Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores

Juan Carlos Gil is legally blind and has cerebral palsy. He has lived in Miami for twenty-five years, uses the JAWS screen reader for almost everything, and had shopped at Winn-Dixie since a school trip in 1999, when the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind took its vending-programme students to the store to learn to buy stock. He kept going because the prices were low and his only income was Social Security. He estimated thirty to forty visits.

In 2015 and 2016 he heard, from television advertising and from people at the Center for Independent Living, the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind, that Winn-Dixie had a website where you could refill a prescription and load digital coupons onto your rewards card. He was interested because, as the trial judge later recorded, he could finally do something independently without asking somebody for help. He spent about half an hour on the site. Roughly nine in ten of its controls did nothing for his screen reader. He could not reach the store locator.

He sued on 12 July 2016 under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, seeking an injunction, a declaration and fees, and nothing else, because Title III gives a private plaintiff nothing else. Winn-Dixie argued that its website was not a place of public accommodation and that nothing on it stopped Gil walking into a store. The Justice Department filed a statement backing Gil. The judge refused to dismiss the case, tried it over two days in June 2017, and found for Gil in a thirteen-page verdict that is still the only trial judgment in the field.

Winn-Dixie appealed. The Eleventh Circuit heard argument in October 2018 and then said nothing for thirty months. In that silence the three-year injunction ran its course and expired. When the panel finally ruled, in April 2021, it reversed two to one and held that a website is not a place of public accommodation. Gil asked for rehearing, pointing out that there was nothing left to decide. In December 2021 the same panel agreed, vacated its opinion and the judgment beneath it, and sent the case back to be dismissed. Winn-Dixie asked the full court to rescue its win. It was refused in March 2022.

Most accessibility cases end in a settlement, so the public record consists of a complaint and a press release. This one produced sworn testimony from both sides, and the judge's findings of fact are worth reading in full. They contain three things a boardroom summary usually leaves out.

The customer's side

Gil testified that refilling a prescription in person meant asking an employee to walk him to the pharmacy and then saying his medications aloud at the counter, not knowing who was standing nearby. Coupons meant asking a friend to read the newspaper to him, or asking employees who sometimes seemed annoyed. Publix and Walgreens both had websites that worked with his screen reader; he used them to build a shopping list, hand it to an employee, and collect prescriptions without announcing them. On Winn-Dixie's site the tab key reached almost nothing, there was no search shortcut, and he could not find a store. He had used five or six hundred other websites that worked. There was no accessibility notice and no way to report the problem.

The company's side

Winn-Dixie's witness was Rodney Cornwell, vice president of IT at its parent, Southeastern Grocers. His evidence did more for the plaintiff than the plaintiff's own expert did. The website had been built in September 2015 and, he said, there had been no discussion whatsoever of accessibility. It had cost $2 million. It was rebuilt for the Plenti rewards programme at a cost of $7 million, again with no accessibility work. It had never been tested with a screen reader. The company had no accessibility policy, was building one, had set aside $250,000 to make the site accessible, and considered the work feasible. A new executive team, several of whom had come from Australia where accessibility was mandated, had decided to do it regardless of the lawsuit.

He also confirmed the facts that later decided the appeal: the site sold nothing; coupons could be linked to a rewards card only through the site; existing prescriptions could be refilled online for collection in store; and 495 stores across five states were listed on it.

The expert's side

Chris Keroack of Equal Entry, a former Microsoft accessibility tester, had run an automated scan and a manual pass with the NVDA screen reader over the home page, the coupons, the store locator and the pharmacy section. He told the court that most of the problems could be corrected with simple changes to source code, that WCAG addressed every one of them, and that a full audit followed by eighty to one hundred hours of remediation and a re-test would cost $37,000 or less. He could not imagine, he said, that it would ever cost in the neighbourhood of $250,000. Google Maps, which powered the store locator, was already conformant.

The dates matter here more than in most cases, because the outcome turned on a gap between two of them. The three-year clock on the injunction and the thirty-month clock on the appeal ran at the same time, and the first ran out.

The defence ran on one idea at every stage: the website is not a place, and nothing about it stops a blind customer walking into the store. That argument failed at trial, succeeded for eight months on appeal, and then ceased to exist. Two things it never argued deserve attention.

