ADA

Most people are familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), but some don’t know that it applies to websites and a lot of businesses are currently exposed to the risk of lawsuits. We’re here to help!

ADA Complaince

What Is It?

According to ADA title III, every business website has to be accessible to people with disabilities, or it will be at risk of being sued and facing unnecessary legal expenses. The good news is that we’ve found a company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning web accessibility to solve this problem. According to their research, this is the most affordable and simple solution in the market today.

We’re not attorneys or accessibility experts but have just spent a lot of time researching and reading and testing. As a result of our extensive reading, the only solution that we have 100% confidence in this solution.

This software-based ADA solution provides:

  • ADA, WCAG 2.1 Level AA& Section 508 compliance.
  • An accessibility statement and certification of performance.
  • Ongoing maintenance involving re-scan of your website every 24 hours.
  • Costs $490 per year (for websites with less than 1000 pages)

Please read the FAQ section below. We’ve compiled and organized the information as best as we could to make this big topic as easy to read as possible. Most of your questions will be handled in here.

 

 

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See it in action

Notice the floating yellow icon in the lower right corner of this page? This is the advanced ADA solution hard at work, give it a click, and explore advanced ADA options.

FAQS

About ADA

ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in 1990 by President George Bush. It has become a very important law regarding accessibility and civil rights for people who have disabilities. While many people think that this simply applies to parking spaces and wheelchair ramps, it is actually quite broad and includes web accessibility.

As more Americans rely on the internet for daily activities and services, ADA title III-related lawsuits have become much more commonplace. We found out that beginning in 2017, there were just 816 lawsuits filed, but by 2018 it grew to 2,200 cases. However, these figures do not account for the thousands of demand letters that have been sent to businesses with non-accessible websites because they settled the matter and never went on the public record. Some industry experts have estimated that more than 100,000 demand letters were sent in 2019, and that figure continues to rise.

Locally, we have recently noticed a spike in web accessibility lawsuits. Large corporations and small-to-medium businesses (SMB’s) are all receiving demand letters from people with disabilities forcing them to make their website fully accessible. Our team has searched for an effective solution for you and our other clients, but until now, we have not found anything that would fully meet our needs. This is why we are coming to you now; not just to point out a problem but to offer a viable and affordable solution.

I’m not an attorney, and in this particular FAQ question/answer, I’m not giving you legal advice. You should talk to your attorney.

That being said, here are my 2 cents:

TITLE 1 of the ADA Act (where you’ll see references to 15 employees or more) is all about employers’ obligations and responsibilities to employees who are disabled. AS AN EMPLOYER OF DISABLED PEOPLE, how you accommodate your disabled employees.

 

But we’re talking about a different chapter/section of the ADA Act – TITLE 3

 

Title 3 is all about “Places of Public Accommodation” – meaning your place of business where you serve the public. Whether it be a restaurant, a gym, a barbershop, the supermarket.

 

In 2018, a federal judge ruled that websites should also be considered “places of public accommodation” and therefore websites from that point came under ADA compliance requirements

 

Of course, please ask your attorney, but I don’t believe I’m wrong. This absolutely applies to your website.

 

 

My Website

While past rulings included language stating that websites did not qualify as a “public place of accommodation” that would fall under ADA requirements, the internet has become much more important for all Americans. Websites now provide the means for individuals to not just shop online or browse for information, but also to schedule doctor’s appointments, pay bills, order food deliveries, and much more. In recent years, court rulings, legal scholars, and disability rights activists have all agreed that websites, online stores, and other internet portals must all be accessible for people with disabilities.

 

For websites with less than 1,000 unique pages, the cost for the AI automated service is $490/year and includes all of the monitoring, scanning, and repair services available through accessiBe. Larger websites with more than 1,000 unique pages would fall under various tiers for service, based solely on the size of their websites.

South Coast Internet is prepared to help implement the accessiBe AI automated service on their websites to ensure ADA compliance. If you would like to add this service to your website, fill out the form below or contact our team directly by calling 508-415-8648. We are highly recommending this add-on service to everyone with a website, and will be offering it to all new clients that we serve in the future.

As soon as the software is installed, your site becomes a lot more accessible to people with disabilities. But it takes the next (up to) 48 hours for the AI software to seep scan the website, fixing and remediating as it goes. In 48 (or press) you’ll get a compliance report (usually reporting that you are 100% now compliant).

Legal Risks

Here’s a one-paragraph excerpt: The panel held that the ADA applied to Domino’s website and app because the Act mandates that places of public accommodation, like Domino’s, provide auxiliary aids and services to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind. Even though customers primarily accessed the website and app away from Domino’s physical restaurants, the panel stated that the ADA applies to the services of a public accommodation, not services in a place of public accommodation. The panel stated that the website and app connected customers to the goods and services of Domino’s physical restaurants.

