Claves 2025 del marco legal de accesibilidad digital (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Thank you all for joining today's session, the 2025 U.S. Digital Accessibility Legal Update presented by Lainey Feingold. My name is Noah Pearson. I use he, him pronouns, and I work on the marketing team here at 3Play Media, and I will be moderating today's webinar. I'd like to welcome today's speaker, Lainey Feingold. I will pass it over to you. Can't wait for the presentation.

[00:00:22] Speaker 2: Thank you, Noah. Thank you, 3Play. Hello, everyone. There are over a thousand people who signed up for this webinar, and I welcome all of you who are here at the time and everyone who will watch it afterwards. Thanks for being interested in the digital accessibility legal space. Like Noah said, this is the U.S. Digital Accessibility Legal Update for 3Play Media. I have on the title slide, accessibility is a civil right, probably the most important takeaway you can take away from this presentation. My name is Lainey Feingold. I have up here my website, which is lflegal.com. I'm a white woman. My, probably my most salient visual feature is that my hair is gray to rapidly white, which I say to signify that I have been in the space for a long time. I got involved with digital accessibility in the early 90s. I sort of tagged my involvement since 1995. So that's me. I have a website, like I said, lflegal.com. I invite you to take a look at it. I try to post about digital accessibility, the legal updates, collaborative problem solving, which is the way I've practiced law for those 30 years with a method called structured negotiation. I wrote a book about that called Structured Negotiation and Winning Alternative to Lawsuits. I try to keep the website up to date, but I cannot always. So I do post things on LinkedIn quicker than I can get them up on my website. So fortunately, thank you to my parents. I'm the only Lainey Feingold, to L-A-I-N-E-Y, Feingold, F-E-I-N-G-O-L-D, on LinkedIn, so you can follow me there or on Blue Sky. Couple reminders, advisories. There's no legal advice in this talk, even though we're gonna be talking about the law. And it's called the 3Play US Digital Accessibility Legal Update. And I have on the slide, it says update does not equal everything. There's a lot happening. Gonna try to keep you up to date about what's happening right now. I invite and encourage you to take a look at last year's Digital Accessibility Legal Update for 3Play, which is on the 3Play website and on my website, as well as the one I did at CSUN this past March, because it's not possible to fit everything into 50 minutes. I have a speaking tab on my website, and under that, one of the options is recorded sessions. So anytime anybody records me, then I put it up there. So yeah, ever since the new administration got elected, went into office, I like to start with the check-in, because a lot of us feel like this picture shows. This is a picture of a nice green bucolic scene. However, there's a tornado landing and there's lightning in the sky, and there's gray clouds everywhere. So not speaking for all of us, but I think many of us are feeling all or some of these things right now, given the government, given the layoffs, given so many things that are happening in this space, both accessibility and disability. Generally, fear and anger, uncertainty, anxiety, frustration and confusion, overwhelm, absence of hope. I appreciate the stars in that thumb up coming in, because I know we all feel this. Now, someone made the surprised face coming with the emoji, so I'm not quite sure. I hope there's somebody here who isn't feeling this way, but yeah, and feeling of powerlessness. So I wanna acknowledge that, because we bring that with us, especially when talking about the law. But I also wanna say that one of the things I try to do when I talk about the law, is to give us all ways to find hope. So we still have strong legal protections. We have legal resistance in the form of lawsuits. We have accessibility work as resistance. There's so many people on this call. There's over 400 people on the call right now. We all have different roles in accessibility. Some of us may be brand new, wanting to learn something. I believe that in this time, doing the work, whatever our role, is an act of resistance. So accessibility as resistance, legal resistance. I wanna try to give you accurate information and a few warnings about, there's so much information floating around. How do we get accurate information about the law? I wanna talk about Accessibility Joy. I have an Accessibility Joy plan. I hope we'll get to it at the end. If not, I will throw in the link, and community. So we are creating a community right here, thanks to 3Play for one hour, to talk about the legal impacts on digital accessibility, and let's do it. So I always like to start talking about the law by talking about what is digital accessibility. Even though probably all of you have your own definition, you're doing a part of it, you know what it is. But when you're talking about the law, it's too easy to forget the big picture why. Why is there even a law? Why is a lawyer here talking about digital accessibility? So my big picture overview things are this. Digital accessibility is the engine of disability inclusion in tech. Just as an aside, digital accessibility is good for a lot of things. SEO, and everybody loves captions now, and it's very important as people age. Disability inclusion is the heart of digital accessibility for me. That is my focus, and that is the language I'll be using here. Engine of disability inclusion in tech, the difference between inclusion and exclusion, the intentional practices that make inclusion happen. So whatever your practice is, whatever role you have, developer, designer, marketer, tester, quality assurance, policymaker, lawyer, whatever it is, if we do it intentionally to make things accessible, that's part of accessibility. Privacy, security, safety, and so much more for disabled people. If you've heard me speak before, you've seen this door. I don't know. Let me know in the chat if I should get a new picture, but I love this picture because the door is so shut. There's two different