The Department of Justice announced earlier this week that it will not be issuing regulations for public accommodations to websites until the 2018 fiscal year, according to Minh Vu and Kristina Launey of Seyfarth Shaw. The laws will now come almost eight years after the agency first contemplated the move with an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.
“DOJ made a number of statements in the 2010 ANPRM that led businesses to reasonably conclude that they could and should wait for the regulation to issue before taking action,” explain Vu and Launey. However, that didn’t stop the DOJ from investigating the issue and pressuring companies to make websites accessible, or intervening in lawsuits, they say. The organization, “took the position that the obligation to have an accessible website has existed all this time in the absence of any new regulations.”
