Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard's twin case. Same outcome.
The same week the National Association of the Deaf sued Harvard, they sued MIT for the same problem: thousands of hours of free, public lectures and online courses with no usable captions. MIT made the same arguments — that captioning everything would be burdensome and the content was free, so users couldn't really demand accommodations.
After five years of litigation, MIT signed a 2020 consent decree requiring them to caption all new public-facing online content and remediate the archive on a schedule. Together with the Harvard case, this established the captioning rules for every university, training-content publisher, and B2B SaaS with marketing videos.
Court
District of Massachusetts
Case
National Association of the Deaf v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3:15-cv-30024
Outcome
Class action consent decree settlement approved July 21, 2020; companion to NAD v. Harvard; MIT required to caption all public-facing online content
What went wrong on the site
Each visual below shows what visitors with disabilities actually experienced.
No CC
Deaf users get audio dialogue with no captions
Audio and video content had no closed captions — deaf and hard-of-hearing users got no access to the dialogue.
WCAG 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded)
Sources & documentation
Is your site exposed like Massachusetts's was?
Run a free scan to find out which of these violations exist on your site right now.
Scan my siteAll Education cases
See the full education risk landscape
Other cases, top WCAG failures for education, and what to fix first.
More B2C cases
Retail / E-commerce
Target Corporation
First major e-commerce ADA settlement in U.S. history; established that commercial websites are covered by ADA and class-action exposure is real — Target paid $6M+ in 2008.
Retail / E-commerce
Fashion Nova
Largest disclosed ADA web accessibility class settlement in recent years at $5.15M — and the DOJ intervened in 2026 to argue even this wasn't enough, signaling elevated federal scrutiny.
Streaming
Netflix
Established that the ADA applies to web-only businesses with no physical stores; Netflix paid $795k in fees/monitoring and committed to 100% captioning of its entire streaming library.