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Vitamin Shoppe ADA Class Action Lawsuit Overview:
- Who: Vitamin Shoppe is being sued by a visually-impaired customer.
- Why: The customer says the company’s website is not accessible for those with visual impairments.
- Where: The class action lawsuit is seeking to represent visually impaired consumers nationwide.
Vitamin Shoppe effectively bars those with visual impairments from buying the health products sold by the company online due to its inaccessible website, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
Plaintiff Vivian Salazar, who is legally blind, filed the class action lawsuit Oct. 26 in a California federal court alleging violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Unruh Civil Rights Act, and seeking damages of $4,000 per person, per violation.
Salazar says she needs screen-reading software to read website content using her computer.
She wanted to make a purchase on the Vitamin Shoppe website, but when she tried she says she found her screen reader was not able to make sense of it.
“The access barriers Plaintiff has encountered on Defendant’s website have caused a denial of Plaintiff’s full and equal access multiple times in the past and now deter Plaintiff on a regular basis from accessing Defendant’s website,” Salazar says.
She says screen-reading software is currently the only method a blind or visually impaired person may use to independently access the internet.
Unless websites are designed to be read by screen-reading software, blind and visually impaired persons are unable to fully access the products they might contain.
Vitamin Shoppe Website Lacks Features Needed for Screen Readers, Says Class Action
When she visited the Vitamin Shoppe website, she said the company hadn’t created alternative text for images or graphics, and the site contained links with no text to explain the purpose of the links, creating a frustrating experience for blind users.
As a result, Salazar is seeking a permanent injunction to cause a change in Vitamin Shoppe’s corporate policies, practices, and procedures so its website will become and remain accessible to blind and visually impaired consumers.
She seeks to represent all legally-blind people in the United States who have attempted to access Vitamin Shoppe’s website by the use of a screen reading software, plus a California Subclass.
Salazar is asking a judge for certification of the class action, an injunction, damages of $4,000 per offense per person, fees, costs and a jury trial.
Earlier this year, Vitamin Shoppe faced a class action lawsuit alleging that the supplement maker made misleading claims about the effectiveness of its glutamine products.
Further, Vitamin Shoppe is not the only company blind consumers have had trouble accessing on the internet. Recently, the owner of American Eagle stores was hit with a class action lawsuit claiming its website presented numerous access barriers to visually impaired consumers.
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The plaintiff is represented by Thiago M. Coelho, Jasmine Behroozan, and Binyamin I. Manoucheri of Wilshire Law Firm.
The Vitamin Shoppe ADA Class Action Lawsuit is Salazar et al., v. Vitamin Shoppe Industries, LLC, Case No. 2:21-at-01018 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
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