{"id":683,"date":"2026-08-08T05:04:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683"},"modified":"2026-08-08T05:04:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:04:40","slug":"the-chew-toy-that-ate-my-small-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683","title":{"rendered":"The chew toy that ate my small business"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Two summers ago<\/b>, a 61-year-old blind woman I\u2019d never met sued me for allegedly injuring her. Her accusation: I had impeded her ability to buy a Snugarooz Floos N\u2019 Fun Ball \u2014 a tug toy for dogs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Bach\u2019s lesson for the AI age<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the complaint, Lisa Cantwell of Queens, New York, visited my online store, but issues with a product page\u2019s metadata interfered with her screen-reading software, ultimately keeping her from completing the purchase. This, the suit claimed, constituted \u201ca concrete and particularized injury,\u201d that led to \u201cdirect harm and frustration\u201d and constituted a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cruelty, thy name is \u2026 Snugarooz Floos N\u2019 Fun Ball.<\/span><\/p>\n

The toy in question was one I carried in my Manhattan dog-training center, School For the Dogs. Dog-training classes, private lessons, and playgroups were the place\u2019s main income generators, but near the front desk, I curated a small selection of toys and training tools. Some of these items were also sold through an online store I built myself on Shopify in 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n

I liked carrying products from small vendors with stories behind them: a rubber bully-stick holder invented by a woman whose dog nearly died after swallowing the end of a chew; handmade treat pouches designed by a California mother after her daughter began volunteering at an animal shelter. The Snugarooz toy was made from recycled materials by a small business on Long Island.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same week I got the summons, I\u2019d begun discussions with another pet-business owner about buying a majority stake in my struggling company. I was desperate for a way out \u2014 or at least, a way forward. I\u2019d started the training business in my living room in 2011. I had no business background and yet for years, pretty much every month was better than the one before it. But then the pandemic hit. At that point, I had more than a dozen employees, a two-story East Village storefront, payroll approaching $40,000 a month, and a 1-year-old daughter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I had to close for a few months at the start of the pandemic, but there was no break on rent or utilities. Many of my best clients fled Manhattan that spring and never came back. The electric bill tripled. Some key employees left in the fog of it all, and those who stayed demanded higher wages because their own bills had skyrocketed. Determined to get to the other side of the madness, I took out loans and pivoted so many times I became dizzy trying to follow my own strategic plans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I had another baby.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had once<\/b> thought of my business as my firstborn child, but increasingly, I wondered if it were more like Audrey Two, the carnivorous plant in <\/span>Little Shop of Horrors<\/span><\/i> \u2014 a ravenous organism that survived only if I continued feeding it my own blood. I was already barely hanging on. A lawsuit felt like it might finish me off.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ordeal seemed terrifying but also \u2026 kind of fascinating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the great moral achievements of modern America. Of course, blind people should be able to access websites. Of course, businesses should make reasonable accommodations. But the ADA was enacted in 1990, back when \u201cgoing online\u201d involved listening to a modem screech like Yoko Ono trapped inside a fax machine, and Amazon was merely a rainforest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But, small problem, the law doesn\u2019t define what an accessible website is. That has created a vacuum now filled by consultants, remediation firms, accessibility software, and armies of highly specialized plaintiff-side law firms. To understand how this world worked, I spoke with David Stein, of Stein & Nieporent LLP, a Manhattan-based firm that has represented defendants in nearly 1,000 website-accessibility lawsuits over the past decade.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are no binding standards,\u201d he told me, \u201cand the cases almost never go to trial\u201d \u2014 a combination that turns out to matter enormously.<\/span><\/p>\n

Simply put: if you want to build a website that you can be sure will evade a lawsuit, you can\u2019t; and if you want to go to court to make the case that your site <\/span>does<\/span><\/i> make accommodations for disabled people, you shouldn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, when building your site, you would be wise to follow a set of guidelines called WCAG \u2014 the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines \u2014 created not by Congress or the Department of Justice, but by the World Wide Web Consortium, an independent nonprofit founded by the web\u2019s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The guidelines recommend using image descriptions, keyboard navigation, readable color contrast, standardized page structures, and about 1,000 other things. The most recent update is longer than most of my favorite Victorian novels.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While there are plenty of companies out there that may help make your site be more WCAG-y, no site is safe from litigation. This is because Congress has never written a standard into law, regulators have never formalized one, and courts rarely interpret any because the cases almost always settle before going before a judge.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re dealing with an impossible situation,\u201d Stein said. \u201cThe official guidelines are nonexistent, and even the unofficial guidelines are aspirational and somewhat subjective.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In practice, this means accessibility litigation often functions less like traditional law enforcement and more like procedural roulette. Anyone who self-identifies as disabled and claims to have had a bad experience on a website for any reason can bring a suit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Said Stein: \u201cThe plaintiff says the site is inaccessible; the defendant says it isn\u2019t. That creates what\u2019s called a \u2018material factual dispute.\u2019\u201d He noted that some plaintiffs have filed hundreds of these cases. Some attorneys have filed thousands. His site lists 12 of the most prolific law firms filing these suits, and their 38 favorite plaintiffs. \u201cThe cases often seem less about improving accessibility,\u201d he explained, \u201cand more about recovering attorney\u2019s fees.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That, it turns out, is the heart of the matter: the fees.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

