You wouldn’t dream of building a bank branch that was inaccessible to a person with a disability, but can you say the same about your website?
A recent spate of demand letters may be the push the banking and real estate industries need to make sure that their websites and mobile applications are up to snuff where the Americans with Disabilities Act is concerned, and advocates for disabled people say it’s high time.
The world was a very different place in 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. We didn’t have virtually ubiquitous Internet access and we weren’t all walking around with tiny computers in our pockets. Web accessibility may not have been much of an issue then, but that’s been changing over the past decade or so.
The Department of Justice has been crafting rules to outline precisely how the ADA applies to web accessibility, although those are not likely to come down until at least 2018. In the meantime, though, a number of law firms and advocacy groups have been sending demand letters to businesses whose websites they find to be inaccessible to people with disabilities.
Unless you live with a disability – or know somebody who does – this may not be an issue you’ve given much consideration, but web accessibility will only increase in relevance – and not simply because of the ADA.
For one thing, Baby Boomers are aging and subsequently learning to navigate hearing and visual impairment. For another, consumers have been changing the way they bank. With foot traffic to bank branches continuing its year-over-year decline, banks that don’t have accessible websites are essentially sending a message to consumers with disabilities: We don’t really care about your business.
It’s an area where multi-trillion dollar national banks have lead the way, said Lainey Feingold, a disability rights lawyer and author.
Feingold began working with big banks, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo, in the ‘90s beginning with talking ATMs and later in the early 2000s with web accessibility. They’ve achieved those changes without filing any lawsuits, too. Instead, Feingold has used a dispute resolution process called the structured negotiation to achieve greater web accessibility.
As far as the Massachusetts Bankers Association is aware, no Bay State banks have received any of those aforementioned demand letters, Senior Vice President Jon Skarin said. But he also said bankers could use some clarity from the Department of Justice as to what elements are necessary to make a website compliant with the ADA.
“I think most banks generally want to provide this information,” he said. “[Disabled people are] potential customers, there’s no reason they wouldn’t want to provide it, but the lack of clarity sometimes can be a problem. You’re developing a website and you may think you’re meeting all the guidelines, but you may not hit everything on your first or second attempt here.”
Access & Autonomy
Feingold doesn’t buy that argument, though.
“The Department of Justice has said for over a decade that the ADA applies to websites and yes it would have been nice to have regulations, but those regulations, whenever we get them, they’re going to be based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,” also known as WCAG 2.0, she said. “So there’s not really a gray area. The standards are just about making sure that however people access content, they’re going to be able to get the information on a website.”
So what does web accessibility really mean anyway?
For a visually impaired person, a web site has to be compatible with a screen reader, said Jack McElaney, vice president of sales and marketing at Microassist, a Texas-based accessibility consulting firm. That means the site has to be coded in a way that a screen reader can process it for a visually impaired person. Videos need closed captioning and sites must be navigable without a mouse, too. By no means is that an exhaustive list, but it’s a start.
Skarin said the Massachusetts Bankers Association encourages its members to audit their web sites to ensure they are accessible. Some banks may actually have accessible sites, but they may not even know it if they haven’t bothered to audit their digital assets.
Moreover, since many smaller banks contract that work out to a third party, this also brings up the need for good vendor management and due diligence.
“It’d be no different than an elevator,” McElaney said. “If I buy an elevator for my building and there’s no braille on the keys, then that vendor better fix that.”
Feingold would go a step further. Don’t just audit your websites and apps. Bring in people who actually live with those disabilities every day, pay attention to how they use them.
She adds that accessibility doesn’t stop with a financial institution’s digital assets, either. Many lawsuits and demand letters begin when a disabled person calls up the bank for help navigating its website, only to be met with “Can’t you find somebody to help you with that?”
“The front line is just as important as the coders,” Feingold said. “Accessibility means you don’t need somebody to help you with it.”
Feingold and others say web accessibility isn’t really a new issue – or at least it shouldn’t be – but demand letters out of law firms and advocacy groups may be pushing the issue ahead of the actual deadline for the Department of Justice’s guidance. At the end of the day, recognizing disabled people’s right to autonomy may just make good business sense, too.
“You wouldn’t ever want a person in a wheelchair not being able to get into your bank. It’s now the accepted norm,” McElaney said. “There’s this cultural tipping point that’s happening. The demand letters are forcing the issue and executives are realizing this is something we’ve got to do.”