Legal Landscape & Compliance

[00:00:00]
>> Jon Kuperman: So, touching on this legal landscape and this is something I had mentioned earlier, that's changing a lot and has changed a lot over the past few years. So for today I went back and forth on this a lot because every country has their own kind of situation right now.

[00:00:14]
But since we're in the US giving this talk right now live, this will be a little bit US focused as we go through the legal stuff. But there are strong parallels between all of the United States laws on accessibility and the EU and the UK and things like that, so this largely applies anywhere that you are.

[00:00:32]
So we have the [COUGH] ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act and web accessibility has been but is a legal requirement under that act. Lawsuits and regulations are increasing, we'll get into some of the numbers next. But the idea being that an inaccessible website can be subject to these regulations and non compliance can result in a lot of negatives like fines, lawsuits, reputational damage.

[00:00:57]
So the key laws and standards to be aware of, we have the ADA Title I and II, so government and business websites need to adhere to these things. We've got section 508, so all federal agencies must comply with these things, that's even stricter. And then the way that we do compliance is through the standards body, which we'll talk about later, but the W3C has WCAG and level AA compliance.

[00:01:20]
Again, we'll get into the nitty-gritty of all this stuff, but it's the current standard for web accessibility and often what these government legislations use for determining compliance. And last year the department of Justice in the US made the compliance a lot more explicit. What you have to adhere to, what the punishments are if you don't, and so we've seen a huge increase in these lawsuits.

[00:01:39]
And I think it's another area where being an accessibility expert can really help you in your career, at your company, at your team, etc. So I saw this statistic that I thought was really interesting, so in 2023 lawsuits related to inaccessible websites rose 62%, I couldn't find 2024 statistics, but I would imagine it is still on the rise.

[00:01:59]
Some big websites like Whirlpool were sued for barriers on their website as well as the famous Katz's Deli in New York which was fined 20,000 for violations. And these can reach up to $150,000 per violation, so this is nowhere near about like fear mongering for accessibility, but I think hope that it helps drive through the importance of it.

[00:02:19]
As the legal requirement becomes more and more prevalent, the industries that the ADA marks as high risk for these legal requirements. Are E-commerce, finance and banking, hospitality and restaurants, and healthcare. Which sounds like a list of like four or five things, but I do find it largely covers most of the things that we work on.

[00:02:37]
And another note that I have is there's quite a few SAS startups out there that offer like, make your website accessible with just our overlay that says it's not accessible move on. Those largely are not working to protect from a legal standard, a lot of websites with those overlays that they pay for are not preventing the lawsuits.

[00:02:54]
Cool, so how to stay compliant do these audits that we'll cover in this course, making sure that your website is WCAG2 at least AA standard compliant. Test with real users wherever possible or as a developer using assistive technology, which we'll do in this course. Use automated tools where you can so there's like lighthouse, axe, wave.

[00:03:13]
These all provide audits you can run through your dev tools or through your CICD pipeline or through your ID and they can help you just make sure you stay compliant. The last thing is especially for kind of like leadership or if you're engineering that works closely with design, or if you're on a design team.

[00:03:30]
Making sure that you train teams on inclusive design, which we will talk about. This is a little cheeky, AKA take this course, hopefully I cover the most important things that you need to know to stay compliant during today's course.