keys. The paint's peeling. It hasn't been open for a long time, and the second picture is the door opening and the sunshine pouring through. So the law is serious. Our work is serious. There's a lot of bad stuff going on, as I said in the first check-in slide, but we're door openers, and in doing this work, I like to remember that. That's why the law is part of that because the law, in its finest sense, is a way to open doors for people who are excluded. Digital accessibility is a bridge to everything. Disabled people on one side, all technology. You know, the law gets a lot of attention. Oh, website lawsuits, mobile app, but all technology. You know, learning platforms and QR codes and kiosks and AI and virtual reality, so much on the other side of the bridge without accessibility. Accessibility is a bridge. We are not just door openers. We are all bridge builders. Digital accessibility is a civil and a human right. This is an image of the Capitol Crawl, which is an advocacy action leading up to the ADA where disabled people left walkers and wheelchairs on the ground and crawled up to demonstrate in a very visceral way why the Americans with Disabilities Act was needed. We say digital accessibility is a civil and a human right because it's about, again, participation, inclusion, communication, education, health and safety. I also like this picture because we have to remember the laws don't fall from the sky. The reason we have civil rights protection in this country and speaking specifically about disability is because disabled people fought for it, organized, wrote the laws, had meetings, did the run-ups, did the actions like this. So when we're thinking about the law, we can't just think of like a memo from the legal department. We have to remember who pushed for these laws and what these laws are about. So you're a civil rights enforcer. All these rights aren't just ideas. They're baked into... All these rights aren't just ideas. They're baked into laws, which is why I have the raw cookie dough, very good, very delicious, but not enough. It's not just enough to have laws. We need to have enforcement of those laws, which is why we have the picture of the cooked cookies, the baked cookies. These are the accessibility cookies. The sign says, bake accessibility into your organization's culture. They have many ingredients. They're yummy looking. There's chocolate chips and coconut and summer vanilla and summer chocolate and lots of different things because whatever your role, you're part of the cookie. You're part of it. This digital accessibility needs everything. And one of the things it needs is law. So I like to say the law is a salt in the cookie. And if you've heard that before, I apologize, but every time I do this talk and I think, everyone's heard it. There's always new people. So I want to welcome you, if you are new to the space, to the whole idea that accessibility is delicious. I have a post on my website, which I invite you by this name, which I invite you to check out. And if you've never heard this idea before, the birth of it is accessibility is like a blueberry muffin. You cannot put the blueberries in the muffin at the end. So that's how I like to think about digital accessibility. What is the legal framework in the United States? I have an image here of gears to indicate there's lots of different parts and they all work together and they all work individually. So here in the US, we have federal laws. We have federal regulations that are based on those laws. We have federal agency policy statements, some of which are still up from the Biden administration, some of which are not, but it's part of the framework. There is the ability to do it. And I have to say, I am an optimist and I'm not going to change my entire personality because of the current situation, although I am also a realistic person. So I don't think it's going to last forever. I think that things are going to change. So you're going to find things on my website. Maybe you go there and it's like 404, it's an error. It's not still there. Oh no, the government took it down. Well, you know what? It's still there on the way back machine. It's still there in the web archives. And one day it will be back. So part of the framework is the agency policy statements. We have state and local laws and regulations based on those. We have global laws that impact US businesses. We even have laws unrelated to disability or accessibility that can be used to advance accessibility. We'll talk about some of those. And we have implementation and enforcement of those laws. So who enforces them, big picture. I have a picture here of a young black student who's communicating in sign language to say that people with disabilities are enforcing these laws every single day when they're asking for accessibility, when they're pointing out, identifying gaps. So if you have an organization and you get feedback and someone says, I can't find this. I can't see this. I don't use a mouse, so I can't seem to get to this link. Those are ADA enforcement, other law enforcement efforts and they need to be paid attention to. We have private party lawsuits in the US. We have structured negotiation, which as I said, is a collaborative way that I and others have enforced the laws. We have organizations doing the right and legal thing. Many of whom are on this call, I'm sure. Many of you work for those organizations. Many of you can advocate within your own organization to be an organization that is enforcing civil rights laws without waiting for someone to file a legal claim. And then we have government agencies enforcing the law, which is what of course is most at risk now that we'll talk about. Okay, so, so much stuff happening. I'm like, how do I organize this? And usually I organize it a certain way. And I invite you really to check out last year's 3Play and this year's CSUN conference talks. But for this, I decided people are always asking me, what about this? What about that? What's happening here? And so I decided to organize it around what about this? What about that? In a series of shorter sections. So first one, what about the Title II ADA web and mobile regulations? Which I know a lot of us are, and a lot of you are very