The Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities.
Recent data show an increase in ADA Title III federal lawsuits, reaching an all-time high in 2021.
Accessibility-related litigation is expected to continue in the coming years as more companies face lawsuits over ADA disagreements.
The million-dollar question is, what happens when your business faces an ADA lawsuit?
What are your best practices for reducing the potential loss of credibility and profitability of your company and reducing legal fees?
Keep reading to find out.
How AccessBit’s Litigation Support Package Can Help
Website ADA compliance is important for maintaining web accessibility for your site and reducing the likelihood of facing an ADA lawsuit.
One way to handle ADA litigation is to seek help from the web accessibility company AccessB’s litigation support package, which includes the following.
- Proposed and legally verified response to certain situations
- Two third party audits performed by the AccessB team
- Dip deep into your case to give you ongoing and extra support if needed
- Examination and documentation provided by AccessB’s research and development (R&D) team, including thorough evaluation and response to each accessibility complaint.
How AccessBi’s automated web accessibility platform helps
Using AccessiBe’s automated web accessibility solution can help reduce your chances of a lawsuit in the first place, although lawsuits can be filed against any business at any time. Let’s take a look at the features of AccessiBe’s automated solution.
Accessibility interface
Accessibility Interface offers a design and user interface (UI) combination feature. It adjusts instant accessibility to your website based on user preferences and needs.
The main adjustment options of the Accessibility interface include:
Accessibility profile
Accessibility profiles enable a combination of general web accessibility features and functionality to automatically address a specific disability requirement.
For example, convulsive users or people with epilepsy may launch Caesar Safe Profile on your website to instantly clean up flashes, flashing animations, and risky color combinations.
When you turn on the Seizure Safe Profile you will notice a slight difference between the image above and the image below.
Profiles allow users to browse your website safely and efficiently.
Other accessibility profiles are visually impaired, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), cognitive impairment, motor impairment that restricts individual keyboard use and is designed for blind users.
Content adjustment
Accessibility interface content adjustment options can change how your website visitors view your site.
Users can change how your website displays titles, text, and other content to make them readable, especially for people with blurred vision and senile vision.
Adjustment options allow users to enlarge text, highlight links and titles, change line height, character spacing and font size, and change text alignment (among others).
Color combination
Users can make instant contrast and color adjustments through the accessibility interface with different color blindness, visual impairment and light sensitivity.
Website visitors can switch between low or high engagement and high, low and dark contrast. They can adjust the color of your site’s background, title, and text, and choose the monochrome option.
Orientation adjustment
Orientation adjustments to the accessibility interface include guiding elements and shortcuts, allowing users to reduce misleading content and noise on your website.
Adjustments allow users to hide images, mute sounds, and turn on options like read mode, reading mask, and reading guide.
Users can highlight the focus and switch the cursor to large black or white to make it easier to see and follow.
Other accessibility adjustments include 12 built-in languages and an online dictionary.
The dictionary can help users with cognitive impairments easily find the meaning of phrases, words and slander within the user interface and without leaving your website.
AI-powered process
AccessiBe’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) handles more complex accessibility adjustments: keyboard navigation and screen reader optimization.
Automatic backend adjustments are applied efficiently within a reasonable time frame, significantly reducing your time and resources compared to manual processes.
Screen-reader optimization
AccessiBe’s AI-powered background application learns to ensure that all components of your site have ongoing ADA and WCAG compliance, even when updating your site.
Through this process, AccessB provides a screen-reader, software that blind people use to browse the web, meaningful data.
The backend process uses a set of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) features to provide accurate, actionable icon descriptions, element roles, form input validity guidelines, form labels, and more.
It also scans the images on your website and provides meaningful and accurate image-object-recognition-based descriptions through alternative text (or ALT text) tags for images without descriptions.
In addition, the background process can extract text embedded in the image using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.
Keyboard navigation optimization
AccessiBe’s background process can adjust the HTML of your website and include various behaviors to make your site operable using keyboard using JavaScript (JS) code.
Adjustment occurs on the fly, allowing users to easily browse your website using common keyboard key combinations and functions such as Shift+Tab Move within a group command.
AccessiBe’s backend keyboard moves focus to triggered popups when they are displayed, so that the focus does not go out.
Consequences of ADA disagreement
In addition, failure to comply with ADA requirements can have serious consequences for your business, including the following:
Loss of your reputation and credibility
ADA lawsuits can damage your brand image.
Cases can affect your company’s reputation, especially when alleged ADA violations become a public record. It can follow and chase your business until it works, potentially hurting your credibility.
ADA fines for disagreement
Federal law can impose fines of approximately 75,000 (for the first ADA violation) and additional তির 150,000 for non-compliance.
You may also receive additional fines and have to achieve higher accessibility standards than the ADA requirements, depending on your local government and state law.
Violation fees and the resources you spend to meet higher accessibility standards can quickly add up, potentially costing you thousands of dollars.
Take advantage of ACCB to reduce your chances of suing
Make sure your website meets the Web Accessibility Guidelines and minimize your ADA litigation by using AccessB’s automated web accessibility solution. And if an opportunity lawsuit is created – don’t panic, because AccessB is on your side.
