Is your business website ADA Compliant? Are you at risk for web accessibility lawsuits?
We recently noticed a spike in web accessibility lawsuits. In the past year we saw that more and more website owners are receiving demand letters from people with disabilities forcing them to make their website fully accessible.
We wanted to make sure that you were aware of recent changes in the web landscape. You may have heard about recent lawsuits involving websites of large companies such as Dominos (Robles v. Domino’s Pizza), Five Guys (Lucia Markett v. Five Guys), Hobby Lobby (Sean Gorecki v. Hobby Lobby), and Winn-Dixie (Gil vs. Winn-Dixie) grocery store who had to pay $105K.
All of those lawsuits involved visually impaired people trying to access the company’s website. These lawsuits have all been filed under ADA Title III. This is the “public access” section of the ADA compliance. Above we mentioned some large companies that have had issues with this. However, recently a small shoe store in Clearwater, FL was involved in a lawsuit.
They are a Mom & Pop shop and this hits home for us… A small business trying to do everything they can to expand their business and make a little more by having a website gets hit with a lawsuit that could cost them $10-$20k. We really enjoy the small businesses that we get to work with and want to help assist you in being compliant.
In 2018 there were 10,163 federal cases RE: ADA & websites. In CA there were 4,249, that’s a 54% increase in CA from 2017 to 2018.
Source: (https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-ada-title-iii-lawsuits-filed-in-2018-tops-10000/)
Because of this shift, we have searched for effective and simple solutions to solve this problem for you and for our other clients. Until recently, none of the solutions we found met our needs.
The current alternatives out there are:
- Manual web accessibility coding work – mostly expensive ($5000 -$15,000 per project), slow and doesn’t provide an ongoing solution.
- Web accessibility plugin- achieves only 20% compliance making you vulnerable to lawsuits since it does not abide by the legislative guidelines.
But here comes the good news – we recently found a solution that we think will be a good fit for you. This is an AI automated system that can achieve full ADA compliance within 48 hours and provides 24/7 automatic maintenance.
This is by far the most simple, automated and affordable solution that we have found. After reviewing the system and testing it on our own website, we have decided to offer the same solution to all of our clients.