involved with. And the first deadline's coming up. So for those of you who are new, and if we're an audience, I'd say, raise your hand if you've never heard of this before. And I'm sure there are some people in this audience that haven't. So again, I welcome you into the world of the digital accessibility legal space. We have a rule. Also in the US, the words rule and regulation kind of mean the same thing. They're used interchangeably. And I may do that too. So it applies to state and local government only. It doesn't apply to federal government. It doesn't, yeah, state and local government only, which is a very big swath of American society. I put up some pictures of a jail, a school, a public hearing, the Berkeley Public Library, which is my local library, local park or a state park with a wheelchair rider on a paved pathway. So all these things are covered. The accessibility standard is the WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA. First deadline is April 24, 2026. And that's for organizations that are big, state agencies, state that are operating within the state, 50,000 or more people in April 26, 2027 for smaller entities. Really important to remember the ADA is not suspended. The ADA is not suspended just because we're about to get a regulation. The ADA has long required that web and mobile, it has long required web and mobile accessibility. There's actually a case in Louisiana right now where it's about a state agency. I can't exactly remember what. And the state said, well, we don't have to do anything yet. This case is too soon. The deadline hasn't happened. And the judge said, the fact that the technical standards have yet to be enforced does not prohibit the plaintiff from stating a claim for violation of Title II or the Rehab Act for failing to make services, programs and activities accessible to him. And he was suing about the website. So it's really important to remember that these are technical standards designed to make it clear what exactly is required to make it more specific, but the Title II anti-discrimination provisions, effective communication provisions of the ADA still apply. So we can't do a deep dive into it. I know 3Play has already done video webinars, they will, but the DOJ website resources about this rule are still as of this morning, nine o'clock on their website. So Casey's gonna drop them in the chat or we'll put them in the post about this webinar later. They have a first steps document. They have a fact sheet that's very easy to understand that lays out what the requirements are. They have a video, which I think they took it off the DOJ website, but I found it on YouTube that's still there explaining this. So the deep dive part you will have to do on your own or relying on other 3Play resources. Will these regulations change? I think this is a big question on everybody's mind. What can happen? Will they change? So first of all, a regulation, the way bullet says how government is supposed to change a reg. They're supposed to change a reg. Say someone decided they wanna change that title 20, the title to web and mobile rule. They have to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking. They have to make it public. They have to give the public a chance to comment. Then they have to evaluate the comments and then they would change the rules. So they haven't done any of that yet. And there's not time to do that before April of 2026. So with this administration, you can't say anything isn't possible, but if they act the way they're supposed to, they can't change the first deadline yet. Okay, there was a recent article written by Department of Justice lawyers who have been there forever, who I really trust that was called Trump takes a wrecking ball to rulemaking. So I said here, will Trump take a wrecking ball to rulemaking? And here's what those lawyers said that there was an agency memo that said, as long as you could make a case that the rule was illegal, you could roll back the rule without doing it the way you're supposed to. I don't think that's gonna happen here. I really don't think that's gonna happen. First of all, it's not illegal to make a rule about how to implement a law that's been in place since 1990. The agency did say in an October 25 memo, I've written about this on my website, might be a little in the weeds for some of you, but I just want everyone to understand that it is possible this rule can change, but it hasn't changed yet. The word on the street is that it probably won't. I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. All I can say is they said they wanted to issue a new notice of proposed rulemaking to, the department plans to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking to reconsider whether some of the regulatory provisions imposed by the Web and Mobile Rule could be made less costly. Well, they haven't done it yet. They haven't done it yet. So it's possible. They might. You can look up the article on my website. I think Casey has the link. I explain how the whole thing works. Okay. I said, beware of random media stories because a story went around that said, DOJ pulls back on ADA regulations. Wasn't really true, but it got a lot of circulation. So it's just a caution. If you see something like that and you haven't read it anywhere else and you haven't seen it on LinkedIn profiles of people you trust, then I'd be careful with it. Most important thing to know about the rule change is the rule is the rule until it isn't. Write that down or remember that because it is a rule and anyone who's thinking, oh, this might change because of the Trump administration is making a very serious mistake. You should all be well underway in implementing this rule. The rule is a rule until it isn't and the ADA still applies to state and local governments and websites. So what about changes to other ADA regulations? For this, I just wanna say, let me do myself a time check. They did try to roll back a 50-year-old rule that the federal government, when they build new buildings, has to build them accessible. And the Department of Energy did one of those notices of proposed rulemaking and said, we're going to roll this back. We don't need it anymore. Disability community organized, mobilized, 21,711 comments primarily opposed to the rule were filed. 