Accessiblity Information
So I have been banging my head against a wall lately trying to figure out how exactly an ecommerce merchant, or anyone for that matter, determines whether or not they are required to abide by the Americans with Disabilities Act with regard to their websites. We have done some articles recently on accessibility, and it remains one of my interests. With that in mind, and having read as much as I think I can about it, here is what I have come up with. Keep in mind that this is not legal advice, or anything close to it.
First of all, the ADA provides protections for Americans with disabilities, ensuring that they are not denied access to employment and services based solely on their disability. For the most part, every employer is aware of their obligations under the ADA with regard to their employees, and if you aren't, the I highly recommend giving the ADA a read. However, I am more interested in how websites play into things. Particularly since the highly publicized lawsuit brought against Target because their website was not accessible. Most recently the lawsuit was given class-action status which sets one of the first legal precedences in this matter. I suspect that there will be many more, based on the following.
Without going into it's exact wording, the ADA essentially outlines that businesses must take all reasonable measures to ensure that their products and services are made available to individuals with disabilities. For example, the ADA does not require that restaurants have braille menus for blind persons, but does require that someone such as a waiter be made available to read the menu aloud. A sign language interpreter is not required for deaf individuals, but someone must be available to communicate with a pen and paper. Essentially, all reasonable efforts must be made by the business owner to accommodate persons with disabilities. It's just the right thing to do anyway, but since people weren't doing it the law had to be put into place.
So what is considered reasonable? The ADA uses some terminology like "readily achievable" with regard to existing facilities. What I find interesting, and what the Target lawsuit has begun to define legally, appears to be that a website can be considered a virtual "facility". On the bright side, you don't have to worry about physical barriers such as wheelchair ramps and installing elevators. However, it appears that with a website you are still required to remove barriers that might prevent Americans with a disability from using your "facility". At first, that seems like it might be a pretty harsh interpretation, but I offer this to support it.
The ADA defines "readily achievable" as "easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense". Considering that most of the barriers for disable users on the Internet are the result of inexperience web developers, I have a feeling that it will be hard to find a judge that will be convinced that a website cannot be made accessible without much difficulty or expense. But let's take a deeper look to be sure.
The first issue is the difficulty, which an interesting one. Consider a website that is coded badly and presents significant barriers to a person with disabilities. In addition to bad coding, most of the website content is displayed via a Flash movie, and an alternative is not provided. In order to fix this, someone would need to go in there and fix the code, to start with. I can tell you from experience that this can be as simple as moving code around and replacing elements, and can range to as difficult as a complete template rebuild. However, if you had a physical location that you had purchased (or built after 1992) you would be required to make sure that there are handicapped parking spots, ramps and whatever other criteria the ADA requires. See a pattern? In my mind, they are very similar, in that all business owners are expected to remove barriers.
And what about the Flash presentation? Consider the case of the restaurant and braille menus. Since the restaurant has waitstaff available to read the menu aloud to a blind customer, they are not required to have a braille menu. If you look at the Flash presentation as a menu (which holds all the content), then here is what you are left with according to the ADA: You can either provide a text alternative to your Flash content, or you can provide an easy-to-contact person that is available to read aloud the content of your Flash content to each blind user that requests it. Which of the two seems more "readily achievable"?
But what about the second issue of expense. There is an estimate that incorporating the ADA requirement into new construction requires less than 1% of construction costs. This is probably a pretty good benchmark for expense. However, the expense issue is even harder for online-only business owners to hide behind, since the cost of incorporating ADA compliance into a new website is nothing. A compliant, accessible website probably costs less to develop and maintain than their non-accessible counterparts, which means that it will be difficult for online business owners (at least in my mind) to play the expense card on a new site. However, with existing sites the expense can be variable. I think that this is shady ground here because using our analogy, nearly all sites were built since 1995 and would not be considered "existing facilities" under the ADA. I'd be interested to hear from someone that knows more about this.
There is a really good FAQ page here that has some pretty good information on it. However, much of this has not been challenged yet in court, so there doesn't seem to be many legal precedents. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I think that I can gauge pretty well the spirit and intentions behind the ADA, and as more and more services move to the Internet this will become more and more of a big deal. Individuals are allowed to sue for discrimination, and considering the number of disabled Americans there are, I recommend that business owners take this stuff seriously.
As a side note, I think it's important to outline my interest in this subject. To start with, my father was "disabled" for most of my life, and I have a very close friend that would also be considered "disabled". Personally, my experience has been that it is extremely difficult to get around some places, and that there are a lot of places that are still not compliant. Professionally, I am a stickler for search engine optimization and efficient coding, particularly with regards to separating content from presentation. To anyone that was curious, web accessibility is one of those subjects that just seems to be a "perfect storm" of my interests. I'd be happy to hear anyone else's thoughts or experiences.
I have seen many comments on the Internet that express a distaste for any online regulation, particularly with regard to accessibility. Many seem to feel that if they don't want to cater to disabled individuals, that it is their right not to. To that I answer with this: A business is a business. Whether you are online only or also have brick-and-mortar stores, you are a doing business in the United States (the ADA is specific to the US, but other countries have their own requirements). Therefor you have an obligation under American law to ensure that persons with disabilities are not presented with unreasonable barriers when trying to access your business, or "public accommodation" as the ADA puts it.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: accessibility, ADA.
