Accessibility in Canada is about creating communities, workplaces and services that enable everyone to participate fully in society without barriers. The Government of Canada believes that all Canadians deserve the same opportunities and chances at success and is pleased to announce the coming into force of the Accessible Canada Act. Reaching this milestone demonstrates the Government’s commitment to implement this transformational legislation in a timely manner, creating…

When Virginia Jacko found out the first Democratic presidential debates of the 2020 election cycle were going to be held in Miami, she was excited to learn more about the candidates and their policies before they arrived in her city. But as she clicked on the candidates’ websites, she realized that most were not accessible to blind voters like her. As the CEO of Miami Lighthouse for…

Xfinity X1 Customers With Physical Disabilities Can Now Use Their Eyes to Change The Channel, Set a Recording or Search for a Show [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://www.accessibilityshield.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/3899023_Accessibility_DD_6x9_FINAL_.mp4"][/video]   Jimmy Curran has Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a condition that affects the part of the nervous system that controls muscle movement, and was among the first customers to get the new X1 eye control technology. PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Comcast today…

Retailers and other companies have been increasingly caught up in an explosion of boilerplate claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), focusing on both websites and physical stores (see our previous coverage here, here, here, and here). While the plaintiffs' bar has had a strong run with these claims in recent years, recent decisions in the Southern District of New York, as well as…

Disclaimer: This post is not about lighthouse, other testing tools perform similarly. It's about us developers and our responsibility to not blindly rely on automatic testing. Google's built-in testing tool Lighthouse judges the accessibility of our websites with a score between 0 and 100. It’s laudable to try to get a high grading, but a score of 100 doesn’t mean that the site is perfectly accessible.…

Florida has long been considered a hotbed of lawsuits filed under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act.   Certainly, that practice has continued with the most recent trend of ADA cases, namely lawsuits alleging that websites are not accessible to the legally blind or visually impaired. For those defending website accessibility cases under the ADA, unfortunately three fairly recent court decisions on cases filed…

On January 15, 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision with important ramifications for website and mobile application (“mobile app”) accessibility under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). In Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, the plaintiff asserted claims for violations of the ADA relating to alleged accessibility barriers encountered on the defendant’s website and mobile app. The district court, while noting…

[Graph: ADA Title III Website Accessibility Lawsuits in Federal Court: 2017-2018: 2017: 814; 2018: 2258, 177% increase over 2017. *The number of cases that could be identified through a diligent search.] As we had predicted, the number of website accessibility lawsuits (i.e. lawsuits alleging that plaintiffs with a disability could not use websites because they were not coded to work with assistive technologies like screen readers,…

The Scope of the Issue The Americans with Disabilities Act (the “ADA”) has been the source of a tremendous amount of litigation since President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990.  Over the past few years, Plaintiffs’ counsel have developed a cottage industry of sorts by filing thousands of lawsuits alleging that company websites are not accessible to the blind or visually impaired,…