More than 250 lawsuits were filed in 2016 against companies alleging that respective websites were inaccessible to users with disabilities related to vision or hearing, and by 2018, the Department of Justice is expected to release Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) website compliance regulations. So why aren’t more people talking about this?
“It does not appear that any target company has accepted the considerable risk of litigating these cases to a final judgment,” said Attorney Mark Sidoti with the Newark, N.J.-based Gibbons P.C.
While medical and retail companies have been targeted in a large number of the aforementioned lawsuits, the California Bankers Associations’ Sept. 26, 2016 CBA Regulatory Compliance Bulletin stated that banks have made the list, too — which means credit unions likely aren’t far behind.
“A new round of demand letters has recently been sent to regional and community banks demanding website compliance,” the bulletin stated. “The letters seek structured settlements, similar to the ‘Talking ATM’ settlements with financial institutions in 2000 and threaten litigation against those who do not respond promptly, typically within 21 days of the letter.”
Title III of the ADA requires businesses and nonprofit service providers to make accessibility accommodations to enable the disabled public to access the same services as clients who are not disabled. While hundreds of lawsuits have been brought against credit unions for non-compliant ADA ATMs, ADA website compliance complaints are putting executives on notice.
Sidoti, a commercial and products liability litigator and chair of the Gibbons’ E-Discovery Task Force, said he has is not aware of any court challenge that has been successful to any significant degree.
“The demand letters and follow-on complaints almost always lead to a negotiated settlement, the terms of which, in my view, generally exceed the costs and burdens that would be entailed by proactive compliance in advance of any legal threat,” he said.
In an effort to be proactive, Allegacy Federal Credit Union launched a new ADA compliant website in February. The $1.2 billion CU supports 134,900 members at 13 branches and eight student-run locations.
“Even though the final rules have not been established, we have a good idea what the core standards will be. For example, we do know that font size and spacing can impact the performance of screen readers, which is a device used by the blind,” said Allegacy Federal CU’s Business System Analyst Brack Morton. “So, we can build the site to accommodate proper spacing and font size. We realize that building a site that is ADA compliant is a work in progress.”
To ensure the CU achieved desired compliance, Morton and his team undertook a vendor vetting process. He encountered two general responses to ADA compliance: The vendor did not know about the forthcoming regulation or they were not going to build toward the standard unless it became a requirement.
“With this experience, we learned credit unions have to ask for ADA compliance in the vendor selection process as most website designers are not making it a default standard,” said Morton.
After due diligence, the Portland, Oregon-based PixelSpoke, a digital marketing and website redesign firm, was selected. For a website to be ADA compliant, a website rebuild is not necessarily required, said PixelSpoke CEO Cameron Madill.
“Many of the items required to retrofit the site involve things like color contrast and font size, and so they can involve design choices that may be hard in the framework of your existing site,” said Madill. He added that a redesign can take as little as one week or as long as a few months.
Morton likened ADA compliance to a contractor following the building codes when remodeling a kitchen. “There are best practices in the initial design, but once the template is built, there is very little maintenance in the day-to-day operation,” he said. “We only go back to the ADA principles when we have to remodel the site.”
The Allegacy Federal CU’s new website also offers accessibility features to assist its growing senior membership who may be facing challenges such as failing vision, arthritis and mobility, hearing impairment, and/or medical conditions that make it harder to use a computer.
With regard to the CU’s mobile banking app, the ADA compliant website uses responsive design, explained Morton. This feature resizes the page to an “appropriate shape” within a mobile web browser.
“We have not tested the mobile app for ADA,” said Morton. “It was produced by a different vendor. That said, if we can make the app ADA compliant, we will.” He added that 32,000 members are active mobile app users and 55,282 are active online banking users.
While the Department of Justice’s ADA compliant timeline remains ambiguous, Sidoti encourages credit unions to be proactive by becoming familiar with the WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines and compliance checklists (
“A wait-and-see approach can be very risky as targeted companies lose significant leverage once plaintiffs have demanded compliance at the risk of legal action. Compliance steps should be taken in advance of receiving a private plaintiff demand if at all possible,” said Sidoti. “Companies can undertake several measures depending upon their risk profile, including their size, web presence and user complaint history.”
Allegacy FCU did not seek to identify members, for example, with vision or hearing disabilities. Morton said the goal was to build a new website that was inclusive of all members and their needs or requirements when utilizing the website.
“We decided to do this as a part of our website redesign simply because we felt it was the right thing to do,” he said.
