A recent ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court was brought to my attention today, where Domino’s Pizza had a court case reversed that suggested that any place providing public accommodation is required to provide the same level of accessibility online that it is required to provide offline.
Essentially, the court indicated that the space of “public accommodation” extended beyond the physical and into the digital. In the words of the opinion summary:
“Even though customers primarily accessed the website and app away from Domino’s physical restaurants, the panel stated that the ADA applies to the services of a public accommodation, not services in a place of public accommodation. The panel stated that the website and app connected customers to the goods and services of Domino’s physical restaurants.”
This builds on the ruling in Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind v. Target Corp., which originally set out the “services of” vs. “services in” language that is here amplified.
What’s this mean?
Well, it means that the things put out into the public sphere digitally need to be as accessible as things provided in the physical sphere: just as you must build ramps to accommodate wheelchairs, you must make your digital content screen reader accessible.
Religious organizations and churches are exempt from the Public Accommodation rules of the Americans with Disabilities Act (42 U.S. Code § 12187), but encouraged to follow them.
And certainly, the ADA is emphatically a civil rights law. What this means is that a violation of the ADA is a civil rights violation. It is just as important.
