Full details on this at You'll get more there after the basics here. Website ADA Compliance reared it's head in 2008 with a $6 million judgement against Target. This has snowballed since then to 2020 to become the latest 'settlement bait' for some law firms partnering with a handful of disabled people. The basic overview of how this formulates to require your business to be in compliance with ADA regulations for websites.
Over these past 12 years no one in website development has included complying to ADA for websites as a design criteria, at least not most.
Now, there have been over 5,000 lawsuits across the country, that almost always settle at at least $25K. And if that wasn't bad enough, California has its own version of the ADA regulations that are even more stringent. So even if your store isn't a brick and mortar facility, that law will get you even if there was supposedly wiggle room with the Americans with Disabilities Act regulations.
Most disabled people have tools that enable them to connect to the web. These are such things as Screen Reader software and keyboard extension with Braille entry pads, and other things.
The problem is that no website development people ever included website accessibility to connect with this devices, or at least almost none did. Some websites are built with some of the architecture or some of the coding, but 99% do not.
So why isn't partial facilities good enough? At a glance it might seem so. Some functionality for the disabled person does result.
However, there are standards called WCAG 2.1 in their latest version. Or, Web Content Access Guidelines. These are published and updated from time to time by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the internet.
And that is typically honored in US Courts as the gold standard for compliance to the regulations and objectives of the ADA, which was enacted shortly before there was a public access of the internet.
So, coming up to the present it got very interesting November 2019 when the US Supreme Court ruled that it would allow a lower appeal court to proceed with a law suit filed against Domino's Pizza by a blind man who sued because he couldn't place his order with them over the internet because their website was not capable of working with his standard disabled person tools.
This set the precedent for now that these suits are not frivolous and so, since there have been over 5,000 suits in the last several years, it can be expected that the exponential increase of law suits against businesses whose websites are non-compliant with ADA regulations represented by WCAG 2.1.
And with that comes the 'ambulance chaser' niche of law firms looking at this type of suit as being a gravy train.
and both provide affordable and easily done solutions for websites to become compliant with both Level A and Level AA of WCAG 2.1, making the websites lawsuit resistant. And, in doing so keeping $25K, plus attorney's fees in the company coffers.
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