Idaho Law Blog
Most people are aware that their places of business may have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires meeting accessibility standards determined by the federal government. What about websites? If a website cannot be accessed by a person with, say, sight or hearing impairments, does it violate the law? Courts have said yes, in some circumstances.
The ADA requires that any no person be discriminated against in the “full enjoyment” of any “place of public accommodation” on the basis of a disability. The ADA can be enforced by affected individuals or by the U.S. Department of Justice. Violations can result in injunctions and monetary damages. In some circumstances, websites have been found to be “places of public accommodation” subject to the ADA. For instance, colleges are clearly places of public accommodation, and their websites are generally necessary to the “full enjoyment” of their services. So colleges are obliged to make their websites comply with the accessibility standards.
If your business is not a physical “place of public accommodation,” but instead exists only on the Web, it gets a little more complicated. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the ADA does not apply to websites that are not affiliated with a brick-and-mortar place of accommodation. Ninth Circuit decisions are binding on federal courts in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, Hawaii, Alaska, Nevada, Montana, and Arizona. But, a federal court in Vermont recently held that it might apply to the online service Scribd, because the internet is now so central to a person’s participation in public and economic life. Similar holdings are likely in the future.
The Justice Department has brought at least one enforcement action against an online-only “place of public accommodation,” which settled before it got in front of a judge.
The Justice Department announced in 2010 that it was developing guidelines for determining which websites had to comply with the ADA. Those guidelines were promised to be released in 2015, but the DOJ has come up with nothing so far.
Few websites today are in full compliance with the ADA, so there is no need to shut down your site if it is not compliant. You may be at risk of an enforcement action, however. The best way to avoid it is to be taking reasonable steps to bring your site into compliance. Your web developer should be working to make your most important pages compliant first.
The standards currently applicable were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are available here. In a nutshell, they require the following for a website to be considered accessible:
- Text alternatives for non-text content
- Captions and descriptions for multimedia content
- Content that doesn’t lose its meaning when presented with assistive technology
- Presentation methods that make it easier to see and hear the content
- All functions available from a keyboard
- There must be enough time to read and understand content
- Content should appear and operate in predictable ways
- Design should make it easy to navigate and find content
- Ways to avoid and correct navigation and data entry mistakes
- Site design compatible with current and future accessibility tools
- Content must not cause seizures
If you have questions whether your business is subject to the ADA, please contact us.