While ADA Compliance has been applied in the past to commercial, government, brick-and-mortar stores or other physical locations, companies are now being sued (and paying dearly) for not having an ADA compliant website:
Plus, the recent Domino’s Pizza vs Guillermo Robles case could require ADA compliance by law.
ADA Compliance
Learn more about ADA compliance below.
ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In 1990, President George Bush signed it into law, and it has become the United State’s most critical law concerning accessibility and civil rights for people with disabilities.
In 2010 the Department of Justice published the ADA Standards for Accessible Design.
These regulations mandated that people with disabilities should have full and equal enjoyment of goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, accommodation of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of “public accommodation.”
The establishment of the ADA in 1990 DID NOT include websites due to the internet’s infancy.
As internet usage increased and websites played a larger role in the way consumers interact with businesses, ADA’s applicability to web accessibility began to change.
Since 2017, a clear consensus has emerged that ADA also covers the online realm.
The Department of Justice, who oversees enforcing the ADA, has taken up the position that the ADA applies to the internet and the web-based providers of goods and services.
The ADA encourages organizations to do internal ADA compliance audits using the WCAG 2.2 level AA guidelines (see next section) as a guide until the Department of Justice defines the regulations.
Despite the Department of Justice’s move to adopt any official legal standard for the ADA, it has frequently referenced the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
They were created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and are the most widely recognized guidelines for web accessibility policy.
The WCAG are not a set of laws that can be enforced; however, they are used as the standard for web accessibility legislation in most countries around the world.