ADA suits are referred to by the legal trade as involving \u201cbits,\u201d like websites, or \u201cbricks,\u201d like ramps. In both cases, the plaintiffs, if they were to go to trial and win, won\u2019t walk away with damages; the verdict simply compels the defendant to attempt to fix the issue. So, in order to incentivize people with disabilities to pursue these cases, law firms guarantee that they\u2019ll have their lawyers\u2019 fees covered by the defendant if they win.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is called \u201cone-way fee shifting\u201d: if the plaintiff prevails, the defendants owe both sides\u2019 legal fees. The process isn\u2019t transparent, but it\u2019s likely the law firms are taking the work on pro bono for the plaintiffs (who then won\u2019t owe anything if they lose), and that some money is passed from attorney to plaintiff when the cases, as they almost inevitably do, settle. For defendants, it\u2019s lose-lose: even if they win, they still pay their own lawyers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And if you want to bone up on ADA law yourself and represent your own business \u2026 you can\u2019t. Limited liability corporations \u2014 the corporate form I used to organize my shop, and which many other small businesses likewise use \u2014 are required to be represented by a licensed attorney in court.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Every attorney I called told me the same thing: win or lose, going to trial would be more expensive than settling.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once a company<\/b> has been sued, Stein told me, the cases are easily found in public databases, and this makes the business statistically more likely to get sued again. I guess it makes the copy-paste procedure especially easy. This is why, Stein told me, after several rounds of getting sued and trying to improve their site and then getting sued again, several companies he\u2019s represented have stopped investing in trying to remedy the problem; instead, they just budget for litigation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many businesses try to rectify the issues by using third-party overlays that will change the site\u2019s contrast or read the site aloud, among other features \u2014 you can activate them usually by clicking an icon in a site\u2019s bottom corner. But Stein said that some plaintiff-side lawyers<\/span> specifically target sites that use these tools because they can be an indicator that the company opted for a Band-Aid-type solution, rather than addressing the underlying issues. Copy, paste: more tidy litigation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more The twilight of the ladyboss<\/a><\/p>\n

Accessibility lawsuits are hardly unique in the way they target businesses of all sizes in the name of an ostensibly good cause. California\u2019s Proposition 65 \u2014 the law behind the cancer-warning labels on nearly every tangible item sold in the state<\/span> \u2014 has spawned a similar industry of private-enforcement suits. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act regularly generates massive settlements over marketing texts that haven\u2019t received the proper consent, even though the law was written long before text messages were even a thing. In 2018, Bloomingdale\u2019s settled a class action suit for $1.4 million because of texts it sent to loyalty-reward customers who hadn\u2019t opted in; the content of the message was \u201c<\/span>Reply Y now to confirm you want texts!\u201d (<\/span>And yet, there\u2019s no law that has me opt in to condone the felling of forests required to keep my mailbox stuffed with Garnet Hill catalogs \u2014 it is legally allowed to send them because it sold me a fitted sheet in 2009.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The broader pattern is hard to ignore: laws passed with generally admirable goals evolve into systems where settlement becomes more rational than compliance. In consequence, small businesses in America increasingly operate inside a haze of invisible rules, selectively enforced standards, and ambient legal risk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Website-accessibility lawsuits represent this dynamic distilled to its essence. A law meant to help one disenfranchised group ends up hurting another group that might be struggling with a different set of problems. In between those two parties is a lawyer with a degree that he probably didn\u2019t need if all he\u2019s going to do is spend a matter of minutes updating a court filing template that\u2019s worked countless times before.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What struck me most during this ordeal was how little either side benefits in the end, and how detached it all felt from human interaction.<\/span><\/p>\n

