Infinity Insights Infinity Dental Web
  • Infinity Dental Web
  • About Us
  • Portfolio & Case Studies
  • Websites
  • Ask for a Quote
  • Blog

Regulations

ADA Compliance Standards – How to Avoid a Lawsuit

Date: April 7, 2021
Category:
  • Regulations
Author: David Hall

In early 2018, we published a post on this blog about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and dental websites. In that post we explained that the Americans with Disabilities Act, enacted in 1990, was meant to apply to physical barriers only, but there were growing calls for it to be made applicable to websites. However, no one had a clear idea at that time what those standards would be.

After considerable research, I have pretty good clarity now on what you need to do, so let’s bring that information up-to-date and help you know what you can do to avoid an ADA lawsuit.

The government has still not enacted any regulations specifying any standards for websites. In fact, the Department of Justice made a statement in late 2017 that they were not going to publish any rules, but leave the matter to the courts. While in many cases businesses like seeing the government back off on issuing regulations, in this case they have left us with a situation that has been an open invitation to lawyers to file lawsuits and test their limits.

Meanwhile, the courts have since established that websites do indeed need to be accessible to people with disabilities. A landmark case in 2019 seemed to settle the issue. Domino’s Pizza was sued because a man with impaired vision was not able to order a pizza through their app. The district court affirmed that the website and app needed to be accessible to the visually impaired but dismissed the lawsuit saying that Domino’s needed to be given fair notice. The 9th Circuit then reversed that decision and ordered Domino’s to make its website and app accessible. In October, 2019, the Supreme Court refused to take up the case, leaving that decision in place and making website and app accessibility the law of the land. Since then, lawsuits over website accessibility have been accelerating. Currently, about one website accessibility lawsuit is being filed every day in federal court.

The accessibility “rules” that are meant to specify exactly what webmasters need to do are published by the World Wide Web Consortium, and they are called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). First published in 1999, their latest version of those rules are WCAG 2.1, published in June, 2018. The problem with these guidelines is that they are so stringent that it can be very costly to make a website fully compliant. Estimates have been given anywhere from $3000 up to $50,000 to make a website fully compliant. The California Dental Association reported in a June 2020 article that one dentist informed them that they were quoted $10,000 to evaluate their website and a $500 monthly fee to monitor it. They checked with a consultant who said that pricing is in the range of what website accessibility compliance consultants charge. But is that really what the law requires?

Wanting to get a better answer, I decided to do some research to find an authoritative answer, and came across some material from a lawyer in New York who specializes in defending businesses against website accessibility lawsuits. His name is Martin Krezalek. He is a partner in the BlankRome law firm in New York City, has successfully defended a number of companies hit with website accessibility lawsuits, and frequently lectures and publishes articles on the subject. He has an excellent webinar published on YouTube that helps a great deal in understanding this.

In that webinar, he explains that there are a lot of website accessibility lawsuits being filed in the country. It comes out to thousands a year, and they constitute 1/3 of all the ADA lawsuits. Most of them are being filed by just ten law firms. They target an industry or maybe a geographic area. They scan the website with a software tool that gives them a report of how compliant the website is with accessibility standards. If it scores poorly, they will send a letter to the business with a list of the errors in the website and notify them of their intent to sue. Sometimes, they will simply file the lawsuit and wait for a response. In over 90% of the cases, they won’t go to trial, but will settle with the business. Is this fair? It doesn’t seem that it is. After all, there is no person with a disability that has been harmed. But is it legal? Yes, unfortunately, it is.

Our response needs to be that we need to get a step ahead of the lawyers, get this software tool, scan our website, and make sure it passes the test so that the lawyer will leave us alone and go on to the next potential victim.

To this end, I decided to make contact with Mr. Krezalek and see if he would answer some questions. He kindly agreed to not only write me extensive answers to my questions, but granted me a couple of lengthy telephone interviews to help me fully understand what dentists need to do to insulate themselves against these lawsuits.

