ADA Compliant Website

[lneibauer]

This is kind of a weird question but I have heard that websites/companies have been getting sued because they are not ADA compliant. From what I read it is a growing trend and at first I dismissed it but I have seen more and more articles about this subject. While the ADA does not specifically mention websites or digital accessibility, the DOJ has repeatedly stated that websites qualify as “places of public accommodation”. In other words: If your website is not accessible to people with disabilities, it is not compliant with the law as websites are considered public places according to the DOJ.
I know there are other shopping cart platforms that have "plug ins" for this issue. Does anyone know how shopsite is addressing this or are there any 3rd party applications that can help make the site ADA compliant?

TIA

[cyoung]

Currently there are no specific requirements/certification for ADA compliance, but there are browser plugins/features you can run on your site to look for things that you can improve for accessibility.

In ShopSite 14.0 sp1 we made several accessibility changes, mostly adding labels to fields that didn't have labels, added a label setting for all image settings in ShopSite, changing some fonts, colors, spacing, etc. Mostly for our newer responsive design templates. If you are using an older version you may need to upgrade, if you are using an old non-responsive theme you should look at switching to a newer theme, if you are using custom templates you may need to run an accessibility assessing browser plugin against your site and see what things can be improve in your templates.

We hope this information is helpful.

[lneibauer]

this was very helpful, We just upgraded from version 14 SP3 r5 to Version 15 r1 earlier in the week. We use our own custom templates based on the boot strap engine but still use a lot of shopsite tags and labels in the process.