21,711 people and organizations took the time. So just like the laws don't fall from the sky, regulations don't fall from the sky either. They're built by people with disabilities and allies and 21,000 comments. So what happened? They were supposed to do the rule, the rollback, I think May, then they delayed it till September 12th. Then they delayed it till December 10, which was yesterday. I thought, oh, I'm gonna have like real news to share with you guys. Then they delayed it to March 9th of next year. And that's all because 21,000 people filed comments opposed to this rollback of the Department of Education. So if you're not already, the DREDF, Disability Rights Education Defense Fund, dredf.org, D-R-E-D-F.org. They keep up with this. They update whenever anything happens. And I share it with you because we might have to do that. Maybe they're gonna roll back something about the ADA Title II. Maybe they're gonna give people another year or six months. Maybe there's something they're gonna change. We don't know, but we too are gonna get it together to get 21,711 people in organizations to file comments. And I think that's very heartening in these times, talk about legal resistance. They're also, government agencies can do a 10-year review of regulations. The government said that they, in this, we're not committing to it, but that they're going to do a review of all the Title II and Title III regulations. We don't know if it'll happen. It's like floating out there in the ether. I feel like we all need to know about it, but we can't let us drive it. We can't let it drive our actions because what's happening now, what's now is now. So we need to be aware of it because we need to spring into action if necessary. So yeah. Okay, what about kiosks? Self-service transaction machines. That's another area where there's no regulation. There's really no matter. From 2010 to 2025, there were failed attempts to adopt accessibility regulations for kiosks, which they also call self-service transaction machines. Not ATMs, not ticket machines that have their own regulations, but every other kind of thing. Checking machines at a doctor's office or what you see in a restaurant when you're paying, payment kiosk or so, so many other things. I've been involved in this issue since before 2010. We still don't have regulations, but I've been keeping an article on my website, my kiosk article that Casey can put into the chat. It's called the Laws Paying Attention about all the legal efforts that have been successful to get us to the point where there are accessible kiosks. I won't go into it now, but I listed all the articles on my website. If there's an update, I have an update button at the top and you can jump right to the updates. And there have been successful lawsuits, have been successful structured negotiations, even without the regulations because the law itself is very strong. The law itself is strong. I have an article about the kiosk rule itself in the, I think it's titled the Kiosk Accessibility. We've been here before. So if you, someone who wants to know the history of why we don't have a reg and why it matters or doesn't matter. I wanna mention electric vehicle charging stations. I have a picture of one here because that's another rule that was pending when Trump took office and they pulled it. Nothing's gonna happen with that, but Colorado has a rule requiring accessible charging stations. Canada has a pending rule or policy on accessible charging stations. I also wanna mention it because the only reason I know this is because an advocate named Alan Hale sends me information about electric vehicle charging stations. He's a one man stop for everything electric vehicle charging stations. I wanna thank him publicly and use it as a way to say, if you have a role in the space and you see something I didn't cover or a topic or your state is doing something and it's not mentioned, let me know because I don't have any staff. I do this by the kindness of community. So thank you to Alan for that. What about Department of Education? What about Department of Education, which is central to inclusion in the civil rights of disabled students? What's happening with digital accessibility there? I put a picture of a roller coaster because as you will see, it really has been a roller coaster. In February of 2025, February 13, the Office of Civil Rights, OCR, was told stop all investigations of all complaints about civil rights in education. One week later, they were told it's okay to investigate disability claims only, not race, not gender, not claims by trans people, disability claims only. So I have an article on my site, lflegal.com 2025 forward slash O2, singling out disability, where I share this information and also talk about, we want good things to happen in the disability space in this time, but we also can't, we can't take our eyes off the bigger picture. I use an image here for this of a classroom, elementary school classroom. The focus is on the first student. He's a young black boy in a wheelchair doing his work and there's two white students behind him because disabled people don't exist in a vacuum. Disabled people are trans. Disabled people are people of color, are black, are queer, are immigrants. All this stuff affects disabled people. So I'm always thinking and struggling with how do we talk about the advantages that maybe this administration's like disability, the only civil rights issue they wanna somewhat care about. We have to know it, we have to share it, we have to pay attention to it and we can't lose sight of the other issues of the other civil rights harms that are being caused affecting the very same people. So the bottom line in 2025 is there was a very severe drop-off in the number of cases resolved in settlement agreements by Department of Ed. And why? Because the ongoing rollercoaster is that in March of this year, they closed seven to 12 offices. I guess the count is not really sure. I'm not quite sure about that. Hundreds of staff were laid off and 6,500 pending cases were left open. December of this year, hundreds of people were told to come back. Maybe some of you are on this call