Accessibility to online content is a growing concern—is your website ADA-compliant?
By Michelle Huffman
REALTORS® across the country have been receiving letters in the mail threatening legal action if they do not comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But compliance isn’t about wheelchair ramps or elevators; it’s about photo descriptions and video captions.
Ways to Make Your Website More Accessible
- All photos and graphics have detailed alternative text descriptions, especially listing photos
- Video and audio files have captions. Also consider adding detailed narration to videos of images, such as listing videos
- Allow users to adjust color and font size, so users can create high-contrast color settings or large fonts for easier reading
- Talk to your web developer about compatibility with screen readers and other programs those visually and hearing-impaired use to navigate the web.
- Add access keys, which allow users to navigate your site without a mouse, for those that have trouble with fine motor skills.
- Avoid using PDF downloads for necessary information. Image-based formats cannot be read by screen readers.
“Most of what our clients have faced so far are these demand letters without a lot of specifics in them,” says Wisconsin attorney Erica Reib at O’Neil, Cannon, Hollman, DeJong & Laing.
The letters are taking the businesses’ websites to task for not having a website that accommodates visually and hearing-impaired individuals. These accommodating features include text descriptions of photographs, transcripts for audio content and visuals, and compatibility with programs that aid those with impairments in navigating the web.
Many real estate websites lack these features and aren’t accessible, but they also aren’t explicitly illegal, thanks to the legal gray area where these web standards currently live.
“That’s the scary part for our industry,” says Tom Hormel, CRS, broker associate with RE/MAX Inland Empire in Spokane, Washington. “It’s the Wild West, and everyone is trying to figure it out.”
Unlike other long-established ADA regulations, such as provisions requiring handicap accessible entrances in buildings, website compliance is still murky.
“There’s not a lot of case law on this,” Reib says. “Depending on where the company is in the country, the courts have come down a little differently.”
And the Department of Justice, the regulatory body tasked with regulation on these issues, has yet to clarify. The DOJ is currently creating website accessibility rules for state and local government under Title II of the ADA, but regulations under Title III, which would apply to most private companies, aren’t slated for release until 2018. The National Association of REALTORS® has even written a letter to the DOJ urging the expedited release of these rules.
Meanwhile, the industry is turning to WCAG 2.0, or the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (find it here). The guidelines have been developed through the World Wide Web Consortium, a group of private companies that works together to develop web standards. While the group is non-governmental, their standards are widely accepted as the most comprehensive guidelines for creating ADA-compliant websites.
What You Need to Know Now
You may not be the only one dealing with this. Many of these letters are coming from the same firms or plaintiffs and your colleagues may have received similar letters. For example, in May, the Washington Post reported that the lawyers of one Pittsburgh firm, Carlson Lynch Sweet Kilpela & Carpenter, “have sent out ‘demand letters’ to as many as 25 realty and home-building companies in recent months.” The Sun Sentinel in Florida found that “more than 2,300 federal disabled-access suits have been filed in the Southern District of Florida since Jan. 1, 2013,” and “nearly two-thirds were filed by the same 10 plaintiffs, and the most prolific, Howard Cohan, filed 435 complaints.”
If you get a letter, don’t just settle. Some of the letters received by REALTORS® demand quick and easy settlement without much exploration of the issue. Because of how complicated and expensive legal matters get, many business owners are tempted to simply settle to make the problem go away. But Reib says that’s not a good approach.
“Sometimes it seems easier to pay the demand letter and get rid of it, but that generally does not get rid of the problem,” Reib says. “There’s not really any value in simply settling this case because somebody could bring a new case tomorrow.”
If you do get a letter, you should contact your attorney and your liability insurer, says Paul Zimmer, a litigation attorney with Reib at O’Neil, Cannon, Hollman, DeJong & Laing.
Start Making Changes
“As soon as I found out about this, I started working toward making sure my web provider is ADA-compliant,” Hormel says.
And he takes notes and documents every move he makes toward that, from contacting his Move.com website host to any changes he makes on the site to prove that he is on top of this issue.
“It’s not a horribly onerous process,” Hormel says. “A lot of it is making sure you have good descriptions of the photos.”
He also puts his web address into web accessibility evaluation tools, such as wave.webaim.org and achecker.ca. The sites can help guide you on where your website needs to change.
Creating better website accessibility is important. While there is little clarity for exactly what businesses should be doing to be compliant, one thing is clear: Making your website more accessible is an important, inclusive step that is increasingly becoming the norm in website design.
“Even if you don’t get a letter like that, but you’re thinking that your website needs an upgrade, or if you have a web developer now, start talking about accessibility and see if you can ease into it. Or if you’re overdue for an overhaul, get this done, too,” Zimmer says. “The law is likely only going in one direction.”
“One-hundred percent, the person with the disability looking for houses should be able to receive the same information as everyone else,” Hormel says. “That’s just not always what this is about.”
For more detailed information about how your website could comply, visit the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool or AChecker, or find a detailed checklist for your developer at W3.org.
