Equal access not required by law
It’s the World Wide Web — but not if you have disabilities.
Websites are too seldom built with people of all abilities in mind.
Online barriers can translate into higher prices if the lowest price is available on a site that wasn’t built to accommodate visual impairment. People with disabilities can’t apply for jobs if the application is available only on a website that isn’t accessible.
“If you can’t get equal access, it will negatively impact your economic status, your privacy, your social life, your independence, even your safety,” said Jonathan Lazar, a computer science professor at Towson University in Maryland.
Courts are divided on whether websites and mobile apps are legally required to provide equal access to people with disabilities under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which was enacted before the Web became as ubiquitous as it is today. But advocates are increasingly filing lawsuits, claiming companies have a legal obligation to make their websites accessible.
The Department of Justice delayed a plan to issue accessibility regulations until 2018, but in November said: “The inability to access websites put individuals at a great disadvantage in today’s society, which is driven by a dynamic electronic marketplace and unprecedented access to information.”
DeAnn Elliott, a Boston disability advocate, was diagnosed at 28 with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that causes gradual retinal degeneration, and declared legally blind at 41.
The Web has opened up many opportunities for people with vision loss, she says. Recent technological advances, such as Apple’s VoiceOver, a gesture-based screen reader that reads a description of everything happening on an iOS device, have turned smartphones into indispensable aids.
Yet too much of the Internet remains tantalizingly beyond her reach. Among the most common obstacles: “captchas,” a security feature that requires users to retype numbers or letters. Audio captchas are often unintelligible, Elliott says.
“It’s terribly frustrating,” Elliott said. “We pay for the same service from our Internet providers as our neighbors but for a fraction of the functionality.”
Making technology accessible benefits everyone, says Daniel Goldstein, counsel for the National Federation of the Blind. “What’s needed are things like: ‘It is the policy of our company to build accessibility in from the beginning of the design process,’ ” Goldstein said.