Examples of places of public accommodation would include hotels, restaurants, libraries, places of education, convention centers, sales establishments (including real estate offices), banks, and association offices. Whether a website constitutes a place of public accommodation is an issue on which the federal courts are split.
In 2006, the Company filed a motion to dismiss NFB’s lawsuit, and the court dismissed some of the allegations in NFB’s lawsuit. However, the court ruled that there could be ADA violations on the Website if the Website somehow interfered with a disabled individual’s ability to enjoy access to the Company’s stores and so allowed such allegations to proceed. Click here to read a summary of the earlier decision.
NFB also sought to have the lawsuit certified as a class action. The requirements for class certification are: first, the class is so large that joinder of all the members is impractical; second, there are questions of law or fact common to the class; third, the claims or defenses of the representative parties are typical of the claims or defenses of the class; and fourth, the representative parties will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class. In addition to meeting the above requirements, a party’s lawsuit must also fall into one of three subcategories for a class action, one of which is relevant to this action. One subcategory allows class actions for declaratory or injunctive relief when the other party has “acted or refused to act on grounds generally applicable to the class”.
The United States District Court for the Northern District of California partially granted NFB’s class certification motion. Previously, the court had defined the class as “[a]ll legally blind individuals in the United States who have attempted to access Target.com and as a result have been denied access to the enjoyment of goods and services offered in Target stores”. Now, the court examined whether NFB had standing to bring the lawsuit.
Standing is a judicially-created doctrine which requires that an actual "controversy" exist between the parties involved in the lawsuit. Special standing rules exist for an association bringing a lawsuit on behalf of its members. An association has standing to bring a lawsuit on behalf of its members when: (1) the members have standing to bring the lawsuit on their own; (2) the interests that the association is seeking to protect are related to the association's purpose; and (3) neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested require the participation of individual association members. The court ruled that NFB had sufficiently demonstrated a possible level of harm to its members from the Website’s inaccessibility and that NFB requesting relief for its members was part of NFB’s purpose. Therefore, the court ruled that NFB had satisfied the standing requirements.
Next, the Company argued that a class action was inappropriate because NFB had not argued that its members were unable to access the goods and services offered by the Company at its stores. Instead, NFB had argued that the Website’s alleged inaccessibility made it more difficult for them to locate goods at the Company’s stores. The court rejected the Company’s argument, finding that its argument essentially required the court to determine whether the Company was liable for ADA violations and not whether NFB had properly described a class of individuals for whom relief could be granted. Here, NFB had identified a class of blind individuals who claimed that they were denied access to the good and services of the Company’s stores because of the Website. NFB had also identified a class who had incurred extra costs in obtaining goods and services from the Company’s stores because of the Website’s inaccessibility, such as costs incurred for hiring a guide for trips to the Company’s stores. The court found that NFB had met the requirements for describing a class.
The court then examined whether NFB had met the other requirements for class certification. Since there are over 100,000 blind individuals in California, the court found that NFB had satisfied the numerosity requirement. The court also found that commonality was satisfied, since the facts surrounding the class members use of the Website and the Company’s stores will be common to all class members. The court did agree that the lead class member identified by NFB did not plead adequate damages under the ADA, and so the court ruled that NFB would have to identify a new lead plaintiff for this case. Otherwise, the court stated that NFB had met the requirements for class action certification. Therefore, the court gave NFB thirty days to designate a new lead class representative but otherwise found NFB had met the requirements for class certification.
Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind v. Target Corp., No. C 06-1802 MHP, 2007 WL 2846462 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 2, 2007). [This is a citation to a Westlaw document. Westlaw is a subscription, online legal research service. If an official reporter citation should become available for this case, the citation will be updated to reflect this information].