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This Week in Accessibility: ADA lawsuits alleging defendants trespassed onto digital devices
What are the potential ramifications if your users with disabilities can’t access consent notice information ?
Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.
Number five on my list of ten things to consider when prioritizing accessibility defects for remediation is:
Are the accessibility defects on a page where there are legal implications if the user can’t access something?
Consent rules for data gathering and cookies exist for a reason. There are laws in place and some pretty hefty fines associated with breaking them (GDPR and COPPA especially). You don’t want to be one of those organizations that get hit with millions of dollars in fines (not to mention reputation harm) for collecting data without obtaining the appropriate consent first.
Trespass is a new legal theory being tried out in Florida in digital accessibility lawsuits in addition to the standard ADA claims. According to this article, at least three of these cases have been recently filed (though citations were not included in the article).
What is Computer Trespass?
Trespass in general means “going somewhere you’ve been told not to go”. A person is guilty of computer trespass if s/he intentionally and without authorization accesses, alters, deletes, damages, destroys, or disrupts any computer, computer system, computer network, computer program, or data.
Breaking it down, the definition of “computer trespass” requires that the trespass be done:
- intentionally — yep the organization did it on purpose, it’s not a bug.
- without authorization — if the authorization section of the website or mobile app…
