By Minh N. Vu
According to the Spring 2015 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will issue no proposed regulations for public accommodations websites until least April 2016 — nearly a year from now. However, the proposed regulations for state and local government websites, originally slated for December 2014, should be out any minute. We know because the Unified Agenda has a May 2015 projected publication date for those proposed regs — which has already passed. This is frustrating news for all affected parties who have been clamoring for clarity while the DOJ has moved forward with enforcement activities against allegedly inaccessible websites in the absence of even a proposed rule. We suspect that the delay may be related to the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) (i.e., cost benefit analysis) that the DOJ must conduct for the proposed rule.
Any proposed rule requiring public accommodations’ websites to be accessible will have an enormous cost impact. Millions of businesses with a website presence will need to hire consultants to figure out what must be done to make their websites accessible, modify their websites or pay others to do so, pay consultants to test and verify the compliance of their websites, and maintain the accessibility of their websites going forward. Quantifying the cost of these efforts, in addition to any cost to society resulting from businesses choosing to provide less content or functionality on their websites, is no small task.
But alas, we will not be reading the proposed rule or the RIA for at least another eleven months.
Edited by Kristina Launey