California courts are, once again, causing broad implications for website owners within the United States. A blind California resident recently brought a lawsuit against a Colorado-based business, citing both Federal and California discrimination laws. The complaint arose from the fact that the website was difficult for blind internet users to interact with. The judge presiding over the matter recently ruled that the disabled man was correct. The company was ordered to modify their website, pay $4,000 to the plaintiff and cover the plaintiff’s legal costs (which could be around $100,000.)
The ruling, if not challenged, could open up liability for every single website owner in the United States, should their website not be accessible to visually impaired users. With this case going to the plaintiff, similar cases are expected to follow.
The status of the internet for the visually impaired
A Cornell university study estimated that about 2.3% of the population (or 7.3 million users) are visually impaired. A few high profile publications have posted articles detailing just how challenging and confusing it could be to navigate the internet as a visually impaired person.
How to be compliant
In order for the visually impaired to be able to fully access a website, the site should be compliant with screen readers. The general consensus on StackExchange, a discussion website for web developers and other software engineers, seems to conclude that a properly built website that has good SEO practices and follows web standards should already be screen reader friendly. To accomplish this, web designers can refer to W3C web standards. Web designers can also look at integrating and supporting screen reading software, or browsers built specifically for the visually impaired.
These parts ain’t the same these days
Long gone are the days of the Wild West, where roaming bandits intercept cattle herds and Wells Fargo coaches. Now, if you drive your well-appointed car deep into the desert to find a small town in the West, you’ll find a gift shop and drive-thru instead of a saloon with poker games.
The same fate has befallen the internet. The Wild West era of the internet is long a memory. States like California have had a huge impact on regulating the internet (at least within California borders.) In 2013, California’s AB370 required any website that collects data on California users to have a privacy policy that addresses how they respond to “do not track” signals. Results of the law have been mixed. Many large publishers and California corporations have either modified their privacy policies or have implemented code that displays “do not track” cookie warnings to users with a California IP address.
While many sites have taken these steps, there are still countless websites that have not. With no department actively enforcing this, for now, each violation would have to be pursued by affected plaintiffs in a civil court. Although conforming your website to be accessible to screen readers is not explicitly required by law, it is implicitly required by this case, and enforcement could come in the form of a lawsuit.
Of course, resulting enforcement of compliance will bring both opportunities and challenges to businesses that operate websites. One opportunity that could result from this ruling is that it could promote future websites being built to a more consistent standard. Of course, visually impaired people would benefit greatly if more websites were compliant with screen readers. Businesses might have easier access to market to blind customers.
A challenge that compliance will present to companies is the potential need to upgrade software. With countless web programs developed on outdated technologies, or perhaps without the ability to completely renovate web software that was not designed to work with screen readers, much of the internet could still remain beyond reach. Further, one might ask, “Where does this stop?” Imagine how difficult it might be for a game designer to develop games that are accessible to the visually impaired. Future litigation could flush this issue out. In the meantime, website owners might want to check out their website using a screen reader to see how accessible of an experience their website provides.