At trial

Winn-Dixie did not dispute that its stores were public accommodations, that Gil was disabled, or that the site failed with a screen reader. It argued that Gil had not been denied access to the stores themselves. The judge answered that the ADA does not merely require physical access; it requires full and equal enjoyment of the services of a place, and the pharmacy management system, the digital coupons and the store locator were undoubtedly services of the stores. He added a sentence with no legal weight and considerable moral weight: those services are especially important for blind customers, for whom paper coupons, finding a store and going to a pharmacy counter are difficult or impossible.

Winn-Dixie presented no evidence that the work would be unduly burdensome. Its own witness said it was feasible and under way. That left the court free to find the cost of no moment, and it did.

On appeal

The majority opinion by Judge Branch worked through the statute's twelve categories of public accommodation, found every one of them a tangible physical place, and held that websites are not among them. It then turned to the circuit's own precedent, Rendon, in which a telephone screening line for a game show was held to be an intangible barrier to the privilege of appearing on the show. The difference, the majority said, was that the phone line had been the only way in. Winn-Dixie's site was a limited-use convenience. It was not a point of sale. Everything started on it had to be finished in a store, and nothing prevented Gil from shopping there, as he had for years before he freely chose to stop.

The majority expressly declined to adopt the nexus test, and it distinguished the Ninth Circuit's decision in Robles v. Domino'son the facts: Domino's sold pizza through its site and app, and Winn-Dixie sold nothing through its site. A footnote recorded that Gil's counsel had conceded at argument that Winn-Dixie was not required to have a website at all and could simply remove it.

Seven points where the outcome was still open, taken from the testimony and the docket rather than from hindsight. At most of them the company was told, by its own people, what to do.

The verdict was the first of its kind and was reported as such. The reversal, four years later, was reported as the end of website accessibility claims in three states. The vacatur, eight months after that, was barely reported at all. This section sets out who said what, at each stage, and where the arguments came from.

Developers, June 2017

The largest public discussion of the verdict was a Hacker News thread of 114 comments. We read all of them. Its centre of gravity was the wheelchair-ramp analogy, argued from both directions: that a website is a storefront and the obligation is the same, or that building codes and design rules are not comparable and government has no business zoning websites. A large sub-thread concerned whether WCAG is easy or hard, with practitioners insisting that sensible HTML gets you most of the way and sceptics replying that the last part is where the cost lives. The $37,000 estimate was mocked as unrealistically low by people who had not read the testimony, and defended by people who had.

The thread's serial-litigation anxiety attached itself not to Gil or his lawyer but to Paul Hansmeier, a Minnesota attorney then under federal investigation for a copyright-trolling scheme who had moved into ADA filings. One commenter noted that Winn-Dixie had spent $9 million on the website the previous year and asked how that squared with the cost objection. Nobody in the thread mentioned that the company had testified it was fixing the site anyway.

That one commenter was answering a claim that the University of California, Berkeley had been forced to take down free online courses over accessibility. Berkeley, he wrote, did not have to take them down; it chose to, and could have captioned them instead. The exchange is a reminder that the most-cited horror story in the thread was itself a choice presented as a compulsion.

Practitioners

Lainey Feingold, who negotiates accessibility agreements without litigation, called the verdict the first trial in an ADA case about website accessibility against a private company and, a month later, published a piece arguing that Winn-Dixie had simply not been paying attention: Safeway had adopted WCAG 2.0 AA in 2013 after a structured negotiation with nine blind customers, and the Peapod settlement with the Justice Department in 2014 was a public roadmap the company could have copied. After the 2021 reversal she described the opinion's reasoning as convoluted and advised businesses that unless they planned a separate website for Georgia, Alabama and Florida, inclusive design should remain their guiding star and WCAG 2.1 AA their standard.

William Goren, an ADA lawyer and commentator, predicted the majority's approach would be very hard for courts to apply and identified a paradox in it: Gil already had his auxiliary aid, the screen reader; the problem was that the company had not set its site up to work with it. Eric Goldman, the technology law scholar, thought the opinion consistent with decades of precedent but puzzled over the business decision, given that the litigation had plainly cost more than the $250,000 the company had budgeted for compliance.

Blind organisations

Two weeks after the reversal, the National Federation of the Blind's president, Mark Riccobono, appeared on the ADA National Network's broadcast alongside Howard Rosenblum of the National Association of the Deaf and Bruce Sexton, the named plaintiff in the Target case fifteen years earlier. Asked for his view, Riccobono said it was outrageous, three times, and then made an argument that was pointedly not a legal one.

This case is misdescribed more often than any other in the field, partly because it changed shape three times and most commentary stopped after the second. Twelve claims circulate widely enough to be worth answering directly, each set here against what the filings and the orders actually say.

