Unraveling ADA Litigations with Eve Hill:
Description
Avoiding a lawsuit is as easy as implementing accessibility correctly the first time. But as many of us know we still aren’t quite there yet. There is a lot of work that needs to be done if we are going to truly have an internet that is accessible to everyone. Many businesses and public entities offer services, products, and information that everyone needs access to, regardless of their ability, and sometimes it feels that a lawsuit is the only way to jumpstart that process.
To get an inside look at the legal system, we have invited a special guest to join us of CHAX Chat! Eve Hill of Brown Goldstien & Levy is an ADA Lawyer and consultant.
In this episode we are going to hear first hand what happens in an ADA lawsuit, the step by step process that complaint is filed, and steps you can take to start preparing your company now for success, enabling your company or organization to serve everyone.
Find and connect with Eve Hill by visiting https://browngold.com/
Time Stamps
- 0:00 - Introduction
- 2:20 - Introducing Eve Hill of Brown Goldstien and Levy
- 4:29 - How to Start the Conversation about Accessibility in Your Organization
- 8:34 - The types of Lawsuits around ADA Compliance
- 12:17 - Responding to a Demand Letter
- 14:12 - Entering into an Agreement
- 14:51 - Receiving a complaint in Court
- 16:08 - Appropriate Response and Development Time
- 21:34 - Canada's AODA Law
- 22:53 - Who does ADA apply to?
- 31:48 - What are things we can do to help avoid a lawsuit?
Links
- Follow CHAX on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chax-training-and-consulting/
- Follow Chad Chelius on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadchelius/
- Follow Dax Castro on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daxcastro/
- Find our upcoming Classes and Episode Transcript: https://www.accessibilityunraveled.com/
Transcript
*Please note: This transcript has been edited for legibility. Spoken antics have been edited for clarification, readability, and grammar. Spoken stutters and repeated words have been reduced for your experience.
0.00 - Introduction
CHAX Chat Introduction
Welcome to another episode of CHAX Chat. Join Chad Chelius and me, Dax Castro, where each week we wax poetic about document accessibility topics, tips, and the struggle of remediation and compliance. So sit back, grab your favorite mug or whatever, and let's get started.
Chad Chelius:
Welcome, everyone! Today's podcast is sponsored by Tamman Inc, a full service accessibility and technology practice. Tamman partners with organizations of all sizes to shift mindsets and empower people wherever you are on your inclusive journey. Tannen's team can help you with web accessibility assessments and accessible digital solutions. Tamman believes that access to information is a human right. So head on over to tammaninc.com to get more information.
My name is Chad Chelius. I'm an Adobe certified instructor as well as Director of Training solutions and principal at CHAX Training and Consulting.
Dax Castro:
And my name is Dax Castro. I'm director of Media Productions here at CHAX Training and Consulting, and Chad and I are both certified as accessible document specialists. And if you'd like your certification, head on over to accessibilityassociation.org/certification and get yours today.
How are you doing, Chad?
Chad Chelius:
I'm doing well. It's, rainy, gloomy day here in the northeast. and it looks like it's going to be that way for a couple of days, but it looks like Thursday. It's going to break, and hopefully the sun's going to come out again.
Dax Castro:
It has been sunny for a couple of days, so I have been able to work on my koi pond. So for the koi pond talk for everyone, for those who've been following, my koi pond is now no longer leaking! And so I have spent the last month and a half and lots more money than I wish to admit chasing the leak. And I have solved it.
So the next thing is just buttoning up some of the plumbing. That's on the exterior and getting that all squared away. I bought this new air filter that's super quiet. So I am at the tail end stages. Reveal party is coming soon!
Chad Chelius:
All right. We're going to have a koi pond party at Dax's house!
Dax Castro:
Exactly. Koi pond reveal.
Chad Chelius:
Awesome. Well, listen, we have an exciting guest on the podcast today.
2:20 - Introducing Eve Hill of Brown Goldstien & Levy
We have Eve Hill, who is a disability rights attorney and consultant at Brown Goldstein & Levy. And the reason that we're really excited about having Eve on today is because, as you know, Dax and I have a cursory discussion about the legal ramifications of your website or your documents not being accessible.