and wanna share something in the chat about that. Told to come back this coming Monday or the Monday after, December 15 or 22 to where some of them worked in offices that were closed. So, I mean, I personally believe that chaos is part of this administration's intentional plan to make us feel off-center, make it difficult for us to focus on what we need to do. So, it's very challenging to report on what's gonna happen with the Department of Ed, but I do wanna mention the National Digital Accessibility Team, which is a centralized team that has, all the digital accessibility cases get funneled to it. Their numbers of staff have been decimated. Will they get some people back? We hope so. And these returns on December 5 and, I mean, December 15 or 22, they work to get entities ready for the Title II regs and help them enforce agreements. The team is run by a lawyer who I know and trust for many years, Mary Lou Mobley. And it's just a reminder to say hats off to the people who are able to stay and find a way to do the important work that needs doing under these circumstances. So, more on that next time. More on the saga of the rollercoaster really quick. The head of the OCR had a confirmation hearing. She was asked by a Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, who I was not familiar with from Delaware, black woman, I love her, because she said, if you are, I'm sure she's worthy for other reasons too, but she said in the confirmation hearing, will you commit to having web accessibility be a priority, particularly because this Kim Ritchie person has a disability herself. Will you devote resources and time to web accessibility? And the OCR person said, we always prioritize web accessibility. Even without a specific law, websites have to be accessible under Section 504. It's like a good thing for us to know. And those of you who are comfortable, you know, writing to the government and saying what you care about, this was said. We have the link to the hearing if you're curious. But again, it's like, do we trust it? There were civil rights groups opposed to her appointment. There's a lawsuit against Department of Ed that was filed recently against government for taking so many things out of the Department of Ed. The Office of Civil Rights is still in the Department of Ed. What's gonna happen next week? We don't know. So kind of hard to do a legal update under these circumstances, but I'm trying. Okay, so what about federal agencies other than Department of Ed? Despite the staff reductions and despite the anti-civil rights, racist, ableist agenda of this administration, there are things happening within federal agencies. The EEOC sued Pearson because their third party vendor provided inaccessible online platforms for people to buy things. So that's a pending case. The Department of Justice sued Uber about benefits, leave and training. Really important issue because if you don't have an accessible procurement program, you can't have accessibility because you're buying things. So that's a pending case. The Department of Justice sued Uber, longstanding problems with them, drivers not picking up blind people, incarcerated people. So these things are still happening, not as many. Again, how do we talk about these cases? How do we think about these cases? Of course, they're important for the issues. Are they gonna be handled well? Are they gonna be settled well? All things to keep in mind when you hear about these cases, but I was very glad in preparing for this to find out that the EEOC has cases and the Department of Justice has very few cases despite the disability rights section being completely decimated. Everyone I've ever worked with there since the 90s, gone. But yeah, these things are still happening. I'm gonna have to skip a few things, but I don't think I can skip this because the advocates would not be happy. Okay, there are a couple of federal laws pending. Maybe new good things will happen. There's a website and software application act that goes beyond the ADA that covers commercial providers who design, develop, modify websites. The Disability Coalition is pushing for that. I have an article on my website sponsored by Tammy Duckworth. You can look at that. There's a new medical device bill to try to get medical devices that are visual only to be accessible because if a medical device is available only in a non-visual way, blind and low vision people can't find out about their own health and their own body. One of the clearest examples of why accessibility is a privacy issue. The Communication Video and Technology Act, I asked Karen Peltz-Strauss, who's a national disability advocate and historian to send me a couple of lines. She said that the law will ensure federal laws requiring, sorry, the Zoom panel is on top of it, requiring disability access to communications, video programming and emergency services will keep up with evolving technologies. It's gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Industry is actively engaging with the advocates. The useful feedback, their bipartisan support is gaining ground. A revised bill is expected to be introduced in a couple of weeks. This is like an update to the CVAA, which I don't have time to go into, but those things are happening. So I applaud the advocates for sticking with the idea of good new things, not just holding on to good old things, but trying for good new things. Okay, hold on. Okay, there's a pending backlash bill. This kind of bill, which they call the 30 day to comply. Right now, you do not have to give notice to an organization if you are suing them for an ADA violation. And they've tried to get something like this passed for a long time. This particular one is about architectural barriers, but if it moves forward, someone is going to add websites to it. Disability community is very opposed to any notice requirement for filing an ADA lawsuits. I wrote about earlier failed attempts on my website. If you search ADA backlash, you'll find it. And Karl Groves, who's an accessibility leader, he just wrote about this new bill, which just came out this week. His article is called the new attempted ADA reform to protect small businesses. So that's happening. We can pay attention to