We’ve recently been made aware through one of our clients of a local Southern California cafe (3 locations) that was targeted for one of these lawsuits. Faced with a $25,000 lawsuit, the cafe chose to settle for $5000. This is quite concerning for many, as most small businesses would be hard pressed to be hit with such a lawsuit.
Seeing this hit a local small business, and as a small business ourselves, we felt it was necessary to bring this issue to you, our clients and website owners. You as a website owner need to be aware of this potential risk so you can make informed decisions that are right for your website and business. As your technology provider, we feel we would be remiss in our duties if we didn’t bring this to you. We will be making the necessary changes to our own site as well to reduce our risk.
an “Accessibility” button that allows for text size changes, several various contrast changes for the visually impaired, removal of ‘moving’ or ‘animated’ items with a button click for those with seizures, ensuring consistent keyboard navigation without a mouse for mobility impaired, closed captioning and/or text transcripts for video or audio for the hearing impaired, and pause/stop/hide and timing adjustment for slideshows.
We can provide an individual report for your website to determine which of these items would apply and would need to be implemented to bring your website to the current industry standard of WCAG 2.1 ADA compliance as recommended/suggested by the W3 Consortium, a web standards compliance organization, who’s rules are being implemented across the state of California’s government websites and being used to create new ADA website compliance laws right here in California (federal laws are expected to be enacted soon as well).