A Pizza Chain Fought a Blind Man for 6 Years

Note: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult qualified legal counsel for guidance on your specific situation.

In 2016, a blind customer tried to order a pizza from a major pizza chain. He's blind, so he uses a screen reader to navigate websites. The chain's website and app didn't work with his screen reader. He couldn't order his pizza.

At this point, most companies would have said "oh, we should fix that" and fixed it. Maybe it takes a week. Maybe two. You update the code, you run some tests, you move on.

The company chose a different path. They chose the six-year legal nightmare path.

The Lawsuit That Went All the Way to the Supreme Court (And Lost)

The customer filed suit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, arguing that the chain's website and app needed to be accessible to blind users. The company's response was essentially: "the ADA doesn't apply to websites, and also there's no clear standard for what website accessibility even means, so you can't sue us."

This is, I should note, a bold legal strategy for a company whose entire business model involves people using a website or app to order pizza. But the company committed to the bit.

The case bounced around the courts for years. The Ninth Circuit ruled against the company in 2019, finding that the ADA does in fact apply to their website because it's connected to their physical stores. The company then appealed to the Supreme Court, asking them to hear the case.

In 2021, the Supreme Court declined.

That's it. That was the whole strategy. Fight for five years, lose, appeal to the highest court in the land, get turned down, and then presumably have to fix the website anyway. The customer eventually settled with the company on confidential terms, but the legal precedent from this case remains influential. The Ninth Circuit's ruling stands in its jurisdiction, and courts have increasingly interpreted the ADA as applying to websites connected to physical businesses.

Let's Talk About the Money

I genuinely want to know who ran the cost-benefit analysis at the company and decided this was the right call. Because the numbers are, to put it diplomatically, not great.

Accessibility remediation for a large commercial website typically runs somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000 for a thorough job. Let's be generous and say the company had a particularly complicated site and it would have cost $100,000 to fix properly. Fine. $100,000.

Six years of litigation involving multiple courts, including an attempt to get Supreme Court review, involves hundreds of attorney hours at rates that would make your eyes water. The exact legal costs are not public, but industry observers have estimated that cases of this complexity and duration can run into the millions of dollars. And that's before any settlement amount.

So the choice the company made was: spend some money fixing a website, or spend significantly more money fighting in court for six years and still have to fix the website at the end.

They chose option B.

The Reputational Damage Is Harder to Quantify

Beyond the legal fees, there's the PR dimension. For years, this was the company that took a blind man to court over pizza. That's not a great look. The case got substantial media coverage. Disability rights organizations were, understandably, not impressed. And while this company is large enough that this didn't sink them, smaller businesses don't have that buffer.

For a regional restaurant chain or a small e-commerce store, becoming the defendant in a publicized accessibility lawsuit isn't just legally expensive. It damages trust with exactly the customers you most want to retain.

The "We Had No Idea" Defense Doesn't Hold Anymore

Here's where I'll give the company some (very limited) benefit of the doubt: in 2016, awareness of web accessibility standards was genuinely lower than it is today. It's at least plausible that nobody on their digital team had thought seriously about screen reader compatibility.

That excuse has a much shorter shelf life in 2026. Web accessibility has been a known, documented set of standards for over two decades. WCAG guidelines have been around since 1999. The ADA has been explicitly applied to websites in court rulings. The DOJ has issued guidance. There are entire conferences, certifications, and professional communities dedicated to this stuff.

"We didn't know" doesn't fly anymore. And courts are increasingly not interested in hearing it.

What the Customer Actually Wanted

Lost in all the legal maneuvering is the fact that this man just wanted to order a pizza. That's it. He wanted the same experience any sighted customer gets: browse the menu, add items to the cart, place an order.

The WCAG guidelines that would have covered his needs aren't exotic or complex. Screen reader compatibility involves things like: making sure interactive elements have accessible names, ensuring form fields are properly labeled, providing text alternatives for non-text content. These are foundational things that good developers do as a matter of course. They're caught by automated accessibility checkers within seconds.

If someone at the company had run even a basic accessibility scan before launching their app and website, they would have found these issues. They would have been line items in a backlog. They would have been fixed at a small fraction of the eventual legal cost.

The Precedent That Now Affects Everyone

The lasting consequence of this case isn't the settlement. It's the legal precedent. The Ninth Circuit ruling that the ADA applies to websites connected to physical locations is now established law in several states and has influenced how courts elsewhere approach similar cases.

If your business has a physical location and a website, and someone with a disability can't use your website to access the services you offer, you may have legal exposure. Multiple courts have ruled on this issue, though the legal landscape continues to evolve.

The better news is that improving accessibility isn't complicated. It doesn't require a six-year legal strategy or a Supreme Court petition. It starts with understanding what issues exist on your site and addressing them. A tool like SCOUTb2 can scan your site to identify potential WCAG issues in minutes. Many common issues it flags can be addressed without bringing in specialized consultants, though a comprehensive accessibility strategy may benefit from expert guidance.

The customer just wanted a pizza. Don't be the next cautionary tale.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, professional, or compliance advice. SCOUTb2 is an automated scanning tool that helps identify common issues but does not guarantee full compliance with any standard or regulation.