Attention Businesses: Are Your Websites and Mobile Apps ADA Compliant?
In January of this year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, LLC, 913 F.3d 898 (9th Cir. 2019), that Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) applies to businesses’ websites and mobile apps. Title III prohibits discrimination against disabled individuals in “places of public accommodation,” and until a recent wave of litigation over the last few years filed by creative plaintiff’s lawyers, very few businesses even considered the possibility that websites (let alone mobile apps) were subject to the ADA, a statute enacted in 1990 that says nothing whatsoever about the Internet or websites.
But in recent years, a growing number of lawsuits have been filed by visually impaired individuals who utilize screen reader software to access the content of websites. Many businesses’ websites are not coded or set up properly to work with such software. The plaintiffs claim that the websites therefore violate Title III and often certain similar state and local statutes.
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“Attention Businesses: Are Your Websites and Mobile Apps ADA Compliant?” by Charles S. Marion was published in the Philadelphia Business Journal on May 10, 2019.
This article was cited in Domino Pizza’s recent Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court (page 25, footnote 1), which has garnered significant attention in the American with Disabilities Act area as it relates to websites and mobile apps.