Photo Credit: Daniel Brennan

Albert J. Rizzi, 52, who is blind and runs the My Blind Spot educational and advocacy nonprofit, says many websites and mobile apps aren’t coded to accommodate assistive technologies like screen readers.

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Will require that sites work for people who are blind, deaf
  • Key is coding that works with assistive technologies, experts say
  • Most businesses design their websites to be accessible to the masses. But one large population they often fail to consider is the disabled.

About 85 percent of websites aren’t fully accessible to this audience, experts estimate. For example, a person who is blind or deaf could not access all the information on a site, even with the use of assistive technology.

But that may change, once the U.S. Department of Justice issues proposed rules on Web accessibility. The long-delayed rules, in the works since 2010, are now slated to come out in 2018.

“Most IT experts and CEOs have no clue about accessibility,” says Bellport resident Albert J. Rizzi, founder and CEO of My Blind Spot Inc., a Manhattan-based nonprofit that has advocated for Web accessibility for a decade and provides training and consulting to organizations to support their accessibility initiatives.

The access issue impacts people with varying disabilities ranging from visual to cognitive to neurological.

Rizzi, who is blind, says he finds it difficult to navigate a significant number of websites and mobile apps because they aren’t coded to accommodate assistive technologies like screen readers that read aloud printed text. Many sites also won’t accommodate magnifiers for people with limited vision, or speech-to-text tools, he said. And many are not fully functional without a mouse, creating a barrier for people who can operate a keyboard but lack the motor control to use a mouse.

Rizzi has been trying to make strides locally and was instrumental in helping get legislation passed in 2013 to make Suffolk County’s own website accessible for the disabled community. But he says a lot more needs to be done.

And businesses that fail to make their products and services accessible are missing out on a big market.

Nearly one in five people report that they have a disability of some kind, according to U.S. Census figures. The Return on Disability Group, a research organization, estimates that Americans with disabilities have a disposable income of $645 billion.

Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act requires that places of public accommodation be accessible to the disabled. While the law, passed in 1990, does not specifically address websites, the Justice Department has maintained in court filings that they are covered under current ADA regulations, explains attorney Minh Vu of Washington, D.C., head of Seyfarth Shaw’s nationwide ADA Title III specialty team. Still, there’s no formal standard for private businesses, she notes.
There are privately developed guidelines for Web accessibility created by the World Wide Web Consortium, but outside of airline websites, those guidelines haven’t been adopted in the form of any regulations that apply to public accommodations, says Vu.

The Justice rules would “adopt a legal technical standard for what is an accessible website and clarify what the obligations of public accommodations are with respect to websites,” she says, adding final rules may not take effect until possibly a year after proposed rules are issued.

But in the meantime, the DOJ appears to have shifted its enforcement position in court filings to the stance that it doesn’t need rules in order to require websites to be accessible, Vu says. Still, the issue isn’t clear-cut.

There’s disagreement among the courts over standards for websites that “don’t have a nexus to a physical location where customers are served,” such as Netflix, says Vu. Court rulings have differed as to whether the ADA applies to those websites.

And litigation continues.

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