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The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a lower court’s ruling that had allowed a Florida woman to sue a Maine hotel for failing to disclose accessible features on its reservation website. The woman had no intention of actually making a reservation at the hotel in question.
Deborah Laufer is visually impaired and uses a wheelchair; the justices unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision to revive her lawsuit against Acheson Hotels LLC. The justices found the case to be moot, so they dismissed it.
Laufer asserted that the corporation was in breach of a federal regulation mandating the inclusion of accessibility information in reservation systems, as per the Americans with Disabilities Act, a seminal civil rights statute passed in 1990, Reuters reported.
Laufer calls himself a “tester” of hotels’ ADA compliance. Disabled people are protected from discrimination by law in a variety of settings, including hotels and other public accommodations, the workplace, public transit, communications, and access to government programs and services.
Typically, plaintiffs need to…
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