But today we have somebody who is actually knowledgeable on this topic, and we're really excited to talk to her. Eve, welcome to the podcast.
Eve Hill:
Great! Happy to be here.
Dax Castro:
It's so awesome to have you here today. Chad and I, often we'll talk about the legal requirements. But we're not lawyers. And as matter of fact, we joke and we say, “I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the podcast.” So it's so nice to actually have someone who is an actual lawyer.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do in relation to accessibility in this world?
Eve Hill:
Well, I'm an ADA lawyer, and consultant, so I both enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and I help companies, businesses, state and local governments to comply and to implement good practices so that they result in compliance.
I do that across a wide array of context. So I was just saying I have a case regarding blind prisoners right now as well as a case against the Veterans Administration for not serving homeless vets, but I also do it in the digital space.
So we also work a lot on both cases and helping as a consultant that are about websites and other technology that needs to be accessible to people with disabilities. Mostly people with print disabilities, but also people with hearing disabilities. So I do a lot of both litigation and consulting, helping entities do the right thing.
Dax Castro:
Eve, one of the things that I think a lot of people are struggling with is usually the accessibility department in a company is 1 or 2 people in a large organization. In fact, I used to work for an organization that had 50,000 people in it, and our accessibility department was three people. And, as you might understand, that sometimes is a big struggle for us because when we're trying to convince others in our organization to make our content accessible, there's a lot of pushback.
4:29 - How to Start the Conversation about Accessibility in Your Organization
And so my question to you would be, how do you start that conversation in a realistic way to tell your supervisors kind of what they could be in for if in fact, they do get sued?
Eve Hill:
Right. Well, the first part of the conversation is, “don't you want all the customers who want your service?” it's not just about the lawsuit. That's not necessarily the reason to make your website accessible. You should make your website accessible because you want customers. And accessibility helps not just customers with disabilities, but it makes better websites and better documents that everybody can use.
So that's the reason to do it. The secondary reason, and I don't mind if you do it because of the lawsuit, is the lawsuit.
So, you can get sued and you can lose under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that can cost you money, customers, and reputation. And that's a really bad situation to be put in. So, that's how I start the conversation versus the right thing.
There are millions and millions and millions of people with disabilities and their families and friends who care about these issues. And if you don't know whether your website is accessible, it isn't. And we will know that it's not accessible because it's not hard to figure out. So then the question becomes, well, what resources do we dedicate to that?
And you need expertise. You need an office with expertise, but you also need to build accessibility into all your development. All your content creators should know how to make a document accessible. That's where the rubber really meets the road is when you create the first document, or when you create the first web page, that person needs to know how to make it accessible.
It ain't hard, It's a doable thing. But you need to know to do it and then you need to actually do it. And so you need expertise for the complicated stuff in your accessibility office, and then you need the basics distributed throughout your content creators.
Then you need a voice from the C-suite saying, “this is important. I want it done. It needs to be done. And I'm monitoring and checking it so I will know if it's not done.”
Dax Castro:
Buy-in from the top, Chad, is so important, right?
Chad Chelius:
Oh, it's super important. You know what we run into that a lot. What Dax and I run into is there's typically a couple of core people within the organization that see the value in doing this work. The people who are or are boots on the ground, they understand this.
Eve Hill:
The Missionaries.
Chad Chelius:
Yeah! They know that it's important, but they can't get the higher ups to see the value of why they should spend money on this, why they should invest time and energy into this.
Dax and I are often brought in to speak to those C-suite executives to explain to them, “hey guys, this is why it's important for you guys to be accessible. I kind of put websites and documents into the same category because one typically leads to the other, right? If you want to make your website accessible, the documents on that website need to be accessible too, right?
8:34 - The types of Lawsuits around ADA Compliance
So you’ll often hear Dax and I say that some accessibility is better than no accessibility. So, Eve, I'm really curious about the lawsuits that you see. Is it because they're not fully compliant, or is it because their website has egregious problems with it that inherently make the website inaccessible?
Eve Hill:
Both things happen. So it's important when you're remediating a website that's not accessible that you focus on the things that people most need. Why do they come to your website, make sure those are the things that you prioritize first, then you want to achieve across-the-board compliance. You can get sued either way because you're failing the standard is effective communication.
