On August 11, 2016 the Department of Justice finally issued its regulations implementing the expanded definition of disability contained in the 2008 Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments. The actual content of the regulations, which apply to Titles II and III of the ADA, will already be familiar to most businesses because they are intended to be consistent with the EEOC’s 2011 regulations implementing the 2008 ADAA for Title I. Equally important, they appear after eight long years of lawsuits brought under the 2008 ADAA in which the courts and litigants had to wrestle with the meaning of the statute. More
ADA Web Access
You can’t agree to what you can’t read – the perils of clickwrap when the ADA is involved.
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA Class Actions, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA Point of Sale, ADA Web Access, Internet, Internet Accessibility, Retail Tags: ADA arbitration, ADA Class Action, Container Store, National Federation of the Blind, Point of Sale, POS terminal
This week’s decision in Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind v. Container Store, Inc., 2016 WL 4027711 (D. Mass. July 27, 2016) is a call to action for every business that uses a click to accept type license or other agreements. Such agreements may not be enforceable in an ADA context unless special care is taken.
The case involved the Container Store’s loyalty program, which provides various perks and rewards. Customers could sign up when making a purchase at a store or online. In either case the process included clicking an “I Accept” button linked to the usual boilerplate terms and conditions, which included an agreement to arbitrate. The problem? Container Stores use a touchscreen Point of Sale device that is not accessible to the blind because it has no tactile controls. I blogged about the issue here, and the problem hasn’t gone away. The argument is straightforward. Blind customers cannot use the devices without giving personal information about their credit card information and email address to the clerk, while sighted customers can preserve their privacy on these matters. More
DOJ rolls out new website to provide no help whatever to businesses concerned with internet access
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA regulations, ADA Web Access, Internet Accessibility Tags: ADA Internet, ada litigation, ADA web, WCAG 2.0, World Wide Web
I wish that this were one of those satires found The Onion and similar publications. On April 25 at 3:00 a.m. Central Time the Department of Justice announced a new “Accessible Technology” section in the DOJ’s ADA website (http://www.ada.gov/access-technology/index.html). The new web page is supposed to:
“assist covered entities and people with disabilities to understand how the ADA applies to certain technologies, such as Web sites, electronic book readers, online courses, and point-of-sale devices.” More
Hot off the presses – ADA governs the internet, maybe.
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA Web Access, Internet, Internet Accessibility Tags: ada litigation, ada violation, WCAG 2.0, World Wide Web
On February 9 Magistrate Judge Katherine Robertson issued a 45 page decision denying a Motion to Dismiss in National Association of the Deaf v. Harvard University, Case No. 3:15-cv-30023-MGM in the District of Massachusetts. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the opinion, but for ordinary businesses there is quite a bit less to this than some sources suggest.
The first statute discussed in Magistrate Robertson’s opinion is Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. This statute applies to programs or activities receiving federal assistance. While federal assistance programs are pervasive, the vast majority of businesses are not subject to Section 504, and so the arguments concerning its application don’t apply at all. More
ADA and the web – they just don’t get it.
By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA rulemaking, ADA Web Access Tags: ADA, ada litigation, disability, internet, WCAG 2.0, web, World Wide Web
My colleague William Goren (see his blogs at www.williamgoren.com/blog) passed along a recent interview with Daniel Goldstein (http://www.bna.com/fighting-accessible-websites-n57982065991) that shows, I think, a serious disconnect is between the disabilities rights community and ordinary American businesses with respect to web accessibility.
I’ll start with what Mr. Goldstein said about making a web site accessible. He said: “It’s pretty easy to resolve most of these barriers [to access]” and “the expense is usually small.” His examples of common problems including things like failure to properly use the “H1 tag” or to write code that properly moves the “focus” of a web page. “Pretty easy” and “small expense” are words whose meaning depends on the business involved. This blog was set up by myself using a WordPress template. I didn’t write any code, and I couldn’t find an “H1 tag” to save my life. I do know, because a web programmer helped me look at it, that this single page is created by about 1000 lines of computer code. If that code is wrong, fixing it would not be “pretty easy” for me or any of the tens of thousands of small businesses that use WordPress or similar template based web design tools. More