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Marking 25 years in existence, the ADA has helped millions, but hasn’t fully caught up with the Internet age, leaving individuals who are deaf or hearing impaired still struggling with basic Internet functions because of non-compliant websites.
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) was a landmark civil rights law passed 25 years ago to help ensure that those with physical disabilities, including the deaf and hearing impaired, are able to enjoy equal social and economic interactions as those without disabilities and protect them from discrimination in the workplace.
Although the onset of the ADA has made strides for Americans facing disabilities, the ADA was drafted before the explosion of the Internet age. More than two decades later, the courts are still struggling to decipher what businesses need to be compliant and how we as a society can further the equality of persons with disabilities.
Oftentimes, hearing-impaired website visitors struggle to grasp and interact with information presented on a website. Embedded videos do not offer subtitles and text scripts, and security measures only allow access to users following a voice command, which is inaudible to those who are deaf.
Melissa Earll, comic book and baseball card collector, said that eBay couldn’t confirm her identity as a seller because she is deaf.
“eBay keeps me from taking advantage of opportunities that other people have and it’s because I couldn’t hear,” Earll said.
When eBay customer service representatives recommended she ask her parents for assistance to listen for the voice-only password, she rejected said offensive suggestion, saying she is a 47-year-old woman who does not live at home with her mother and father.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila didn’t agree with the argument, stating Earll’s position was factually inadequate and that Earll was unable to prove that she tried to register as a seller after speaking with eBay about other possible solutions.
Title III of the ADA requires businesses and nonprofit service providers to accommodate for persons with disabilities by allowing them to access the same services as clients who do not have a disability.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than thirty eight million (approximately 38,225,590) people who suffer from ‘hearing problems.’ Across all age groups in the U.S., there are approximately 1,000,000 people over 5 years of age who are ‘functionally deaf,’ with more than half over the age of 65.
While the ADA doesn’t expressly apply to “Internet retailers,” many online websites may fall within “place of exhibition or entertainment,” “sales or rental establishment,” “service establishment,” “library,” “gallery,” or “place of public display or collection.” Persons with hearing impairments should not be discriminated against when the ADA sets forth safeguards for everyone to be treated equally.
Scribd attempted to win its lawsuit by stating it wasn’t a physical place and is therefore not regulated by the ADA, when Scribd was be accused of noncompliance. Scribd’s website and applications were not programmed to be accessible through [screen reader] software, making it difficult, if not impossible, for blind persons to access all elements of the site.
The court ruled against Scribd, saying “Now that the Internet plays such a critical role in the personal and professional lives of Americans, excluding disabled persons from access to covered entities that use it as their principal means of reaching the public would defeat the purpose of this important civil rights legislation.”
This was a momentous decision that has paved the path for more Internet sites needing to abide by the ADA to ensure that persons with disabilities have equal access to this integral part of a modern Americans life.
In another huge advance for persons with disabilities, Netflix agreed to caption all of its shows by 2014, after the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a class-action lawsuit in 2010.
Since these websites were clearly marked as a businesses that needed to comply with the ADA, there are now hundreds of thousands of websites falling within this category that should follow suit before they get slapped with a lawsuit.
This is only the beginning, and we will have a ways to go!
Here’s a great website that lists things that can be done to all websites to help accessibility issues for those with disabilities:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/web-designer/creating-an-ada-compliant-website/
If you have any questions, concerns or just want to find out more, we would love to help.
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