In our first interview, he referenced a September 2018 statement from the Department of Justice:

“Absent the adoption of specific technical requirements for websites through rulemaking, public accommodations have flexibility in how to comply with the ADA’s general requirements of nondiscrimination and effective communication. Accordingly, noncompliance with a voluntary technical standard for website accessibility does not necessarily indicate noncompliance with the ADA.”

The “voluntary technical standard” refers to the WCAG. He said he has successfully argued that this statement means that your website doesn’t need to be fully compliant with the stringent WCAG 2.1 guidelines. This reduces the cost of compliance dramatically, to a much more reasonable amount. He shared with us the name of a company that has developed an affordable accessibility solution. We subsequently contacted that company and developed a partnership with them so that we can incorporate their software into our web development, providing affordable accessibility to our clients. While this software isn’t a complete solution, it is a key ingredient in making your website compliant with requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are often other issues that need to be addressed, and the combination of addressing those and installing this software will make you compliant with the law. However, we offer this disclaimer—it’s impossible to fully guarantee anyone to not be the target of a lawsuit. It will always be possible for a lawyer to file a lawsuit that has no merit. The good news is that the software being licensed to us includes access to a strong legal department that will help you respond to any threatened lawsuit for no extra charge.

Can a Widget Protect You?

In the webinar, Martin Krezalek addressed the use of widgets that many websites are using to address accessibility. While most of these widgets do address accessibility issues, they are usually not the most image of a section of a website with a wheelchair icon in the lower left cornercritical issues. He said, “So you know we often get the question as to whether overlays and widgets will protect us from lawsuits and the answer is probably not.”

I decided to test a random selection of fourteen websites, half that had a widget and half that didn’t, to see how accessible they truly were. Interestingly, the websites without a widget scored higher on the average than those that had a widget. It seems to me that the use of a widget gives some website companies a false sense of security that causes them to ignore more critical accessibility issues. The widgets are generally helpful, but they have to be combined with a robust software solution and often some manual attention to some issues to make your website accessible.

It’s Time to Act

It’s clear from what is happening in the courts that this issue is not going to go away. Rather, as these enterprising law firms scour the internet looking for targets, it seems like it is only a matter of time before they find you. And given what we know now, complying is not that complicated or expensive. So we recommend that you address this. Contact us, and we can give you an estimate of the cost and then make you compliant.

Let’s end with a bit of good news. There is a provision in the tax code that, if your practice has fewer than 30 employees, you can claim a tax credit of half the cost of removing any accessibility barriers. That could make the modest cost even more modest.

Interested? Give us a call.

(Visited 1,378 times, 1 visits today)
David Hall is the founder and president of Infinity Dental Web. He was a practicing dentist for many years and is an accredited member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.

Tags: ADA, ADA Compliance Widget, ADA lawsuits, American Dental Association, Americans with Disabilities Act, BlankRome, disability, Domino's Pizza, Martin Krezalek, WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, website accessibility, widget, World Wide Web Consortium

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Barry Bolio says:
    April 7, 2021 at 7:22 am

    Excellent information, glad to hear there is some defense to frivolous lawsuits

  • Cassie says:
    April 7, 2021 at 11:20 am

    This information is very insightful, thank you!

  • Recent Posts

    • Review Bug Causes Google Reviews to Disappear
    • The Value of Social Media for a Dental Practice
    • ADA Compliance Standards – How to Avoid a Lawsuit
    • What More Can I Do? Social Media and Your Marketing Plan
    • CallRail vs. Kall8
    • Search Trends in 2020
    • Virtual Consult App
    • Search Engine Journal – Don’t You Know This?