The legal position in Florida, Georgia and Alabama is what it was in 2016: no appellate decision either way, district courts applying the nexus test case by case, and the Justice Department's view on the record. The company that fought the case says it now conforms to a standard the order never required.

Did the site get fixed?

Unlike Domino's, Winn-Dixie's site was server-rendered through the years that matter, so the Internet Archive's captures contain markup that can be measured. We measured the home page at four points and then measured the live site on 2 September 2026, counting the defects a screen reader hits first.

The shape is clear enough. The page with no language declaration, no accessibility link and eleven unnamed links in 2016 had all three fixed within the injunction's first year, and stayed largely clean through the appeal. The 2026 figure, twenty-one images without alt text on a page that claims WCAG 2.0 AA, is the familiar pattern from the Domino's app: accessibility is a maintenance property, and the order that required quarterly testing expired in 2020.

The company since

Southeastern Grocers emerged from Chapter 11 in 2018, was bought by Aldi in a deal completed in March 2024, and was sold back to a private consortium including its supplier C&S Wholesale in February 2025 with about 170 stores, the rest converting to Aldi. It has announced a rebrand to The Winn-Dixie Company in 2026. Its accessibility statement, last updated 21 January 2026, names WCAG 2.0 AA as its standard, describes periodic testing with screen readers, magnifiers and disabled users, and gives an email address, a telephone number and a postal address. It names no vendor and runs no overlay. WCAG 2.0 is two revisions behind the current guidelines; the order that named it was written in 2017.

What to take from it

• Vacated means gone.Anyone citing the Eleventh Circuit's Winn-Dixie opinion as law, in a brief or a sales deck, is citing an opinion the court itself withdrew. The question is open in three states.
• Your own witness sets the ceiling on your defence. Once the company said the work was feasible, budgeted and under way, the cost argument was over before it was made.
• An in-store alternative has to be equal, not merely available. The dissent's point about saying your medications aloud at a counter is the one that will be argued next time, and it is a usability finding, not a legal one.
• Time-limited orders time out. A three-year injunction and a thirty-month appeal cannot coexist. Plaintiffs who want a precedent now know to seek declaratory relief; defendants who want one now know the risk of winning late.
• Statements outlive orders. The company still publishes the policy the injunction required, six years after the injunction ended. Check it against the live site, as we did, before relying on it.

Trial findings, procedural facts and quotations are drawn from the verdict, the appellate opinions and the filings below. Commentary and community claims are attributed to their sources. Where the record is silent, particularly on Winn-Dixie's litigation spend, this page does not estimate.

Primary

• Verdict and Order Following Non-Jury Trial, 257 F. Supp. 3d 1340 (12 June 2017)
• Statement of Interest of the United States (12 December 2016)
• Eleventh Circuit opinion and dissent, 993 F.3d 1266 (7 April 2021)
• Gil's petition for rehearing en banc (15 April 2021)
• Order granting panel rehearing and vacating the opinion, 21 F.4th 775 (28 December 2021)
• Amicus brief of the US Chamber of Commerce and eleven business organisations (17 October 2017)
• District court docket, No. 1:16-cv-23020
• Winn-Dixie accessibility statement, checked 2 September 2026

Reporting and legal commentary

• Seyfarth Shaw on the verdict (June 2017)
• Legal Newsline on the fee award and the appeal (2 October 2017)
• Coupons in the News on the verdict and Gil's other suits (21 June 2017)
• CNBC on the Southeastern Grocers Chapter 11 filing (27 March 2018)
• Seyfarth Shaw on the sanctions against Scott Dinin (August 2019)
• Eric Goldman on the panel opinion (April 2021)
• William Goren on the panel opinion (13 April 2021)
• Holland & Knight on the vacatur (January 2022)
• Seyfarth Shaw on the denial of rehearing and the 181-group letter (March 2022)
• Southeastern Grocers on its 2025 change of ownership

Practitioners and community

• Lainey Feingold on the verdict (13 June 2017)
• Lainey Feingold, “Winn-Dixie wasn't paying attention” (July 2017)
• Lainey Feingold on the appeal (11 April 2021)
• ADA Live transcript with Mark Riccobono, Howard Rosenblum and Bruce Sexton (21 April 2021)
• Hacker News discussion of the verdict, 114 comments (June 2017)
• UsableNet on Winn-Dixie's accessibility statement after the reversal (April 2021)