Americans with Disabilities Act and Newspaper theme

Hello,

I have an inquiry from a client about the current U.S. spike in lawsuits over compliance with the “Americans with Disabilities Act.” This current spike is so dramatic here (USA) that some are arguing that it is more akin to troll lawsuits whereby opportunistic plaintiffs are only interested in monetization of minor infractions, not whether or not anyone complies with ADA.

My only standard of reference is W3C’s web content accessibility guidelines which now finds itself somewhat outdated due to careless deregulation by our government. Here are those:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

These former WCAG guidelines are rather large in scope and would prove quite time consuming to try to go through and a) understand the complexity of all specifications, and b) proceed to turn over every stone. I say that because even then it might prove moot due to the deregulation I mentioned.

I advised my client that I would run this topic by you and get your thoughts. Embarrassingly, I must also mention that this client’s theme version is quite old due to their previous experience of certain theme updates breaking their site. This has caused an over-hesitance with updating every time a new theme update is released. They are currently on Newspaper v7.8.

How compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act or, even, European disabilities regulations is tagDiv’s efforts with these themes (Newspaper and Newsmag)? I assume you all know about the W3C guidelines I mentioned and I’m interested in how safe you would consider a customer site using the Newspaper theme with these (potential) lawsuit trolls out there looking to monetize any infraction, however minor.

Thanks very much!

Dan

I appreciate the time you took. Believe it or not, it may prove quite helpful. Not that we’re looking to move to a different theme at all actually, but just your honest impressions — which you offered. Upswings in these types of lawsuits represent opportunistic and frivolous intent and (ironically) are largely unconcerned with issues of accessibility.

I’ll discuss with the client. Thanks again!

Dan

There is an ADA compliance plugin for WordPress worth looking at.
However, some stuff might be considered questionable; for example for ADA Compliance, it’s likely bad form to continue using title tags for images in addition to alt tags, even though we’ve been doing that for SEO for years, and because some of us like the hover function for a label. However, this should not be abandoned as bad for ADA, and really useless for SEO (basically start using proper captions!).

Stuff like that. Some of the ADA compliance stuff is, ironically, already included in the ‘audit’ usability score stuff in Chrome/Lighthouse — this is where some of that tap target and stuff too tiny to read warnings come from.

So I’ve been telling folks
(1) run audit for ‘usability’ with Chrome (F12 – audit) and learn what the stuff means to get 100% ‘usability’ score
(2) run the ADA Compliance plugin for WordPress to at least start looking at options — https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-ada-compliance-check-basic/

(I have no relationship to the TagDiv folks other than having been around here since they launched; and have no relationship to the plugin noted)

Chris,

Thanks for that. Both are worth pursuing here (WP plugin and Chrome audit).

Dan

Is there even sufficient legal precedent that concludes that ADA even applies to websites? My understanding is that it applies to “places of public accommodation”. I don’t understand how a website could be considered a “place”.

I don’t know about precedent as most businesses sued must choose to settle, over risks of going to court and damages of losing … but we can always hope what you suggest is true.

Here is one link:

https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2019/01/24/ada-lawsuits-are-on-the-rise-website-complaints-biggest-targets/?slreturn=20190324001239