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Here’s What You Need to Know About ADA Compliance

March 2, 2018

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In June 2017, a Florida federal judge decided that Winn-Dixie’s website violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (also known as ADA). The North American retailer was required to update its site because it was inaccessible to the visually impaired. According to Forbes, the company has set aside $250,000 just for the update, although it’s estimated it won’t cost that much. Plaintiff Juan Carlos Gil isn’t entitled to damages, but he is entitled to attorneys’ fees as the prevailing party.

This particular case – believed to be the first of its kind, has set a legal precedent for ADA compliance related lawsuits that has most businesses worried. But what is ADA exactly and how does it apply to your business?

In order to fully understand the reasons behind the ADA compliance, we’ll need to start from the very beginning.

What exactly is ADA?

As stated before, ADA stands for Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) – a comprehensive civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability, in all areas of public life. This law applies to:

  • State and local government.
  • Public and private spaces.
  • Employment.
  • Building codes.
  • Transportation.
  • Telecommunication.

For the private sector businesses (Title III), this law applies to companies with 15 or more employees.

In 1990 – when ADA was signed into law, the Internet was not a big presence in the lives of Americans. In fact the law mostly revolved around physical locations and the standards they should meet in order to be accessible for everyone – schools, office buildings, hotels, and others. Some years later (2003), the Department of Justice (DOJ) recognized the possible application of Title III from ADA to websites as well. In 2010 the DOJ released a Notice of Advance Rulemaking where it was stated that regulations for implementing Title III of the ADA will be revised so that they could be accessible to individuals with disabilities as well. This statement led to a forecast by the accessibility community that formal guidelines from the DOJ will arrive in 2015 – later pushed to 2017 for government agencies and 2018 for private businesses.

The speed at which technology has developed (specifically Internet dependence) has forced the tech community to find a way to deal with this issue earlier. This brings us to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (2008) and the updated version from 2012 (WCAG 2.0). This is a technical standard that developers and designers use to guide their work. It has 12 guidelines, and for each guideline there are 3 conformance levels: A (lowest), AA (mid-range), and AAA (highest). Conformance at higher levels indicates conformance at lower levels. For example: AAA conformance also includes AA conformance.

Some federal regulations should take effect in January 2018, and by then all federal institutions’ websites must meet AA compliance on all items in WCAG 2.0. This applies to any businesses as well, at least the ones that are considered “public accommodations”. An ADA compliant web presence is therefore becoming mandatory for any business that should be easily accessible to the general public.

Businesses are worried, here’s why

Organizations are not concerned because the world is moving to a more accessible online environment for everyone, but rather because ADA related lawsuits are becoming more successful. The fact of the matter is that judges haven’t been waiting around on the DOJ, and why would they? As people become more dependent on web and mobile applications, the need for accessibility also increases. We opened this article with the Juan Carlos Gil vs. Winn-Dixie case. Gil uses the retailer’s website to buy groceries and prescription drugs. It’s only normal that he would want the same level of accessibility as everyone else. Judge Robert Scola ordered the company to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

In another ADA compliance case that took place in an August 2016, the DOJ alleged in a letter that the University of California, Berkeley was in violation of ADA Title II (similar to Title III but it instead applies to government organizations) because their YouTube channel’s videos didn’t include captions for hearing impaired visitors. The DOJ found this to violate the ADA as deaf users did not have equal access to the online content.

“The Department found that of the 543 videos it could identify on the YouTube channel, 75 had manually generated closed captions,” the letter stated. “Of the remainder, many had automatic captioning generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology.”

The outcome? To avoid costly fixtures, the University of California, Berkeley ended up cutting off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts.

Do you need an ADA compliant web presence?

YES – if your organization is considered in any way a “public accommodation”. This could mean various things, but to simplify the thought process, think of it like this:

Does the general public need to access and use your products/services in any way?

Can everyone do this with ease?   

The answers to these questions should provide you with a clear objective on the matter.

It’s probably clear by now that the result of any ADA related lawsuit can be costly. In fact organizations will not only face the costs of the lawsuit, but a tight deadline for compliance with WCAG 2.0 Level AA as well. The Department of Justice has clarified that these legal requirements are on the horizon, but some judges don’t wait for DOJ anymore.

There’s never been a more urgent time to have an ADA compliant web presence.