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The chew toy that ate my small business American disability law has gone terribly wrong

ADA scamsAmericans with Disabilities ActDisability lawDogsE-commerceNew York CityScam law firmssmall business

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Annie Grossman

8 Aug 2026 - 12:01am 9 mins

Two summers ago , a 61-year-old blind woman I’d never met sued me for allegedly injuring her. Her accusation: I had impeded her ability to buy a Snugarooz Floos N’ Fun Ball — a tug toy for dogs.

According to the complaint, Lisa Cantwell of Queens, New York, visited my online store, but issues with a product page’s metadata interfered with her screen-reading software, ultimately keeping her from completing the purchase. This, the suit claimed, constituted “a concrete and particularized injury,” that led to “direct harm and frustration” and constituted a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Cruelty, thy name is … Snugarooz Floos N’ Fun Ball.

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’s 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.

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.

The same week I got the summons, I’d begun discussions with another pet-business owner about buying a majority stake in my struggling company. I was desperate for a way out — or at least, a way forward. I’d 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.

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.

Then I had another baby.

I had once thought of my business as my firstborn child, but increasingly, I wondered if it were more like Audrey Two, the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors — 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.

The ordeal seemed terrifying but also … kind of fascinating.

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 “going online” involved listening to a modem screech like Yoko Ono trapped inside a fax machine, and Amazon was merely a rainforest.

But, small problem, the law doesn’t 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.

“There are no binding standards,” he told me, “and the cases almost never go to trial” — a combination that turns out to matter enormously.

Simply put: if you want to build a website that you can be sure will evade a lawsuit, you can’t; and if you want to go to court to make the case that your site does make accommodations for disabled people, you shouldn’t.

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