Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Appeals Court Says ADA Doesn't Cover the Web

Posted by michael on from the need-a-seeing-eye-web-browser dept.

tassii writes "In this article from CNet, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's decision from October 2002, which concluded that Web sites cannot be required to comply with the 1991 disabilities law."

2 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. On the other hand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    USA government websites have to comply with Section 508, UK and Australian websites have to be accessible to disabled people, and lots of EU countries are implementing or have already implemented similar laws. In particular, the UK Disability Rights Commission has already stated in plain terms that the Disability Discrimination Act applies to websites, and in Australia, the Sydney Olympics Committee were successfully sued for tens of thousands of dollars because blind people couldn't use their IBM-developed website.

    The trend in web development is towards greater accessibility; for the most part sticking with valid HTML 4.01 and following sound development principles like graceful degradation is enough to be accessible.

  2. Appeals Court DOESNT say ADA Doesn't Cover the Web by Bazzargh · · Score: 4, Informative

    .... would be a more accurate title (for the CNET article too). If you read the judgement[1] you'll see the case was dismissed because the appeal used a different theory of the case not argued in the original hearing; it seems this would require a whole new suit (IANAL, etc).

    On the plus side, as the new theory was not judged on its merits, this doesn't form precedent.

    [1] asking /. to RTFJ is a step beyond even RTFA I know...the gist: in the original hearing the plaintiff argued that the website is a "public accomodation" and lost; the appeal argued that the company as a whole is a "public accommodation".