Groupon was sued in Minnesota federal court on September 15, 2026 over a website the complaint says blind shoppers cannot use with a screen reader. It is one of well over a hundred near-identical class actions the same plaintiff has filed in that one district, and none of them pays class members anything.
Allegations Only · No Findings of Liability
Every case described on this page is at the complaint stage. The barriers described are allegations by one plaintiff about what happened on a particular visit to a website. None of the companies named has been found liable, no class has been certified, and there is nothing to claim in any of these cases. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
What Is Happening
On September 15, 2026 a class action complaint was filed against Groupon, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. It alleges that groupon.com is not accessible to blind and low-vision shoppers who navigate with screen reader software, and that the barriers violate Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Minnesota Human Rights Act.Read on its own, that sounds like a landmark case against a household brand. It is not. The federal docket index lists 139 cases brought by the same plaintiff in this one district during 2025, and roughly twenty more in the month before the Groupon filing. The complaints share a structure, a legal theory and a law firm. Groupon is the newest name on a long list.
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The Recent Run of Defendants
Between mid-August and mid-September 2026 the same plaintiff filed against, among others, Nike, H&M Fashion USA, Marc Jacobs International, Sportsman's Warehouse, iHerb, Untuckit Retail, Rhone Apparel, VEJA North America, Proper Cloth, Paul Fredrick Menstyle, Impressions Vanity, Johnnie-O, Messika USA and Marubeni America. Groupon followed on September 15.The defendants have little in common beyond running a retail website. That is the point of the model: the claim is about the site's compatibility with assistive technology, so any e-commerce operator is a candidate, and the same pleading works against all of them with the product details swapped out.
Why Minnesota
Title III of the ADA does not award damages. A successful plaintiff gets an injunction and attorney's fees, which is why federal accessibility suits tend to end in a remediation agreement rather than a payout. The Minnesota Human Rights Act is the reason these cases cluster in one district: the complaints pair the federal claim with an MHRA claim and ask the court for damages, a damages multiplier, and a civil penalty payable to the State of Minnesota.That combination changes the negotiating position without changing what class members get. The civil penalty, if awarded, goes to the state rather than to anyone in the class, and the class as pleaded is a Rule 23(b)(2) injunctive class — a device the rule's drafters built for civil rights cases seeking an order about future conduct, not for distributing money to individuals.
What These Suits Get Consumers
If you are blind or have low vision and you use a screen reader, the honest answer is: potentially a website you can use, and nothing else. There is no fund in any of these cases, no settlement administrator, no claim form and no deadline. If one settles, the typical result is a private agreement in which the company commits to an accessibility program, plus fees to plaintiff's counsel. Class members are not sent checks.That is a real benefit and worth saying plainly rather than dismissing. It is also not the kind of benefit most people mean when they ask whether they can join a class action. Anyone searching for a Groupon payout will not find one here.
The Standing Fight Is the Real Battleground
The recurring defense argument is that a plaintiff who visits a website, encounters confusing narration and leaves has not suffered a concrete injury — particularly where nothing was actually purchased. The Groupon complaint anticipates that, quoting a Minnesota federal judge who rejected it from the bench in an earlier case by the same plaintiff against Wilson Sporting Goods: the judge found an adequately alleged injury in wanting to look at products and being unable to do so, and observed that a plaintiff does not have to promise she was going to buy something.The complaint also leans on Steger v. Franco, a 2000 Eighth Circuit decision holding that an ADA plaintiff may seek relief for barriers beyond the ones personally encountered, since requiring a separate suit for each barrier would be impracticable. Whether those arguments hold in any particular case is exactly what gets litigated, and courts have not been uniform.
What the Complaints Ask Companies to Do
The injunctive relief sought is unusually specific, and it is the most useful part of these filings for anyone running a site. The Groupon complaint asks for an accessibility audit within 90 days, a written digital accessibility policy posted in the site header, a corrective action strategy circulated to executives and contractors, staff training within 12 months, a named staff member accountable for the policy, contract terms requiring third-party vendors to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, all published pages accessible within 18 months, and — the part that matters most — a standing obligation to test before release, with monthly automated scans and quarterly manual testing by disabled end users.That last item reflects a point the complaints make at length: a one-time fix does not survive contact with a site that changes daily. Accessibility either lives in the release process or it decays.
Where OCA Has Covered This Before
Website accessibility cases do occasionally produce money, just not through this model. OCA's pages on the Fashion Nova accessibility settlement — and the Justice Department's objection to it — show what happens when a deal is struck that the government thinks shortchanges the class. The Home Depot ADA settlement is the rarer shape where affected shoppers actually received something. Both claim windows have closed.For the Groupon case specifically, OCA tracks the docket on its Groupon website accessibility lawsuit page.
Questions
Can I get money from an ADA website accessibility class action?
Almost never. These suits are pleaded as Rule 23(b)(2) classes, which exist to obtain an injunction rather than to distribute money, and Title III of the ADA does not authorize damages at all. There is no fund, no claim form and no deadline in any of them.
Why are so many of these lawsuits filed in Minnesota?
The Minnesota Human Rights Act gives a private plaintiff remedies that ADA Title III does not. The complaints pair the federal accessibility claim with an MHRA claim and ask for damages, a damages multiplier and a civil penalty payable to the State of Minnesota, which changes the settlement leverage even though the class itself is an injunctive one.
How many of these suits have been filed?
The federal docket index lists 139 cases brought by the same plaintiff in the District of Minnesota in 2025 alone, and roughly twenty more in the month before the Groupon complaint. Defendants in that recent run include Nike, H&M, Marc Jacobs, Sportsman's Warehouse, iHerb and Untuckit.
Does a filing mean the website is definitely inaccessible?
No. A complaint is an allegation. None of these defendants has been found liable, and the barriers described are the plaintiff's account of what a screen reader did on a particular visit. Some defendants fix the issues, some dispute them, and courts have split on threshold questions such as standing.
What should a business do if its website gets one of these complaints?
That is a question for counsel, not a web page. What the complaints themselves ask for is instructive though: an accessibility audit, a written policy, staff training, WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance for new content, and automated plus manual end-user testing on a recurring schedule rather than a one-time fix.
Sources
- Docket, Dalton v. Groupon, Inc., No. 0:26-cv-04014 (D. Minn., filed Sept. 15, 2026)
- RECAP docket index — the plaintiff's District of Minnesota filings
- Americans with Disabilities Act, Title III (42 U.S.C. § 12181 et seq.)
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 quick reference
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative — the business case for digital accessibility