that. Okay, what about other government orders? For that, I just want to say, it's another example in February with the terrible attacks on DEIA, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Government backtracked and said some good things about accessibility and disabilities. Agencies should not terminate or prohibit accessibility or disability related accommodations. They don't need to say that, that's a law. But there was some idea that disability is accepted from DEIA as any attacks on DEIA, diversity, equity, and inclusion are attacks on all of us because they're attacks on fundamental civil rights and freedoms in the United States. They want to make exceptions for disability. We want to say that's good, and we're not stepping away from caring about attacks on everyone else. But just this week, somehow my, just this week, Marco Rubio, who's head of the department, I can't even remember, not defense, but remind me, they're changing the font back to a font that's less accessible because he said that a serif font is a wasteful diversity move. So we need to be very careful about how excited we get when we hear about disability exceptions to these things. Shocking, but true. What about state laws? This is a map of the United States. Every state's in a different color because every state has different laws. Many states have anti-discrimination laws. State laws aren't affected by what happens on the federal level, except possibly for funding certain things. Many states have state-funded laws, just like section 504 says you're gonna take state money, you can't discriminate against disabled people. They have state purchasing law that require accessibility when states purchase things, just like section 508. There's a lot of state agencies doing good work. There's some states that have laws about K-12 procurement, making sure our disabled students get accessible tools. There's some states that have accessible prescriptions. How do you keep up with that? So wherever you're doing business, wherever you live, I noticed before they said New Jersey, and I think New Jersey has some new laws too. Up here I have Colorado. Colorado just did an update to theirs. They're being, you know, the real leader in the space of state laws. Maryland, Massachusetts, California, just as a result of a lawsuit made their Medi-Cal communications accessible. The blue state attorney generals are doing important work. The way I keep up is either with the Converge Accessibility Bill Tracker, that's Ken Nakata's group. I have a global page, US is part of it. I try to put it up there. The legal advocacy groups like DREDF, Disability Rights Advocates, National Disability Rights Network. And again, when I find out about these things, you're more likely to see them on LinkedIn first. But a lot of good work is happening on the state level. Laws outside the United States are now part of the US legal update because US companies are impacted by the European Accessibility Act. If you put something in the market in Europe that is covered by the European Accessibility Act, it has to be accessible, even if your organization is based in the US. Same with India, a lot of great accessibility work being done in India. My global law and policy page is at lflegal.com global-law-and-policy because accessibility is global, accessibility is global. I invite you to check out the page. If your country is not on there, if you see something wrong on there, please let me know so I can make it better. What about website lawsuits? Everybody's favorite topic. Okay, in 2024, if you're new to the space, you may not realize there were over 4,000 lawsuits against companies operating websites. 2025, there's probably gonna be a 20% increase in that number. 41% of the suits last year were against companies that had already had a lawsuit. And last year, 1,023 companies using an overlay, one of those widgets where you press it and it claims to give you accessibility options and for very little effort. There's a lot written about overlays. We're gonna talk about that in a minute. All these trends are continuing. If you're interested in these lawsuits, again, the Converge blog and the SafeHearth ADA Title III blog are good to read because they give you sort of a deep dive into some of the cases. And I get these numbers from UsableNet and Jason Taylor, who's been very helpful for me when I prepare these kinds of things. Their 2025 numbers are coming out the end of this month, but he gave me this update that the trend is on trend. So we don't really have time to talk about all those lawsuits. I've written about some of the ethics issues around them. We'll save that for another day. Maybe we'll do a whole talk on the web accessibility lawsuits. But here's my hall of shame lawsuits. Don't do these things. Don't lie about accessibility because many federal and state, the federal government and state governments have what they call False Claims Act. If you're selling to a state or federal agency, don't lie about it because you could get sued the way the California park system and their vendors got sued when the vendor said, oh, the park system website's gonna be accessible. And it wasn't. The 1.2 million, why didn't they just help case? Which is unbelievable. Blind woman goes to Alameda County to fill out a business license, not accessible. They don't help her. She asked them to engage in structured negotiation through her lawyer, Tim Elder. They say, no, she has to do a trial and has a $1.2 million settlement. The $5.15 million later case is another one of these cases, Fashion Nova. I wrote about it on the site. You can read about it. Should have settled five years earlier and didn't. And the Stop Wasting Taxpayer Money case, which is true for all of these things, which is why I've illustrated this with a woman holding up money burning the case against Los Angeles Community College District. And I'll just leave it at, look that up on my website. A case where the plaintiff, blind students, have won at every stage and the Los Angeles Community College District is still fighting it. So I encourage you to check those out. What about overlays? Don't use them. Be familiar with the overlay fact sheet. Know that the Fair Trade Commission collected a $1 