A Case Against Domino’s Reveals a Slice of the Internet’s Accessibility Issues
The pizza giant is matched against a blind customer advocating for a better digital world
For three years, Domino’s Pizza waged a legal war to exclude people with disabilities from using its website and popular app, underscoring the bizarre reality that U.S. civil rights law does not always apply to the internet — and that in an increasingly online world, no law or regulation broadly requires digital spaces to be as accessible as physical ones.
In 2016, the multinational pizza chain was sued by Guillermo Robles, a California man who is legally blind, after he was repeatedly unable to order a custom pizza from its website and app. Robles claimed that under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), an anti-discrimination law signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, Domino’s should have to make its platforms compatible with assistive technology. In Robles’ case, he could not use screen reader software — a type of text-to-audio translator — to read the instructions aloud and purchase a pizza. He argued that since Title III of the ADA prevents brick-and-mortar facilities, such as restaurants, from ostracizing people with disabilities, websites and apps should be compliant as well.
