Seyfarth Synopsis: A recently-filed lawsuit contains a lengthy critical report by a digital accessibility consultant of accessibility issues created by an accessibility widget.
Amidst the thousands of lawsuits filed over the past few years alleging business’ websites and mobile apps are not accessible to blind individuals, businesses have scrambled to find ways to make their
By Minh N. Vu and Kristina M. Launey
Domino’s filed its petition for writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court today, June 13, 2019, asking the Court to review and overturn the Ninth Circuit’s decision which allowed a website accessibility lawsuit to proceed against Domino’s. Domino’s styled the question presented as “Whether Title III
Seyfarth Synopsis: Two Florida federal district court judges require websites to have a “nexus” to a physical location for coverage under Title III of the ADA, but a third judge requires more.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which includes Florida, Alabama, and Georgia) has yet to decide whether and to what extent Title III
Seyfarth Synopsis: An executive order from President Trump will likely halt the Justice Department’s public accommodations website rulemaking.
President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) had stated that proposed regulations for public accommodations websites would be issued in 2018—eight years after the agency began its rulemaking process. The likelihood of such a proposed regulation being issued
By: ADA Title III Editorial Board
Seyfarth Synopsis: Final Rule Setting WCAG 2.0 AA as the Federal Agency Website Standard Published in Federal Register, Triggering Compliance Deadline of January 18, 2018.
Last week we reported that the Access Board announced a final rule, under the authority of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, requiring
By Minh N. Vu
What a difference five years makes. In September 2010, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced in an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) that it would issue new regulations under Title III of the ADA to address the accessibility of public accommodations websites. At that time, it made a number of statements that reasonably led public accommodations to conclude that their websites did not necessarily have to be accessible as long as the public accommodation offered an equivalent alternative way to access the goods and services that were provided on the website. The DOJ’s statements also led public accommodations to believe that once DOJ issues a final regulation, they would have time to make their websites comply with the technical accessibility standard DOJ adopts in that regulation.
DOJ has now shifted positions, presenting its revised viewpoint in Statements of Interest it filed in two lawsuits originally brought by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) against two universities about the alleged inaccessibility of videos on their websites. See here and here.
What DOJ said in 2010.
In the 2010 ANPRM, DOJ stated that “covered entities with inaccessible websites may comply with the ADA’s requirement for access by providing an accessible alternative, such as a staffed telephone line, for individuals to access the information, goods, and services of their website. In order for an entity to meet its legal obligation under the ADA, an entity’s alternative must provide an equal degree of access in terms of hours of operations and range of information, options, and services available. For example, a department store that has an inaccessible website that allows customers to access their credit accounts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in order to review their statements and make payments would need to provide access to the same information and provide the same payment options in its accessible alternative.”
DOJ also asked the public to comment on the following questions: (1) “Are the proposed effective dates for the regulations reasonable or should the Department adopt shorter or longer periods for compliance?” (2) “Should the Department adopt a safe harbor for such [web] content so long as it is not updated or modified?” (3) “Should the Department´s regulation initially apply to entities of a certain size (e.g., entities with 15 or more employees or earning a certain amount of revenue) or certain categories of entities (e.g., retail websites)?” Particularly relevant to the NAD lawsuits, DOJ specifically asked the public to comment on whether requiring videos on websites to have captioning would reduce the number of videos that public accommodations would make available, to the detriment of the public. (“[W]ould the costs of a requirement to provide captioning to videos cause covered entities to provide fewer videos on their websites?”).
What the DOJ is saying now.
Continue Reading DOJ Shifts Position on Web Access: Stating In Court Filings That Public Accommodations Have a "Pre-Existing" Obligation to Make Websites Accessible
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
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:
Continue Reading Accessible Websites and Mobile Apps: Hot Topics at CSUN’s International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference
By Kevin Fritz
Members of the European Parliament voted last week to strengthen a proposed European Directive on Accessibility of Public Sector Bodies’ Websites. The beefed up version of the directive would require all UK public sector websites to be accessible to users with disabilities; not just those sites proposed by the European Commission, such
