Over the 20 year history of the American Disability Act (ADA), the Department of Justice (DOJ) has actively pursued enforcement actions, previous focus has been on physical barriers.  Recently and for the first time, the DOJ has sought to revise the ADA Standards to reflect changes in the law and technology

The current wave of public accessibility lawsuits is growing. Some of these lawsuits are unquestionably legitimate, Many lawsuits, however, are filed by opportunistic attorneys that seize on technical violations to extract large attorney’s fees settlements.

Companies below settled threatened lawsuits and entered into agreements to make their websites accessible;

Staples

Washington Mutual

Ramada Hotels

Priceline.com

Apple (iTunes)

MLB.com

CVS

Rite-Aid

Radioshack

Major League Baseball required to use reasonable efforts to address the following accessibility issues on the major web pages and indices of www.mlb.com, and on club sites that contain the url www.mlb.com:

• Lack of page language identification

• Absence of method to bypass repeated blocks of content

• Images with incorrect or no text alternatives

• Headings, lists, data tables and paragraphs not identified using HTML code

Major League Baseball required to address:

• Color being used as the only visual means of conveying information

• Text and background color combinations providing sufficient contrast for pages other than statistics pages

• Page titles not providing enough information

• Unclear text links

*Facts from Hunton & Williams, LLP

Audit Genie- An  on demand website testing tool that validates a website accessibility for disabled persons. www.auditgenie.com