million fine against overlay companies and it was finalized in the Trump administration. It's not fair to use an overlay. There's cases brought by small businesses who bought into the overlay. They didn't know. Do your due diligence. And then they got sued. Okay, I'm gonna have to shut my timer off. Let me just do a time check. Okay, I got five more minutes, good. The lawyers who are handling these cases for the small businesses, the small businesses bought the overlays or licensed the overlays and they still got the lawsuits and they didn't get the support they needed or wanted. When I heard about these cases, I found out who the lawyers were and I called the guy. One of them's named Ari Brown. And I'm like, oh, you know, we know about this in the accessibility world. And if you ever need any accessibility information, he's kind of like, you know, in a very good way. He's like, that's good to know. And we've been in touch the whole time, but there's a general laws that say you have to be fair in business. You can't breach a contract. I don't really have to know about accessibility to know that it's wrong to sell someone an overlay that doesn't work as expected. And so it was very kind of humbling to me because I'm in the weeds about overlays. So yeah, breach of good faith and fair dealing is what it's called. So I have written about both these cases on my website, Tribeca Skin Care and Bloomsy Box, you know, small businesses who didn't know, should have known. How could they know against the big advertising budgets of these companies? So what about AI? There's a couple cases that I'm following. One against HireVue and Intuit, one against Workday. Again, these are filed. They're not, I'm not saying anything about the merits of them. It's just a way to watch that AI doesn't treat disabled people fairly in the workplace. And there was guidance on this under the Biden administration. And I put updates to these HireVue cases. HireVue and the Workday case, case is gonna drop it in the link. But I just wanna say, I report on the cases and sometimes companies get sued when they have very good accessibility teams. Like, I really respect the people at Workday, I don't know, and even the people at Intuit who I know less of. But it's really important to pay attention to how AI, disability, accessibility are intersecting. So nothing's happened on either of these, but it's something I'm watching. Best strategies in times of uncertainty. Okay, I guess the first one and probably the only one I have time for is this, don't obey in advance. This is by Timothy Snyder from a great book he wrote called On Tyranny. And he's a historian at Yale and he studies like how did, what happened to Nazi Germany? What happened in places where tyranny took root? And he has, it's a very small book, I can really recommend it. He has like 10, 20 phrases like this. He has a little paragraph about what it means and then two pages about the history, why he believes it as a historian of these kinds of issues. And he says, you know, compliance is often freely given. And so don't obey in advance to me and our work of accessibility means, don't think they're gonna change the ADA Title II regulations. The rules are the rules until they're not. The laws are the laws until they're not. Don't be afraid to keep doing your work. As I said at the beginning, it's an act of resistance. Don't obey in advance. And laws include legal remedies. And if you do end up in a lawsuit situation, you're gonna have to do all these things, fix the bit, sorry, fix the barriers and systems. You might have court or agency oversight. You may have DOJ penalties, probably not in this administration. You might have to pay disabled people, pay their lawyers, pay your own lawyer. In the EAA, you could have market fines, jail laws. So the best way to comply is to just do the things, you know, be proactive and fix the barriers and fix the systems and do that first. So yeah, fix the barriers, fix the systems. The letters are getting bigger. What about ethics? Okay, in closing, next to last closing, I have been very involved in a book in the past couple of years that's coming out on March 26th next year called Digital Accessibility Ethics, Disability Inclusion, and All Things Tech. And in that book, it's, let's say here, I'm one of three editors. There are 39 authors, including us three editors from 10 different countries, disabled and non-disabled. We're using a digital accessibility ethics framework that I really have long thought we needed and I'm so glad to put it out as a living document. And I really hope you can connect with it. And the framework is comprised of 10 values. One of those values is legal compliance. So we're hoping that digital accessibility ethics can give you all just another tool, you know, legal compliance, digital accessibility ethics, very intertwined, it's an ethics value and accessibility is part of legal ethics. It'll be available March 26th, 2026. And I'm not ashamed to say, very coincidentally, we have a great global publisher called Taylor & Francis. They picked the publication date and apropos to my description of myself, I will be turning 70 on that day. So share it here. Okay, take care of ourselves. We have to take care of ourselves in this time. I have a digital accessibility joy plan that I posted on my website in January, I think. And I really encourage us, I encourage you to try to do the same. And the joy plan idea, I just need to give a shout out to Desmond Patton, who's a professor in Philadelphia, teaches a class on joy, journey to joy. And he says, joy is not just about feeling good. It's about creating a world where justice and healing are at the core of joy. So when you read my article, you see what I said about digital accessibility there, about my joy plan. And I think we even have time for a couple of questions. Noah.

[00:49:59] Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you so much for that great presentation and a huge thanks to our attendees for such a lively chat. We love to see that. And thank you for the questions. We have a few questions to get to here. First one, any insight into the DOJ's plans to re-examine public accommodations and its impact on digital accessibility?