    Search

    Categories

    • Client News (98)
    • Company News (104)
    • Designs (14)
    • Feature Client (4)
    • Local Search (34)
    • Marketing (59)
    • Meet the Team (14)
    • Mobile Websites (13)
    • Regulations (2)
    • Reputation Management (19)
    • SEO (85)
    • Social Media for Dentists (83)
    • Tech Trends (45)
    • Uncategorized (6)
    • Video (8)
    • Website Design (2)

    Archives

    • November 2022 (1)
    • January 2022 (1)
    • April 2021 (1)
    • December 2020 (1)
    • November 2020 (1)
    • September 2020 (1)
    • August 2020 (2)
    • July 2020 (1)
    • June 2020 (1)
    • May 2020 (6)
    • April 2020 (5)
    • March 2020 (3)
    • December 2019 (2)
    • October 2019 (2)
    • September 2019 (1)
    • July 2019 (1)
    • June 2019 (1)
    • May 2019 (1)
    • April 2019 (2)
    • March 2019 (1)
    • January 2019 (1)
    • October 2018 (1)
    • September 2018 (3)
    • August 2018 (3)
    • July 2018 (1)
    • May 2018 (1)
    • April 2018 (2)
    • March 2018 (3)
    • February 2018 (1)
    • January 2018 (1)
    • August 2017 (1)
    • July 2017 (1)
    • June 2017 (2)
    • May 2017 (2)
    • April 2017 (1)
    • January 2017 (2)
    • December 2016 (3)
    • November 2016 (1)
    • October 2016 (1)
    • August 2016 (1)
    • July 2016 (4)
    • June 2016 (2)
    • May 2016 (3)
    • April 2016 (1)
    • March 2016 (4)
    • February 2016 (5)
    • January 2016 (4)
    • December 2015 (7)
    • November 2015 (7)
    • October 2015 (6)
    • September 2015 (5)
    • August 2015 (4)
    • July 2015 (4)
    • June 2015 (10)
    • May 2015 (2)
    • April 2015 (1)
    • March 2015 (1)
    • February 2015 (4)
    • January 2015 (1)
    • December 2014 (5)
    • November 2014 (2)
    • October 2014 (6)
    • September 2014 (7)
    • August 2014 (2)
    • July 2014 (8)
    • June 2014 (5)
    • May 2014 (7)
    • April 2014 (4)
    • March 2014 (3)
    • February 2014 (3)
    • January 2014 (7)
    • December 2013 (6)
    • November 2013 (6)
    • October 2013 (6)
    • September 2013 (4)
    • August 2013 (5)
    • July 2013 (5)
    • June 2013 (7)
    • May 2013 (6)
    • April 2013 (4)
    • March 2013 (6)
    • February 2013 (9)
    • January 2013 (7)
    • December 2012 (11)
    • November 2012 (8)
    • October 2012 (5)
    • September 2012 (5)
    • August 2012 (7)
    • July 2012 (4)
    • June 2012 (6)
    • May 2012 (3)
    • April 2012 (5)
    • March 2012 (4)
    • February 2012 (5)
    • January 2012 (5)
    • December 2011 (5)
    • November 2011 (4)
    • October 2011 (4)
    • September 2011 (1)
    • August 2011 (6)
    • July 2011 (5)
    • June 2011 (6)
    • May 2011 (8)
    • April 2011 (9)
    • March 2011 (7)
    • February 2011 (8)
    • January 2011 (8)
    • December 2010 (9)
    • November 2010 (9)
    • October 2010 (9)
    • September 2010 (7)
    • August 2010 (10)
    • July 2010 (8)
    • June 2010 (5)
    • May 2010 (1)
    • April 2010 (4)
    • March 2010 (2)
    • February 2010 (1)
    • November 2009 (2)
    • October 2009 (7)

    Tags

    advertising American Dental Association Content Management System Websites content marketing cosmetic dentist COVID-19 dental marketing Dental SEO dental social media Dental Website Design Dental Websites Dentist dentists Facebook Facebook marketing general dentist general dentistry Google+ Google Business Listings Google places Google Reviews Google Universal Search Great Dental Websites Infinity Dental Web Instagram Internet Internet Marketing LinkedIn local search marketing Mobile Websites online reviews Pinterest post SEO social Social Media Social Media for Dentists social network technology Twitter Web Yelp Yelp Reviews YouTube Channel
    Infinity Dental Web Logo Icon

    And now ...
    let us grow your practice

    BBB Accredited Business badge American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry Corporate Member badge

    © 2009-2023 Infinity Dental Web Inc. IDW logo All rights reserved | Privacy Policy

    Email address