I called a blind client of mine and asked whether she had ever struggled using my website.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd if I did, I\u2019d probably just call the phone number at the bottom of the page.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Exactly.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the lawyers I spoke with, I probably could have settled the case and covered my own legal fees for under $5,000, but I got served at a moment where I was struggling to keep my business bank account in the four figures. And even if I\u2019d settled, I was afraid there would be remediation expenses, plus the lingering possibility of future lawsuits. \u201cJust ignore the whole thing!\u201d was the advice I got from my friends, none of whom is a lawyer or a business owner. The problem was that it\u2019s hard to sell a business that is in open litigation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I hated the idea of closing the store because it was one of the few parts of the business still doing reasonably well. The store and the rest of the business generally operated as a unit, but the retail arm had its own site and LLC. This was good news: it meant if the training studio failed, I could maybe continue operating the online shop from home while slowly paying down debt.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But now that I had someone likely taking over the business, that calculus changed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unsure what to do, I asked the prospective buyer what her preference would be: settle the suit, or let the site go dark and hope the case evaporated?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She picked option two. So I shut it down.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A week later, she backed out of the deal entirely, and I had to pull the plug on everything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This left me spending much of last year navigating a different \u2014 but simpler! \u2014 legal process: personal bankruptcy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the ADA,<\/b> plaintiffs don\u2019t receive damages, but as I mentioned above, I am guessing that Lisa Cantwell walks away from the cases she\u2019s named in with some token of appreciation from the lawyers. When I explained the situation to my blind client, she pointed out that most visually impaired people have trouble finding work. This made me feel for Lisa. A little bit. But it is a strange state of affairs if a blind woman\u2019s inability to find employment leaves a bootstrapped small business like mine unable to continue supporting small vendors, who often had their own compelling stories \u2014 think single mother hand-stitching dog toys in her kitchen so she can put herself through nursing school.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wondered if Lisa really had had an issue with buying the toy or if the lawyers perused sites and then just put her name on the filings? I found her on Facebook and messaged her to ask, but I never heard back; I emailed her law firm, but it didn\u2019t reply.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The same week she sued me, Lisa was named as the plaintiff on 40 other cases against a motley crew of other businesses including Williams-Sonoma, Lululemon, and the Manhattan restaurant Balthazar. A lawsuit brought on by a stranger creates a funny kind of intimacy with odd parties. I began to think of these businesses as my litigation kin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I couldn\u2019t sleep at night worrying about the collapse of a business I\u2019d put my heart and soul into and had spent years of my life building, I went deep into Google to try to see what I could find about Lisa. I learned she had received a Labrador guide dog named Louie through the <\/span>Guiding Eyes For the Blind<\/span>; a profile of her on the organization\u2019s site informed me that she was blind because she was born with underdeveloped retinas. Also: she worked in special education for 25 years, belongs to three book clubs (psychological suspense and historical fiction are her preferred genres) and likes to play \u201970s folk music on the guitar. I knew I was behaving a little like a scorned ex-girlfriend by looking into these details, but I was heartbroken and stressed out, much like when I\u2019ve been a scorned ex-girlfriend. Also, my business was created by a human being, me, and I wanted to know if there was a human being on the other end of the final straw, and if so, who she was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Going deeper, I found out her address, her middle name, maiden name, and parents\u2019 names. She has a son in his 30s who is married and lives in Connecticut, and a 29-year-old daughter who loves Disney World. Her husband is a New York Rangers fan and voted for Donald Trump. At one point, I even tracked down an old realtor\u2019s listing for her home, and found myself studying her bedroom set and beige wall-to-wall carpet. There were green and blue Sterilite storage bins stacked in a corner, and an empty wire dog crate with a fleece blanket folded inside of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The details made the whole thing feel both more absurd and more sad. I couldn\u2019t really bring myself to hate this person because, well, I didn\u2019t actually know her. What I hated is a system that turned two ordinary people \u2014 two New York City dog lovers \u2014 into opposing parties in a federal case over a rope toy.<\/span><\/p>\n

I absolutely support the underlying principle behind laws protecting Americans with disabilities, and wish I had known that my site needed to be better optimized. But as I now know, I could\u2019ve invested a boatload into optimization and ended up in the same place. For that reason, I don\u2019t think these cases are doing anything to improve the situation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The internet once lowered barriers to allow for the creation of funky little businesses like mine \u2014 businesses that could be run without in-house counsel and a budget for litigation. Now, I worry that the web has been booby-trapped to prevent the rise of anyone whose Chief Accessibility Officer sleeps at the foot of their bed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My own e-commerce days are certainly over. But I still participate on the other side of the equation. When my dog needs a new tug toy, I buy it from Amazon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more How corruption could bring down Zelensky<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two summers ago, a 61-year-old blind woman I\u2019d never met sued me for allegedly injuring her. Her accusation: I had impeded her ability to buy a Snugarooz Floos N\u2019 Fun Ball \u2014 a tug toy for dogs.\u00a0 Read more Bach\u2019s lesson for the AI age According to the complaint, Lisa Cantwell of Queens, New York, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weekend-spotlight"],"yoast_head":"\nThe chew toy that ate my small business - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The chew toy that ate my small business - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Two summers ago, a 61-year-old blind woman I\u2019d never met sued me for allegedly injuring her. 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Her accusation: I had impeded her ability to buy a Snugarooz Floos N\u2019 Fun Ball \u2014 a tug toy for dogs.\u00a0 Read more Bach\u2019s lesson for the AI age According to the complaint, Lisa Cantwell of Queens, New York, […]","og_url":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683","og_site_name":"\u0421ity Flow Journal","article_published_time":"2026-08-08T05:04:40+00:00","author":"admin","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"admin","Est. reading time":"14 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683"},"author":{"name":"admin","@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/#\/schema\/person\/eb5442f0ad6aa87f0eddf619a8d0abc4"},"headline":"The chew toy that ate my small business","datePublished":"2026-08-08T05:04:40+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683"},"wordCount":2723,"commentCount":0,"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/6d67d68552fb105b6805c52a28574d0a.webp","articleSection":["Weekend Spotlight"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683","url":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=683","name":"The chew toy that ate my small business - 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