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Difference Between ADA and WCAG

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From: Guy Hickling
Date: Jan 4, 2020 2:30PM

It actually doesn't matter what the ADA says or does not say about website
accessibility in its wording. It also isn't important what the Department
of Justice has said, though the decisions they published in the past
initiated today's concentration on website accessibility. The only thing
that matters, to businesses today, is what the courts are saying about it.
And virtually all courts have accepted that the ADA does in principle apply
to websites.

Where businesses have won court victories over a complainant it has been
for other reasons. For instance some credit unions won cases because they
only covered a specific area of the country, and the disabled litigant
lived outside the area so could not be a member, so the courts decided they
did not need to use the website. But any credit union that thinks that
decision makes them safe is living in cloud cuckoo land, because their
website is still non-accessible, and still wide open to challenge by some
disabled person who *does* live in their area.

Another more problematic question, that has had different decisions in
different courts, is whether the website was sufficiently tied to a bricks
and mortar building to be a "place of public accommodation". But any
business making a fight over that is taking a huge risk. Far safer and
cheaper just to make their website accessible than to risk a lawsuit over
that. The changes required are, honestly, usually so simple.

The one thing that all courts that found in favour of the disabled person
have said, is that the website must be measured using the WCAG 2.1 Level AA
(They used to say WCAG 2.0, but moved to 2.1 within weeks of the update
coming out.) Never mind anything said to the contrary, if A says "I used a
different approach", but the court says "not enough", court wins!

So, James, that is what you can say to anyone asking you about it. ADA
compliance means WCAG 2.1 compliance, because that's what the courts demand
if it goes that far. And therefore what complainants can demand. Also
because if their website complies with that, they are unlikely to have any
disabled person complain in the first place since that person is unlikely
to experience any access difficulty. But businesses need to get expert help
from accessibility professionals, not rely on a quick test with automated
test tools to tell them what they need to do, because those things just
don't do the job. For instance, one of the things most mentioned in
lawsuits is images that don't have a correct alt text. There is no tool on
this earth that can tell developers what alt text to use!

Too many businesses have gone for a cheap, quick fix, but there are far too
many lawsuits being brought all the time to take that risk any more!

Regards,
Guy Hickling
Accessibility Consultant