5.15 Million Dollar Settlement in California Web Accessibility Class Action Fashion Nova website barriers spark lawsuit that should have settled

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This is an article about a lawsuit in the United States. The lawsuit was filed by a blind person who could not use the website of a clothing company called Fashion Nova. The case settled after five years of fighting. The case settled for 5.15 million dollars. Disabled people who tried to use the Fashion Nova website in California could file a claim for up to $4,000.00. The lawyers who filed the case were also paid out of the settlement amount.

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Digital accessibility is a civil right of disabled people. In the United States and other countries, civil rights are baked into laws mandating accessibility. Among other things, these laws have different remedies available to people with disabilities who have been denied access to web content.

If someone sues under the ADA the remedies available to a disabled person include getting the problem fixed and getting their attorney paid. In California and some other states, the remedies also include money payments to impacted disabled people.

A class action is a type of lawsuit where lots of people with similar experiences get together and ask for remedies for all of them. This is an article about a web accessibility class action case that settled for a little over five million dollars.

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What is the status of the Fashion Nova case?

Fashion Nova is a fast fashion brand selling clothes through its website across the United States and in many other countries around the world. The lawsuit was filed by a blind person who alleged that the company’s website was not compatible with his screen reader. Eventually, after five years of expensive legal proceedings, the parties settled the case.

The case was settled as a class action. There were two class settlements. One was for people living everywhere in the US except for California. People in this class did not receive any payments.

The other involved “All legally blind individuals residing in California who attempted to access Fashion Nova’s website using screen reading software during the same period.”

There was a separate “California class” because California has a law that allows disabled people to recover up to $4,000.00 for violations of California disability discrimination law. A significant amount of the 5.15 million dollar fund goes to administrative costs and lawyer fees and costs the lawyers incurred in prosecuting the case over five years. You can read the Fashion Nova February 13, 2025 amended settlement agreement here. You can find the breakdown of how the 5.15 million dollars was allocated in the Claim Depot article linked in the next section.

Resources about the Fashion Nova case

Why I’m ambivalent about reporting on this lawsuit

As a disability rights lawyer my work has focused on digital accessibility for thirty years. I helped negotiate the first web accessibility agreement in the US 25 years ago. You’d think I’d be excited with a five million dollar settlement in a web access case. Ambivalent is a better word for how I’m feeling.

I consider one of my roles to be sharing legal developments about digital accessibility in ways that limit legalese and focus on the civil rights of disabled people to participate in the digital world. Learning about private enforcement of disability rights laws is also important in today’s national political climate where the trump administration threatens foundational laws and regulations and decimates the government agencies responsible for enforcing those laws.

I’m writing about Fashion Nova for these reasons.

I hope that learning of a big money case will encourage organizations to make digital accessibility a priority. That it will encourage organizations not to spend money fighting legal claims but to spend money investing in sustainable ethical accessibility.

But learning of a multi-million dollar settlement can have negative impacts too. A case like this can generate fear, and, as the great Yoda, Jedi Master in the Star Wars universe says, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”

Organizations that become afraid of the law and how some lawyers use it (or sadly abuse it) often turn to quick fix solutions like overlays that harm disabled people and don’t protect against lawsuits.

Lawsuits are a critical part of ADA enforcement. Many lawyers who file lawsuits do so to improve accessibility for disabled people still locked out of far too many websites, apps, and other digital tools. The lawsuit remedy in state and federal laws also contributes to making collaborations like Structured Negotiation possible.

But today, I believe too many lawyers filing (or threatening) web accessibility lawsuits are more focused on collecting lawyer fees than on sustainable long term disability inclusion in tech. Fear generated by big settlements may make it more likely that organizations just pay money in response to a suit or demand letter instead of fixing barriers and developing the programs and policies to avoid them in the future.

And worse, organizations may turn their fear and frustration with the lawsuit or the lawyers against disabled people, forgetting that ethical accessibility is about including people with disabilities, not checklists.

The large amount of money going to lawyers in this case happened because there was five years of fighting. In my opinion, Fashion Nova and its lawyers made a bad decision to turn this lawsuit into a full-blown battle.

I hope readers take this as a message that money is better spent on accessibility solutions.