This article is sponsored by accessiBe.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination against persons with disabilities. ADA Title III Federal Lawsuit filings hit an all-time high in 2021, showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. This highlights how more and more businesses get into ADA Lawsuits over non-compliance with the ADA.
While your website is a powerful tool for your business, it also leads to your downfall if it does not comply with web accessibility standards, violating ADA Title III. You could face ADA lawsuits and spend thousands of dollars on legal fees. In turn, this potentially damages your company’s reputation and profitability.
The big question is, what do you do when your business faces an ADA lawsuit?
accessiBe’s ADA Lawsuit Litigation Support Package
If you find your business in an ADA lawsuit, web accessibility company accessiBe helps through their Litigation Support Package.
The support package includes the following:
- Documentation and testing from accessiBe’s Research and Development (R&D) team, including line-by-line assessment and response to accessibility complaints
- Two third-party audits conducted by the accessiBe team
- Legally-vetted and suggested responses for case scenarios
- A close look into your case to provide extra and ongoing support you might need
The Automated Web Accessibility Solution
accessiBe helps you remediate your website to make it accessible through the below features and functionalities.
The Accessibility Interface
accessiBe’s Accessibility Interface is a User Interface (UI) and design adjustment tool which makes instant accessibility modifications to your website based on the users’ preferences or needs.
Some of the accessibility interface’s main features include the following:
Accessibility Profiles
The Accessibility Profiles throw typical accessibility combinations together to address a specific disability’s needs. For instance, a user with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) enables the ADHD Friendly profile with just one click to significantly reduce noise and potentially distracting elements on your website. The profile allows website users to read, browse, and focus on essential site elements.
Other accessibility profiles include: Seizure Safe, Vision Impaired, Cognitive Disability, and more.
Content Adjustments
Users adjust how they want your website displayed with the Content Adjustments feature. The adjustments help make your site’s texts, headings, and other content readable for people with specific disabilities, such as aging sight and blurred vision.
Users highlight titles and links, magnify texts, change text alignment and adjust font sizing, line height, letter spacing, and other content adjustments.
Color Adjustments
It is challenging for users with visual impairments or varying color blindness levels to see website content well. People with light sensitivities might not also see or use a site if it has a white background.
The Accessibility Interface allows quick color and contrast adjustments. These include high and low saturation, dark, high, and low contrast, text, background, and title colorization, and monochrome options.
Orientation Adjustments
The orientation adjustments provide shortcuts and guiding elements, including reducing noise and distractions.
Users mute sounds, hide images and enable ReadMode, a reading guide and reading mask. They also highlight, focus hover, and change the cursor to big, white or black.
The Accessibility Adjustments feature offers an online dictionary. This help users with cognitive disabilities look up the meaning of words, phrases, languages, and slang without leaving your website. The feature includes 12 built-in languages, including Deutsch (German), French, and Spanish.
Critical Considerations
The ADA Title III does not provide technical standards to accommodate persons with disabilities in online spaces. However, federal laws such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (applicable to federal agencies) require adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The WCAG provides the international accessibility standard often cited in accessibility lawsuits. Based on principle-oriented framework, it guides web development and design decisions to ensure content provides reasonable accessibility for all users.
Some essential factors to adhere to the WCAG and mitigate ADA lawsuits include the following:
- The WCAG has three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA. Most U.S. court cases consider Level AA conformance an acceptable level of accessibility.
- Automated tools assess WCAG conformance but have several limitations. Your best bet is to get professional accessibility experts to audit your website to limit the chances of accessibility-related lawsuits.
- Get your website audited against the latest version of the WCAG, which is WCAG 2.1. (The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes the guidelines and expects to publish WCAG 2.2 as an official recommendation by September 2022).
Mitigate ADA Lawsuits and Related Legal Risks with accessiBe
Be better equipped to handle ADA lawsuits by making your website accessible and get litigation support from accessiBe.
