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Re: Regarding VPAT and litigation

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 28, 2021 9:34AM

I'm not a lawyer either, but I have some experience of this and have done a lot of research.

Firstly, in the US, the overwhelming risk of litigation is not from genuine users of a website - they invariably go through the proper channels to ask the company for help. The biggest risk is from ambulance-chasing parasite lawyers who are looking for a nice payday.

However, your customer does not fit the profile of their typical victim. Most law suits are brought against companies in specific sectors such as hotels, restaurants, luxury goods and clothing chain stores. The typical size range is $20M to $200M annual turnover - large enough to secure a substantial pay-out, but small enough that they won't want a long drawn-out court battle. As such, your risk is low.

On the flip side, such law suits never have anything to do with the user experience. The lawyers use an automated testing tool, and if it reports more than a couple of issues, they file a boilerplate law suit. Almost all websites contain such issues, so your risk is high. This is why we tell our US clients to fix all the issues that automated tools find, even if they do not affect the user experience.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd