ADA Asks: Does Your Website Speak? [IP Bytes #7]

(Original image from: Undoing Ruin)

A blind student has initiated a law suit against Target Corp. alleging that their website violates provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act ("ADA") b/c it does not accommodate blind users. The ADA provides that places of business, schools and others must make accommodations to differently abled individuals. The most obvious manifestations of such accommodations are wheelchair ramps or handicapped parking spaces, but now it seems that there is a trend towards targeting (no pun intended) cyberspace.

The main concern raised by those who think that the ADA does not refer to websites is that certain "organizations" can bring suit against large companies, urging them to retool their websites. Rather than go to court over the issue, the companies submit to the demand and, as Scott Kirwin says in a post on Dean's World:

"The result? The charity gets a large corporate "donation", the lawyers take a cut of the gross, and the firm is charged with spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on making its external-facing website ADA compliant."

The sky is not always so grim for big business. South West Airlines successfully defended against such a suit in a federeal district court in Florida. The court granted their motion to dismiss on grounds "place of public accommodation" did not include websites. In the 12 page opinion the judge construed the language of the statute narrowly and found that the internet was not to be reasonably read out of it.


Original image from: Handheld Heaven)

I personally think that the judge may have been short sighted. As we move into an age where Wi-Fi allows broad band users to be mini-internet hubs, the web is becoming even more public than ever. Also, the internet has become indispensible for various public functions such as paying parking tickets, registering for classes at schools and obtaining financial aid. Surely these types of websites should be under an obligation to have functionality that accommodates differently abled users. We thus come to a crossroads: do we require that websites be classified and revamped according to the needs under the ADA based on their function? Should commercial sites be as pressed to comply as say federal government or municipal sites? Where do we draw the line? I believe the answers to these questions will not be as far off as the judge in the FL opinion may have assumed, and that we may come to see this issue as more than just cyber-extortion.