[00:50:22] Speaker 2: Public accommodations, for those of you, good question. Let me, when you were thanking people, let me just thank our ASL interpreter, Abby, because I know I talk fast and I feel like there's so much I wanna share. And Abby, thank you so much for putting up with me. And I see all the hearts and applause because it's very deserved. So thank you. Yeah, well, that has to do... Okay, so there's no effort underway to make a new rule, that's for sure. And that 10-year rule that I talked about where they said they want to look at all the pending regulations, they're not gonna add it. I don't know if your question is about, are they gonna add anything? We have been trying to get Title III, which is a public accommodation part of the ADA to have web and mobile regulations for a very long time. In 2010, when President Obama introduced on the ADA anniversary, the regulations, proposed regulations, it was for Title II and Title III public accommodation, but the Biden administration could only get out Title II. So fortunately, we have very many cases. I didn't have time in this kind of session to go through all the cases that support web and mobile accessibility. Both cases, and also all the negotiations I've done without lawsuits for 30 years, many, many of them have dealt with web and mobile accessibility. So we're not gonna see regulations, but we still have a strong foundation in the law.

[00:52:06] Speaker 1: Awesome, thank you. Next question here. How is digital accessibility enforced? Is it all reactive or are there proactive means by which gaps are caught?

[00:52:18] Speaker 2: That is a good question. The CVAA, which has to do with the captioning and the audio description and more of the video thing, they do have reporting requirements. Section 508, which we didn't get into here, which requires the federal government to not just make sure what they purchase is accessible, but that employees have the tools they need to work in the federal government if they need digital accessibility and other kinds of tools. That does have a reporting requirement too, but mostly in the US, it's reactive in the sense that people, that's why I had that slide at the beginning. Disabled people say, hey, there were no captions here, I need it. A company that does the right thing, leadership companies, they, of course, have systems in place to check and make sure they have legal departments that understand the law, not as a punishment, but as a way to enforce civil rights. So yeah, that's how it works. But it's different in other countries. That's something I learned in the digital accessibility ethics book. I wrote two chapters, one on the global accessibility landscape, kind of like this presentation, but in words and not so rushed. And I interviewed people from other countries and in the European Accessibility Act, they have different kinds of enforcement methods, but here it's pretty much people have rights and they enforce them. The government, you know, before this administration, the federal government itself enforced that digital accessibility team that I mentioned at department event, they do a lot of proactive work with agencies who call up and say, you know, we wanna do better. How do we do digital accessibility? So yeah, we have very strong enforcement here in the US. And the more I get involved globally, the more I see that people, you know, we can complain about how things are, but in a lot of countries, they don't have lawyers who have a way to enforce laws and they don't have the tools and the strategies. So yeah, good question.

[00:54:37] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point. Thank you. Next question here, if widgets continue to be a problem for people with disabilities and they have shown to be misleading, why don't we see more aggressive legal posturing against them?

[00:54:56] Speaker 2: Well, that's a good question. We do write about, Avia Rosselli wrote a chapter on overlays in the ethics book. You know, we have a million dollar fine against accessibility that I mentioned by the fair trade commission. We have these two lawsuits that are filed as class actions brought by small businesses. I can't really speculate on that. I feel personally just so frustrated with the overlays because our community knows so much. The overlay fact sheet is so good and people, and that's one thing we're kind of hoping with the ethics book to get people out of, oh no, I got a lawsuit. I better do something cheap to fix it. I mean, it's all part of an ecosystem where we have these lawsuits that often don't do enough to get good enforcement. Although some I am now seeing have lines in them that say in settling this case, the company cannot use an overlay.

[00:55:58] Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know.

[00:56:01] Speaker 2: I wanted to say one quick thing that the picture I have on here with my website again, lflegal.com, it has the word community in Scrabble letters. So if you're here, hopefully you felt part of a community this hour and getting involved in meetups that people have and online forums and just know you're not alone in doing this work, especially in these times. For me, it's a lifesaver to be honest, because I work for myself out of my house with no staff. So it's like having the community is everything, is everything. So I wish for all of you that you find a way. There is an accessibility book group that actually just found out is gonna look at the ethics book next May and June. And they have meetings once a month where people read the same book, which I can recommend that, yeah.

[00:56:52] Speaker 1: Awesome. All right, well, it looks like we're about time here. So I will wrap it up. Thank you so much, Lainey, for the presentation. Sorry, we weren't able to get to all of your questions, but feel free to connect with Lainey or follow up with our team, and we will try to point you in the right direction. And thanks again to all of our attendees who have made it to this session. We really appreciate it. Hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Thank you.

[00:57:19] Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you all.