Pharrell Williams. Photo: Anthony Mooney/Shutterstock.com.

Last week, singing sensation Pharrell Williams got some unhappy news. His clothing companies, Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream Retail Operations LLC, are being sued because their websites allegedly violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The plaintiff is a visually impaired man who says Williams' websites didn't work with screen reading technology, making them inaccessible for him.

The case against Williams' sites is hardly the first of its kind. Last year, it's been reported more than 800 cases were filed alleging companies' websites violated ADA Title III, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in the activities of places of public accommodations.”

“There's been an explosion of website accessibility cases in the last year,” said Martin Orlick, a partner at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell who advises companies on ADA compliance. He said he's currently working on his fourth ADA website compliance case in two weeks.

Anne Marie Estevez, head of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius' ADA public accommodation and accessibility litigation and counseling practice, said she's also seen a “tsunami of cases” filed in recent years. She's worked on ADA website cases for a long time, including Earll v. eBay, which resulted in a ruling that a website business not connected to any physical place is not a “place of public accommodation” and can't violate Title III of the ADA.

Businesses with both websites and physical locations, like Pharrell Williams' stores, face a different precedent. In 2017, a Florida federal court ruled in Gil v. Winn-Dixie such businesses' websites did fall under ADA Title III if the website helps users access the public, physical store.

But aside from court decisions, which differ in their interpretations of the ADA, U.S. businesses don't have much to guide them formally.

“There are no laws currently on the books at a state or federal level for privately owned companies to have their websites coded or set up in a particular way,” Estevez said. “In other words, [there are] no state laws or federal guidelines that are required for websites in terms of accessibility.”

That doesn't mean companies shouldn't strive for accessibility, or that they're immune from lawsuits, according to Estevez, who said companies can use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, as a benchmark. The WCAG 2.0 guidelines have been adopted as an international standard, and in some non-U.S. jurisdictions, such as Quebec, some version of the guidelines have been enshrined in law.

Estevez also noted that even if a website doesn't follow WCAG 2.0, it could still be accessible to visually impaired users. The best way to know if a company's site is accessible, she says, is to test it.

That can be done before a lawsuit even happens. Estevez says she's seen more companies being proactive about making sites accessible. Another Florida-based lawyer, Scott Topolski, a litigator at Cole Schotz who focuses on ADA cases, says he's still seeing many companies wait to make changes until they're sued.

“There are some proactive companies. We have a client that did reach out to us last week about what this trend is and what's going on, who hasn't been sued yet,” Topolski said. “By and large what you see is businesses will respond once they get sued. Not necessarily everybody, but it's the lawsuit that triggers action and not necessarily the fear that it may be out there.”

Cristopher Broyles. executive vice president of accessibility and inclusion solutions for the ‎American Foundation for the Blind, has seen companies do testing the right and wrong way. He says many rely on automatic testing alone. But automatic, computer testers often miss the majority of what hinders real visually impaired users from fully accessing a site.

He recommends that companies unsure of their website's accessibility status should run manual tests with experts and visually impaired users in-person, to see where major issues arise. He said some of the most common mistakes on sites are: code that makes text unreadable to screen readers like JAWS, missing alternative text on images, lack of color contrast, unlabeled fields and poor keyboard navigation alternatives.

“Those are the biggest issues, and generally they're pretty easy to fix,” said John Lilly, a senior accessibility engineer for AFB.

However, Lilly, Broyles and Estevez stressed that testing at the end stage of a product—or years after its launch—isn't the route to long-term accessibility.

“Organizations that do accessibility well are organizations that are proactive, that think about accessibility throughout a project's life cycle. During initial design, during hammering out code and quality testing,” Broyles said. “If you think about accessibility through the cycle, by the time you get to the end the issues you find are minimal issues you can fix quickly and you can keep it on budget.”

That sort of accessibility integration will require more education for people at various stages of the site's life cycle. Companies should be holding recurring “brown bag” discussions with employees on accessibility, Broyles and Lilly say, so that it stays on people's minds.

It's important to keep the conversation going, the lawyers and experts say, because guidelines are always changing, and so are websites. A company's site could be accessible one month and become inaccessible the next, when new content is added. Estevez says those changes are fine, and likely won't lead to a lawsuit—as long as companies have a history of checking back to make sure accessibility is up to date and fixing issues. It's good to keep a record of what's been fixed, she adds.

The three also said it's good practice to have a place where users can report accessibility issues and provide feedback, so companies' know when something's not working.

“Improving accessibility is a sustained activity, instead of a knee-jerk reflex,” Broyles said.