I am regularly asked about compliance with other laws. So will this audit, and if I remediate according to this audit, will it make me compliant with other laws outside of the ADA or other than the ADA?
So sometimes this is within the scope of the United States and any other various laws and other times it’s these clients are speaking internationally. So it could be for the AODA or EN 301 549 or any other laws.
So the answer is that generally, if you are conformant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, you are going to be materially compliant with any law.
And I say generally because I can’t guarantee that is an absolute, and of course there could be scenarios where, so for example, let’s say an accessibility statement is required. And so you have that notice requirement and you need to make a contact available, et cetera.
That’s going to be beyond the web content accessibility guidelines because it’s in addition to the actual accessibility of the digital asset, be that an app or be that a website.
But when we are talking about material compliance, so when I say material compliance, I’m speaking to the digital asset itself, it would be hard to be, it would be very difficult to be WCAG conformant and yet not comply with any law.
And I say that with confidence because when we look to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, these are the internationally renowned guidelines. They are the guidelines that are looked at by everyone, by all authorities for web accessibility.
And so digital accessibility can go beyond web accessibility, right? Because digital accessibility is referring to many other types of things that are electronic.
So this could be video games, it could be software. It could be things that are not web based, but the principles behind the web content accessibility guidelines will still apply.
And so if you are conformant with these guidelines, then you are very likely going to be in material compliance with any law that is mandating digital accessibility.
So if you are auditing under the web content accessibility guidelines, obviously the version, it might be 2.1, it might be 2.2, 2.2 would be the latest. It’s still yet to be officially released.
But if you are conformant with the latest version of the web content accessibility guidelines, would be very hard for you not to be materially compliant.
So you can be very confident that if you are following, if you are conformant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that you are very likely in compliance with the material portion, the material part of any digital accessibility law.
