There will be notable updates to the ADA website compliance legal landscape in 2023.
And one very important update is there will be less litigation.
There has already been a decline in the second half of 2022 and I expect that to continue into 2023.
And the reason why is because there have been adverse court decisions both in California and New York to plaintiffs’ law firms.
California and New York are the two most litigious states for website accessibility and in California online only businesses can no longer be effectively sued both in state and federal court.
And in New York federal court, boilerplate claims can no longer be brought.
So if you file a complaint and it’s a boilerplate complaint that’s the same as effectively the same as the another complaint then that complaint will be dismissed.
Also, the Department of Justice intends on publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking for website accessibility under Title II.
Now Title II of the ADA only applies to public entities, not private entities, but when this regulation is issued, it is very likely that there will be subsequent regulation that does pertain to Title III.
Moreover the framework for such litigation will be in place from this Title II regulation so pay very close attention to what happens with this notice of proposed rulemaking.
And if you would like to have input in that, you can make a public comment but this could this is this is very, very important not necessarily for 2023 but for 2024, possibly 2025 when we do see regulation that lays out what needs to be done in terms of digital accessibility.
And this proposed rulemaking is specifically for website accessibility but we’ll see if they go further with that.
Also the a new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2 is expected to be released.
Now it still hasn’t been officially released as of the date of this video, which is November 29th 2022, but it is forthcoming and there are seven additional success criteria under level conformance level AA that you’ll want to pay attention to.
Now this is not going to be a legal requirement anytime soon, but it will be interesting to see if the DOJ references 2.1 or 2.2 in its new regulation so that’s something else to pay attention to.
But 2.2 is a notable release and it will be best best practice if you can incorporate that into your website but it is highly unlikely that we will see 2.2 issues found in claims brought by serial litigants.
And then, last, I am going to be releasing an ADA compliance course and this is going to significantly lower the cost of making your website accessible.
