Accessibility Compliance Requirements for Websites as per ADA – AccessiBe

ADA or the Americans with Disabilities Act was made a law in 1990 with the objective of ending discrimination against people with disabilities. The law was a continuation of the Civil Rights law in 1964, which was meant to end all discrimination based on religion, sex, race, nation of origin, etc. With ADA, all the public accommodations as government organizations and businesses had to provide easy accessibility to employees and customers with special needs.

Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities were revolutionary acts by the Federal government in order to end the marginalization of the minorities. ADA was made mandatory in public spaces by providing facilities like wheelchair-accessible ramps, accessible restrooms, and various other equal accommodations access as mandated by the regulations. Over time, as the internet became widespread, there were many interpretations of ADA by covering the web space also as a public accommodation under the Title III ADA. However, during the time of the law’s initiation, legislators were not aware of the future requirement for Internet utility.

ADA rules on websites – AccessiBe

As discussed above, ADA interpretation on websites has always been complicated and confusing. ADA had not been addressing online compliance explicitly during its early times. Even after going through various amendments over time, there is no specific coverage of websites under the law until this time. AccessiBe logically explains that public accommodation naturally extends to websites, but from a legal standpoint, many gray areas exist.

Various judicial courts across the United States have also ruled commercial websites and other public online spaces as a public accommodation, which are subjected to the ADA rules. Various rulings by courts concluded that websites are also bound to abide by the ADA regulation as there is a close nexus between the websites and physical locations.

One of the most important examples of court rulings related to accessibility is the  Winn-Dixie Supermarket case, as they did not make the site accessible for users with vision impairment. Many other courts have also ruled that ADA does not offer proper protection for online uses. With no overarching federal rules and regulations in place, it is difficult to make any concluding statements about the implications of ADA and accessibility rules on websites.

Making it even more complicated, some of the states also recently adopted comprehensive accessibility requirements as per the standards of website building based on the WCAG 2.0 Level AA guidelines. It is actually a set of guidelines ensuring website accessibility on a global scale. It has been largely in practice in Europe as well as many other nations across the world. However, some of such regulations had been withdrawn based on the pressure toward regulation.

So, we can see many questions related to ADA compliance, and there is also a necessity for websites to be compliant with the same. In all possibilities, ADA is going to be a strict mandate in the future, and it is ideal for the websites to be compliant with ADA and WCAG standards at the earliest. AccessiBe also suggests that ADA compliance will not only help ensure legal abiding, but it can also set open many new opportunities for the business websites to reach more people.