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Re: Reclaiming ADA court costs from developers

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From: Wilson, Jordan
Date: Jul 30, 2018 12:01PM

This is a very slippery slope - I've seen vendors who do go out of their way to include accessibility (and accessibility costs) into RFPs have to back out of it because adding A11y costs into a project when their competitors do not prices them out of the RFP.

I spoke about this at Accessing Higher Ground last year because its becoming a big problem - I recommend that agencies include accessibility as a line item in their RFP responses for this reason. Don't include it in the core prices so that your client can see that its in there and can differentiate your response from others.

Ideally everyone includes a11y, but we're not there yet.

I'd love to see a panel on this at CSUN in the future - many of us work with 3rd party design agencies and there's fear of liability there.

Jordan

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2018 9:55 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [WebAIM] Reclaiming ADA court costs from developers

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This is a very interesting case that could have notable ramifications
in the design/development community. Please keep us apprised of the
outcomes.

I can't speak to UK law, but under the Americans with Disabilities
Act, there is Section 303 which defines that discrimination can occur
for a "failure to design and construct facilities" that are not
accessible. There have been court rulings against designers and
contractors for not implementing physical accessibility, even when
this is not specifically defined in the contract. The onus is thus on
the architect and contractors to understand the accessibility
requirements and implement them.

As Birkir noted, we do not yet have technical specifications for web
accessibility under ADA, but this has not stopped lawsuits and
Department of Justice actions. In fact, the lack of technical
standards and implementation guidelines has certainly increased the
number of lawsuits because litigants need not define that a web site
failed to meet a defined technical standard, but only that it is
"discriminatory". This creates a higher burden of proof on contractors
to make things accessible - and, because the DOJ has utterly failed to
define what "accessible" even means here, the litigant can define this
to be pretty much whatever they want.

Jared
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