Sued by Joseph & Norinsberg over your website?

Joseph & Norinsberg LLC is a New York law firm whose cases include website accessibility lawsuits. If your business was named in one, here's what the complaints say and what to do first.

This is a technical accessibility assessment, not legal advice, and automated testing cannot establish ADA compliance.

What the court records show

Between September 18 and October 7, 2026, the firm filed 11 ADA cases in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, by our count of the public dockets on CourtListener. We read all 11 complaints. All 11 were about a website, all were against businesses that sell online, and all were filed as class actions.

What the complaint says

The 11 complaints follow the same outline and run from 19 to 33 pages:

• The plaintiff is legally blind and uses screen-reading software such as JAWS or NVDA.
• The plaintiff visited the website to buy products the complaint names. It gives the dates of the visits, often three of them.
• The plaintiff could not finish because of barriers on those product pages: images without alternative text, buttons and links the screen reader announces as empty, and low-contrast text.
• Automated accessibility scans of the same pages found the same kinds of problems. 10 of the 11 complaints name the scanning tool, WAVE.

Each one makes five claims: under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the New York State Human Rights Law, the New York State Civil Rights Law and the New York City Human Rights Law, plus a request for a declaration from the court. Each one demands a jury trial.

What it asks the court for

• An order requiring you to make the website accessible to blind users.
• A declaration that the website discriminates against blind users.
• Certification of the case as a class action.
• Money damages under the New York state and city laws.
• The plaintiff's attorneys' fees and costs.

What any of this means for your business is a question for your attorney. How these lawsuits work, in plain English.

Common questions

Is the lawsuit real?

A filed case has a case number, such as 1:26-cv-08230. You can look it up free on CourtListener or on PACER, the federal courts' own system. If the case is there, it's real.

We aren't in New York. Why were we sued there?

The complaints say the website sells to customers in New York. Whether that is enough for a New York court to hear the case is a legal question; ask your attorney. More on New York cases.

The complaint cites a WAVE report. Can we run the same scan?

Yes. WAVE is a free tool from WebAIM that anyone can run on a page. Run it on the product pages the complaint names and save the results with the date. A scan shows what a tool detects today, not everything a screen reader user runs into. How we test, and what a scan can't tell you.

First steps

1. Write down the date you were served and talk to an attorney. A lawsuit has a short, fixed deadline to respond. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away.
2. Find the products and the visit dates in the complaint. They tell you which pages to look at first.
3. Get the technical facts. Check which of the claimed barriers exist on those pages today, and on your home, cart and checkout pages.
4. Fix the real issues in the site itself. Step-by-step fixes: Shopify, WordPress. An accessibility widget doesn't change the code the complaint is about: do widgets stop lawsuits?
5. Keep dated records of what was wrong, what you changed and when.

How we counted

On October 12, 2026 we searched CourtListener for federal civil-rights cases coded "ADA – Other" that list Joseph & Norinsberg as plaintiff's counsel and were filed from September 14 to October 11, 2026. Cases that haven't reached CourtListener aren't counted, so the real number may be higher. We read the complaints that were available as public documents. We have no connection to the firm or its clients. If anything here is wrong, tell us and we'll correct it.

Sued by a different firm? See Gottlieb & Associates, Usher Law Group, East End Trial Group.