By Kristina M. Launey

Once again, CSUN’s International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference brought together thought leaders, programmers, corporate and governmental accessibility representatives, vendors of digital accessibility solutions, advocates, and others in the field of digital accessibility to share developments and ideas. The large, varied crowd, as well as the substantive sessions, remove any possible doubt that the area of web and mobile accessibility is rightfully garnering a lot of attention.

Although the Department of Justice is still working on proposed regulations that would presumably adopt a legal standard defining what is an accessible website or mobile app, its recent enforcement actions make clear that the absence of regulations poses no impediment to legal action against businesses for not having accessible websites or mobile apps. Private plaintiffs have been also been very active in filing lawsuits or asserting such claims against many companies.  In this climate, many companies that have either been the targets of these actions, or just paying close attention to these developments, have decided that it is better to commit to accessibility now than to engage in a protracted and expensive legal battle.  Moreover, as many companies at the conference have recognized, building accessibility into any refreshes, redesigns, or new rollouts of websites or mobile apps makes sense over increased expense of remediating those same sites later, especially if remediation is done in response to legal action.

The conference’s legal update session drove these points home.  Accessibility civil rights attorneys Lainey Feingold and Linda Dardarian emphasized their position that Title III of ADA does cover websites, and gave a year-in-review report of digital accessibility legal developments in the following industries:
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