A blind shopper picks a size on dillards.com and his screen reader goes on announcing “toggle button not pressed.” That allegation is in an ADA website lawsuit filed on 2 September, and it is the pattern in the month’s most detailed complaints against national retailers: the shopper presses something and the site gives no answer, like a counter bell that makes no sound. We read 117 of September 2026’s federal ADA complaints. In the ones that say exactly what broke, it broke after a keypress.

What do the detailed complaints say broke?

Macon v. Dillard’s runs 51 pages and letters fifteen barriers from a to o, each with the WCAG criteria it is pled under. The plaintiff says he was shopping for Polo Ralph Lauren, visited the site seven times between 28 April and 15 July, and sent the company a pre-suit communication on 11 May. Besides the size button, he pleads Previous and Next buttons that a keyboard may never reach, and a Change Country dialog that opens without the screen reader announcing it.

Hernandez v. Best Buy, filed 15 September in Miami, lists eleven barriers with the URL for each and the test setup: Windows 11, Chrome, the NVDA screen reader. Nine of the eleven are things the screen reader never said. Search suggestions were read out as “Blank.” The message that delivery is unavailable went unannounced. So did the confirmation that a gift card had gone into the cart. The other two are keyboard problems, including a store-locator dropdown of “more than one hundred options” that the Escape key would not exit.

Zhang v. Cole Haan, filed 30 September in Manhattan, is 12 pages and pleads four barriers, all inside the search box. The plaintiff wanted a pair of wingtip oxfords. The complaint says the search box opened and would not close, the Escape key did nothing, and the screen reader looped through the same products. Color choices were announced as “Color label button.”

The same plaintiff and firm sued Carter’s that day. There, the search box’s “Trending Now” products came through as the word “blank,” and clearing a filter produced no announcement that it had cleared. A Miami complaint and a New York one use the same word for what a blind shopper heard in a search box.

Would a scan of my site have caught these?

Mostly no, and that includes ours. We sell remediation and give away a scan, so here is the scan’s limit: it reads each page as it loads. It never types in the search box, chooses a size or adds anything to a cart. All eleven Best Buy barriers, all four at Cole Haan and most of the fifteen at Dillard’s are pled as something that happened while the plaintiff was doing one of those things or moving through the page by keyboard. The bell only fails when somebody rings it.

Did every September complaint read like that?

No. Pagan v. Ulta Beauty, filed 14 September, is nine pages. Its barrier list has five items, starting with “Text equivalent for every non-text element is not provided,” and names no page, no product and no date.

One retailer suit turned out to have nothing to do with a website. We bought Gazonni v. Lululemon expecting one. It is about the card reader at an outlet store: a blind customer who says she could not enter her debit PIN privately because the terminal had no audio output.

What should you do with this?

Put the mouse away for ten minutes. Open your search box and press Escape. Pick a size or an option and check that the button reports it was picked. Add something to the cart and listen for a confirmation. Those are the bells September’s plaintiffs rang.

Then scan for the rest. Our free report covers what a machine can check on the pages it loads, with no login and no sales call. The “blank” a screen reader announces is usually a control with no accessible name. And a fixed, documented site has ended a case before: a federal court dismissed a website suit after the defendant showed its remediation.

The fine print

Every case here is an allegation. These are complaints. Nothing in them has been answered, tested or decided, and naming a defendant reports what was filed. We did not test bestbuy.com, dillards.com, colehaan.com, carters.com or ulta.com, and we do not vouch for any barrier described. “ADA compliant” is a legal conclusion; the technical standard these complaints cite is WCAG, which courts reference and no binding holding adopts. The dismissal linked above was for mootness and without prejudice.

What we read. We pulled every federal docket filed 1 to 30 September 2026 under nature of suit 446 (ADA, other than employment) from CourtListener: 304 dockets. Complaints for 113 of them were free in the RECAP archive and we read all 113. We bought four more from PACER through CourtListener (Best Buy, Dillard’s, Ulta, Lululemon; 107 pages, $8.50 at PACER’s rates), which are now free to everyone at the links above. Of the 117 complaints read, 39 are website accessibility suits and 78 are something else, 47 of them filed in the Central District of California, where the complaints we read plead physical access. Another 27 dockets come from three New York plaintiff firms whose every September complaint we read was a website complaint; we count those as likely website suits and have not read them. We excluded 43 unread dockets as government, school or physical-access filers. 117 dockets remain unclassified, 96 of them in Florida, because their complaints are not free and we stopped at four purchases. So 39 is a floor for the month and is not a count of September’s website suits.

Basis. Federal court only. State-court filings and demand letters sit outside this and cannot be added to it or compared with any count that includes them.

On the complaints themselves. Dillard’s: the complaint hedges the Previous and Next buttons (“may not receive keyboard focus”); the size-button and dialog allegations are stated flatly. At least three of its fifteen items (a link with vague text, a page with no main heading, an alt attribute on the wrong element) describe the page as written and are the kind of thing a scan can sometimes flag. Best Buy: the barrier list reads as a tester’s report inserted into the pleading. One paragraph says the plaintiff used ChromeVox while the report lists NVDA, another refers to “menu offerings,” and the complaint says the plaintiff also acted “as a tester.” Three of the eleven barriers are on a gift-card page at bestbuy.cashstar.com. Cole Haan and Carter’s: each says the plaintiff “engaged an expert witness” who consulted “an IT specialist,” and refers to exhibits we did not see. The same plaintiff and firm filed three more suits that day; we read the two against Artsana USA (chiccousa.com) and Stand Out For Good (altardstate.com), which plead submenus, a search box and a cart button. Lululemon: the plaintiff’s lawyer filed five other September suits we have not read, so we do not know what they allege.

We sell remediation. Telling you a scan misses most of this cuts against our own free report, and it is still true. An automated scan is a floor and never conformance: it cannot judge whether alt text is meaningful, whether focus order makes sense, or whether a keyboard user can leave a dialog. Our own site scores 100 and that proves nothing. This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

  • Macon v. Dillard’s, Inc., No. 6:26-cv-01954 (M.D. Fla., filed 2 September 2026), Complaint (ECF 1) — PDF
  • Hernandez v. Best Buy Co. of Minnesota, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-26346 (S.D. Fla., filed 15 September 2026), Complaint (ECF 1) — PDF
  • Zhang v. Cole Haan LLC, No. 1:26-cv-08632 (S.D.N.Y., filed 30 September 2026), Complaint (ECF 1) — PDF
  • Zhang v. Carter’s, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-08629 (S.D.N.Y., filed 30 September 2026) — PDF
  • Zhang v. Artsana USA, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-08628 (S.D.N.Y., filed 30 September 2026) — PDF
  • Zhang v. Stand Out For Good, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-08625 (S.D.N.Y., filed 30 September 2026) — PDF
  • Pagan v. Ulta Beauty Cosmetics, LLC, No. 1:26-cv-26307 (S.D. Fla., filed 14 September 2026), Complaint (ECF 1) — PDF
  • Gazonni v. Lululemon USA Inc., No. 0:26-cv-62492 (S.D. Fla., filed 8 September 2026), Complaint (ECF 1) — PDF
  • CourtListener docket search, nature of suit 446, filed 1–30 September 2026, accessed 4 October 2026
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, W3C