Recommended ADA Solution

There has been a lot of buzz in the marketplace discussing why web accessibility overlays are not compliant. We can say for certain that overlay companies pose their solutions as being compliant, when in fact they are not. Research shows overlay only handles up to 25% of the WCAG requirements leaving the remaining 75% inaccessible and vulnerable to lawsuits. Why? Those overlays only handle the more simple requirements which are the CSS adjustments of a website. For instance, color contrast ratios, stop animations, larger cursors, font colors and sizing, and more.  Where our partners solution differs from other layover tools is that it handles both the foreground CSS adjustments and the 75% ‘heavy background lifting’ WCAG 2.1 AA requirements like Aria attributes, assistive technology compatibility, alt tags for images, contextual understanding Ai that assigns all the correct elemental structures like pop-ups, forms, icons, buttons, and website behaviors.

If a website owner has a layover tool that does not handle the ‘heavy background lifting’ as stated above, they are definitely at a greater risk of being served a demand letter or a lawsuit.

Reports have been received from people in the disabled community in tandem with law firms around the US are grouping together to find websites that are using layovers and targetting them with ADA lawsuits and demand letters as they too know those layovers are not making their websites accessible.

In most cases, yes they can however that does not mean that it will be completely compatible with all assistive technologies like screen readers or keyboard navigation only. In addition, there are certain layover tools that have screen readers embedded within their ‘solutions’ which is purely a marketing gimmick, this is actually counterproductive since those with disabilities have their own assistive technologies and the embedded screen reader’s conflict with their own technologies.

We have extensively tested and now use this solution on our own websites and are very satisfied with the results. This affordable and simple system provides the initial ADA compliance within 48-hours of installation and re-scans each website every 24-hours to ensure ongoing compliance for new posts, pages, and content. Developed side-by-side with real people who have disabilities, this program is not just a quick fix or workaround, but a viable service designed to protect website owners and improve web accessibility for people with a wide range of disabilities.

Some of the ways that websites can become ADA compliant include manual web accessibility coding and web accessibility plug-ins. Unfortunately, the first is quite expensive and does not provide an ongoing solution. Manual coding would be required going forward to examine every new page or bit of content added to the website to verify accessibility. The second option, which involves the use of a web accessibility plug-in, will only provide a minimum percentage of compliance, which can still make you vulnerable to lawsuits.

The solution that we have found and tested on our own websites is accessiBe. It is an AI automated system that provides full ADA compliance within 48-hours and provides ongoing 24/7 maintenance to ensure that any new posts, pages, or content are also compliant with the current ADA requirements. The accessiBe AI solution offers compliance for WCAG 2.1, ADA, Section 508, and EAA/EN 301549, and delivers the industry’s highest success rate. Each website is re-scanned every 24-hours to ensure compliance. Developed side-by-side with people with disabilities, accessiBe works directly with blind people, motor and visually impaired people, people with epilepsy, and others for continued research and development.

In order to meet compliance for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), accessiBe‘s AI scans and analyzes websites to determine which functions and elements they include and makes adjustments based on the needs of the user. One example is the automatic screen-reader adjustments, which helps blind users to navigate the website. Other examples include automatic keyboard navigation adjustments for popups, buttons, and menus, as well as personal UI and design adjustments for color and contrast, stop animations and content display options. Clients who work with accessiBe will also receive an accessibility statement and certificate of performance, monthly compliance auditing, and the complete re-scanning and fixing of any new issues every 24-hours.

After up to 48-hours, most websites will be fully compliant and certified. The accessiBe AI scans and analyzes your website to determine any changes that must be made. The accessibility interface will instantly appear on your website and provide automatic compliance to the latest ADA standards. The team behind accessiBe implement the highest standards and practices for both the security of the websites that they protect and the privacy of their users. We have used accessiBe on our own website and are very pleased with the services and support that we have received. This is why we are now 100% confident to recommend it to our clients.

Why Become ADA Compliant?

Today, by the power of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), every business website has to be accessible to people with disabilities. The Law prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by places of public accommodation, meaning websites or brick-and-mortar facilities.

People with disabilities, specifically those who are blind or visually impaired, have been filing lawsuits against businesses over website accessibility issues, and many of them were winning.

There has been a 200% increase in lawsuits and demand letters from 2017 to 2018 and trend is only going up.

Accessibility lawsuits per year*

* Numbers are approximate and based on reports

Get Started With ADA Compliance

Avoid expensive lawsuits and make your website accessible to more people with our partner’s ADA Compliant solution. Call us (+92) 331-5303010 or click on the button to get started with us!