On a September evening in 2016, Guillermo Robles opened the Domino's website to order a customized pizza. Robles is blind; he browses with a screen reader, software that turns a page into speech. The deal he wanted was locked behind an unlabeled button. The toppings menu was a silent grid. He tried the iPhone app instead. It was worse.
So he did something most people never do about a broken website: he sued. Robles argued that Domino's online ordering was a service of a place of public accommodation — a pizzeria — and that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, it had to work for him the way the counter and the phone line did.
Domino's could have fixed the site. Accessibility consultants later estimated the work at less than the cost of the litigation's first year. Instead, the company — backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of retail and restaurant trade groups — decided to make Robles the test case for a much bigger question: does the ADA, written in 1990 when "web" mostly meant spiders, reach the internet at all?
The company spent years and millions arguing it shouldn't have to label a button.
The Ninth Circuit said yes: the website and app connect customers to the goods of Domino's physical franchises, so the ADA applies. Domino's appealed to the Supreme Court, warning of a "tsunami of litigation." In October 2019, the Court declined to hear the case — one line, no comment — leaving the ruling in place. Robles eventually settled. The pizza, by then, was three years old.
The precedent nobody wrote down
Here is the strange part: the case that defined web accessibility law in America produced no new law. Congress has never amended the ADA to mention websites. The Justice Department has issued guidance, withdrawn it, and issued it again. What exists instead is a patchwork of circuit-court opinions that disagree with each other — which is why, as we report elsewhere in this issue, thousands of American businesses keep getting sued over their websites every year, and why so many of them reach for one-line "overlay" widgets that promise compliance and rarely deliver it.
For Robles, the stakes were never abstract. "This is about independence," his lawyers argued — the ability to order dinner without asking a stranger for help. For the internet, the stakes were the same ones this magazine keeps returning to: the everyday errands of life moved online, and the law is still deciding who gets to come along.