Blind plaintiff shopped at his local Winn-Dixie grocery store and pharmacy in person — but was unable to access the website for information such as the store locator, online coupons, store events, and specials.
Target, Domino’s, Expedia, GNC, FedEx and dozens of other major cases had previously reached settlement agreement or other structured resolution.
No mistake that the first item is functional performance: ICT providers must remediate known issues. Communicate and fix priority accessibility issues. Celebrate wins publicly.
No system is perfect and it is unreasonable to expect perfection. Two items aimed at facilitation:
Publish an Accessibility Notice on the corporate site, describing the state of accessibility support (VPATs) with workarounds, and how to contact the organization with accessibility concerns.
A web accessibility policy guides the internal decisions and processes of your organization. It may not be appropriate to promote and circulate it to your customers and clients — rather, it should be distributed among the relevant departments of your organization, along with training where necessary.
Web Accessibility Committee will develop mission and access policy, appointment of board liaison and documentation of grievance procedure. Accessibility Committees are responsible for providing guidance and direction regarding barriers that exist within the corporation, programs, and customers.
Executive Director that oversees and insures that mission, goals and budget for Accessibility are implemented within the organization.
Web accessibility evaluation often focuses on conformance to accessibility standards such as WCAG. While conformance is important, providing the structure and resources for evaluating with real users with disabilities and older users identifies usability issues that are not discovered by conformance evaluation alone.
Automated accessibility testing tools enable organizations to passivley audit thousands of documents, web pages, or even multiple websites simultaneously for certain accessibility defects that can be detected by software. Though often these tools are limited in scope, they are a good start.
Assisted automated testing (tenon.io, LevelAccess) and developer in-browser F12 devtools (aXe, Accessibility Insights) can be more impactful.
In practice, the best approach for many organizations will be a hybrid approach of automated and manual accessibility testing. Automated accessibility testing should be your first line of defense, helping you identify and resolve the majority of quick-fix issues before progressing to areas that require more analysis and human input with in-depth manual testing.
All customer service personnel should receive training on helping customers with disabilities, including considering a text relay (TRS/TTY)-capable special customer assistance line.
Provide a form for external customers to be able to report and receive help regarding accessibility issues.
Nearly the last item was technical conformance to WCAG standards. WCAG 2.0 AA compliance is a legal requirement for federal ICT vendors under the Revised Section 508, and meeting WCAG success criteria will lead to a more usable system for users with disabilities. WCAG technical compliance remains not the goal itself:
The real measure of accessibility is whether any user can actually & equivalently accomplish their tasks.
A web accessibility statement is a public proclamation of your commitment to online accessibility. Make public disclosures of existing/past efforts in accessibility in press releases, blog posts and marketing.
“Winn-Dixie has presented no evidence to establish that it would be unduly burdensome to make its website accessible to visually impaired individuals. Remediation measures in conformity with the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines will provide Gil and other visually impaired consumers the ability to access Winn-Dixie’s website and permit full and equal enjoyment of the services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations provided through Winn-Dixie’s website. Gil has proven that he is entitled to injunctive relief.”
— Robert N. Scola, Jr.
United States District Judge