WASHINGTON — Lawsuits targeting a slew of Washington’s major corporations and small businesses alike claim the companies violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. But are these suits about protecting those in need or making a quick buck?
Starbucks, Nordstrom, Zumiez, Outdoor Research, Eddie Bauer, and Tommy Bahama are just a few of the Washington-based household brands named in the suits.
The suits also target smaller companies, like Manson, a Washington-based clothing company Sheer the Brand.
“I’m flattered and honored at the same time to be named on this list of such great fashion brands and companies, but this is not how I imagined it,” Shir Donovick, owner of Sheer the Brand, said.
Donovick owns a luxury women’s shapewear brand, which she runs out of her home.
“Think Spanx meets Alexander Wang, all in one,” she said.
Her business was just taking off when she was hit with a lawsuit claiming her company’s website violated the ADA, a civil rights law enacted in 1990, long before the rise of e-commerce.
“It was stressful and scary at the time,” she said.
Donovick was lucky. Her business was doing well and she had recently made upgrades to her website. The lawsuit only named examples from her previous site. Her lawyer wrote a strongly worded letter and the case was dismissed.
“Accessibility should be about helping people, not scaring small businesses into settlements,” Donovick said.
The suit against Donovick and the other companies deal with website accessibility issues involving screen readers. Screen readers are a type of software that allow visually impaired people to access the web by reading the contents of a web page out loud.
Sites must have special formatting in order for a screen reader to work properly. For example, images must have hidden text attached to them so the software can describe what they show. Pop-up ads are also frequently mentioned in the suits, as screen readers are often unable to move past them to view the actual site.
Rory Martin, a web designer with decades of experience, told KIRO 7 it can take one two to weeks to get a typical website for a small business ADA compliant.
“Grunt work, going through, updating all the alt images, making sure you don’t have any pop-ups that are traps for the visually impaired,” Martin said. “It’s not rocket science, but it is real work that real web developers need to do.”
According to Martin, the vast majority of sites on the internet are not ADA compliant, meaning they could be vulnerable to a suit.
“98 to 99 percent of folks who are small businesses to medium businesses are not ADA compliant at the basic level,” he said.
The cases against Donovick and the other Washington-based companies are far from unique. KIRO 7 and its sister stations around the country tracked more than 15,000 such cases over the last four years. More than 90% of the 4,000 cases filed in 2025 alone came from the same 16 law firms.
“We have filed, certainly, hundreds,” Bruce Carlson, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based attorney said. “I don’t know what the exact number is.”
Carlson is one of the leading attorneys in the space. He was among the first to file lawsuits over website accessibilities.
He’s the one who filed the suit against Sheer the Brand.
Carlson said as many suits as he’s filed, he’s sent even more demand letters. The scale of his litigation is by design.
“That’s intentional because we are trying to be impactful,” he said.
Carlson believes that because the federal government won’t take steps to enforce online accessibility, the responsibility falls on lawyers like him.
“We want to move the ball on an industry-wide basis,” he said.
Even Carlson acknowledges there are issues with this system.
He said there are several times he has come across suits from other lawyers that are copy and pasted from his own suits with only minor details changed.
“Their approach is antithetical to the interests of disability rights in some instances,” Carlson said. “I’m not trying to make this into a platform to criticize other lawyers, but I think that’s the reality.”
The issue has gotten large enough that it has grabbed the attention of the National Retail Federation.
Its head lawyer said many of the cases end in five-figure settlements, often because it may seem cheaper to pay up instead of fighting the case in court.
“The sad thing is that often, it is easier and cheaper for businesses to just write checks and make this go away, rather than continue to fight it over and over again,” Stephanie Martz, chief counsel of the National Retail Foundation, said.
“I am morally aghast by what is going on,” Nayan Padrai said.
Padrai believes the issue has already gotten out of hand. He was sued for website accessibility issues and now runs a company that makes sites accessible.
He was so perplexed by his own suit that he has spent years looking into the cases against others, claiming to have spoken to over 1,500 business owners who were sued. He is now working on a documentary about the situation.
“Get a free computer,” an unnamed plaintiff said in the trailer for his film. “Of course, who doesn’t want a free computer?”
Padrai has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars looking into the issues and claims many of the law firms behind the suits recruit people who are visually impaired to become plaintiffs.
“The plaintiffs in New York that we spoke to were paid $500 for every settlement that had their name on them,” he said. “I believe every plaintiff law firm that is in this space needs to be investigated.”
He wants the law changed at the federal level to make website requirements under the ADA clear and end the endless lawsuits.
“The motive is profit,” Padrai said. “And wherever you have a profit motive, you’re going to find creative ways to make a profit.”
Until that happens, Shir Donovick, whose company is still going strong after her suit, has one piece of advice for entrepreneurs: get a lawyer.
“So many other entrepreneurs and business owners are probably experiencing this and might be scared, might not know what to do,” Donovick said. “I hope that by talking about this more, we are creating awareness, but also providing resources and information on how to solve this.