older man sitting in wheelchair, using laptop
It has been posited for some time now that the industry around ensuring websites and other digital products remain accessible to users with disabilities is heading for an inevitable “market failure.”
The problems across the sector are myriad but, in essence, boil down to one critical theme – making a website legally compliant and accessible, especially if large-scale revamping is needed, requires significant time, money and education for website owners.
For smaller businesses, in particular, such resources are not always readily available and hence the risk of excluding users and subsequent legal action looms large.
Enter stage left web accessibility overlay companies, some of whom claim that with the payment of a monthly subscription fee and the injection of one line of code, a website can be made accessible through automated detection and remediation processes that work in the background.
The marketing hype is alluring. For a manageable fee, website owners can outsource their accessibility compliance to an affordable AI solution and rest easy, safe in the knowledge that they are protected from legal action and not losing valuable customers.
Unfortunately, all that glitters is not gold. Though the basic pretext is spot on i.e., the market is in dire need of cheaper, more scalable products and services – web accessibility overlays are mere bit-part solutions and certainly not the magic bullet they are sometimes purported to be.
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Legally exposed
If any doubt remains over whether a simple overlay solution can protect a website from lawsuits, one need only look at the recent case against eyewear retailer eyebobs.
Earlier this month, a federal judge approved a class action settlement against the company brought forward by a visually impaired plaintiff.
This happened even though eyebobs had been deploying a market-leading web accessibility overlay solution on their site.
Eyebobs is not the first company to get sued despite implementing such a tool and is unlikely to be the last.
Commenting on the settlement, Doug Flood, President of Deque Systems, a global leader in web accessibility software and services that has worked with the likes of Google and Microsoft says, “This lawsuit is important because it reminds us that digital accessibility awareness and education is still lacking.
“Adding an accessibility widget to your website will not remove access barriers for all people with disabilities.
“The scope and depth of the settlement agreement reflects a significant increasing trend highlighting what we, at Deque, have known for a long time. To sustain digital accessibility, it must be treated as an ongoing practice and not a single outsourced widget,” says Flood.
Being Transparent
Some providers of automated web accessibility solutions supplement their digital tools with a manual testing and remediation service to better educate their customers and plug the gaps.
One such supplier is AudioEye, which has operated in the digital accessibility market since 2010.
The company recently announced its A11iance program which offers reimbursement to its external team of website testers with lived experience of disability.
AudioEye’s COO Dominic Varacalli believes that the key to addressing some of the confusion amongst website owners over whether they are doing enough to ensure their digital products are usable and legally compliant lies in transparency from software providers.
“As an overlay company, or as any outsourced solution, we need to be transparent with our customers and tell them, ‘Here’s what it’s going to take. Our automation makes it cheap to get you up the accessibility ladder from one to five,” he says.
“But really, you need to make it to seven and it’s going to cost this much extra to make it to that level.
“Other overlay providers may not transparently report website accessibility fails or may not offer manual site-specific remediation. So, they tell their customers that automation is 100 percent of the solution and that’s where issues can arise.”
As a tech enthusiast, Varacalli is certain about one thing.
“Automation is going to improve over time,” he insists.
“It’s going to get even better at understanding intent and context. But, at the same time, the web is going to continue to evolve. It’s always going to come up with new issues for automation to solve. So, we need to be constantly learning, growing and catching up to that next thing that the web will bring us.”
Evolving legislation
AudioEye also has on its board a very special “representative.” Former Congressman Tony Coehlo was the primary sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) back in the late eighties.
Speaking on the failed passage of the Online Accessibility Act at the end of last year, which sought to formalize the process for managing web accessibility disputes, Coehlo is scathing about the proposed legislation.
“It absolutely shouldn’t have gone through,” says Coehlo.
“It just didn’t go far enough. The proposition was muddled in effect and deliberately so. I think it’s been discredited enough that it won’t go anywhere now.”
He continues, “It’s typical business lobbying to come up with something minimalist that businesses can live with and make it legal by an act of Congress thereby preventing the enforcement of the ADA with regards to the internet. That was always the goal.”
Speaking of the 31-year-old landmark legislation – it’s becoming increasingly clear that in the advanced digital age we live in in 2021, websites must indeed fall into the “places of public accommodation” referred to in the historic act.
Exactly what this means for online businesses in relation to legal liability still needs time to evolve. However, it’s already abundantly clear that solely relying on cheap and cheerful automated solutions with no human oversight poses as many problems as it offers solutions.
