What CIOs Need to Know about Americans with Disabilities Act
As if they do not have enough challenges to overcome and expenses to incur, in the last few years a growing number of businesses have been on the receiving end of claims and lawsuits asserting that their websites (and, in some cases, their mobile apps as well) violate Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), because they are not accessible to visually impaired and other disabled individuals. To make matters worse, there are no official government rules or regulations for what companies must do to make their websites accessible and compliant with the ADA.
In fact, the ADA, which was enacted in 1990, says nothing whatsoever about websites or the Internet. But with the growth of e-commerce, some advocacy groups and, more recently, some creative plaintiff’s lawyers, have argued that websites are either, by themselves, “places of public accommodation” for purposes of the ADA, or are extensions of their owners’ physical business locations and therefore subject to the statute. They further contend that if a consumer-facing website is not coded so that it will work with the screen reader software and devices visually impaired individuals use to access content on the Internet, then those individuals are being discriminated against by the website owner in violation of Title III.
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"What CIOs Need to Know about Americans with Disabilities Act," by Charles S. Marion was published in InformationWeek on May 27, 2019.