Your communications with people with disabilities need to be just as effective as your communications with people without disabilities. To do that you need to make your website accessible according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, 2.1 now, level Double-A. In order to get to that, You can't do it immediately or necessarily overnight. So you’ll want to prioritize the things that are most important.
Why are people coming to your website? What are they trying to get there?
Make sure that they can get through the user way, to get through what a user would want to use on your website, and then focus on the less important things later. But do focus on them because you can get sued for technical noncompliance as well as that really hurts people.
What I always advise folks is to have a way to avoid a demand letter. You don't want the only way that someone can communicate an error or a problem to you to be through a demand letter, you want to have an email address that is actually monitored and responded to so the person can say, “hey, I can't do this, I need to get this done, and then you can fix it.” to avoid a demand letter.
So those are really important things.
Dax Castro:
I tell people that an accessibility statement on your website goes a long way to being able to say, “these are the things that we know we're doing right. Here are some things that we're working on. And by the way, here's a way to contact us.”
If there's something else that we missed because, like you said, that isn't an immediate knee jerk reaction to a lawsuit, someone's going to say, “oh, hey, there's this keyboard trap in your pop up for whatever…” you know, and you can take care of it. But without that, at least, hey, we're working on this kind of statement.
Eve Hill:
And it encourages patience. If you know that you have accessibility problems and you're working on them and you're transparent about the fact that you're working on them, it encourages me to be patient with you.
Because, if you don't have an accessibility statement and I know your website's not accessible, I assume you don't know and you don't care.
Dax Castro:
Right? Well, so let's talk through the steps.
So the first thing that you can do to help mitigate or reduce the possibility of a lawsuit is to address what we call Born Accessibility. Putting the accessible components in as you develop them.
You get to a certain point in that process, you put an accessibility statement on your website, you monitor an email, form, or some communication.
If that does not work and you get, for some reason, the demand letter. Is that typically the first step?
12:17 - Responding to a Demand Letter
Dax Castro:
Let's walk through the steps of what it looks like for someone. Get going through the process of this litigation.
Eve Hill:
Once the lawyer gets involved, the first step is usually a demand letter. Sometimes the first step is a complaint in court. So not everybody sends a demand letter. And that's the best practice for lawyers to send a demand letter. Because sometimes you can resolve things without having to go to court. So I generally send a demand letter.
That's your first warning. That's your first shot across the bow.
if you say, "look, there's a problem here. I've gotten a lawyer involved. I want this fix. This is a real priority.” And that's your first, well, actually, hopefully your second opportunity to actually make the fixes that you need.
What you want to be able to do if you're in really good shape is to respond to that demand letter by saying, “thank you for bringing this to our attention. Here's our plan. We already have a plan in progress. We just haven't gotten to the thing that you're complaining about yet. So here's our plan.”
That will, again, encourage patience. It will also move the things that they're complaining about up on your priority list. So you can get to those things early.
If you don't already have a plan, then you're in a much more difficult situation and you need to respond by saying, here's the plan we're going to use and have that be a real plan.
So you want to bring in your consultants at that point to say, how are we going to do this? How are we going to get this done? And how quickly can we get it done? Dragging your feet on it is not going to help that. That does not encourage patience on the behalf of the blind person or the person with a hearing disability.
So ideally you want to be able to respond with “Here's the plan we already have.” If you don't have that, then you want to be able to respond with, “Here's the plan we just came up with bringing in consultants to do, but you'll need to respond quickly by the time you get a demand letter.
The patience is drawing thin and people are ready to file.
14:12 - Entering into an Agreement
Eve Hill:
So the next step after that, if you don't get an agreement, once you get a demand letter, you're probably going to have to enter into an agreement with this person. It's no longer an informal thing. You've got a lawyer involved. You're going to have to have a settlement agreement with them.
You may have to pay their attorney's fees, some money. You may, depending on what state you're in, have to pay the blind or deaf person some damages.
They're not huge damages. They're not huge attorney's fees. But you may have to pay them because they invested. They had to come to this.
They've had to come this far to get your attention, basically.
Dax Castro:
Right.
14:51 - Receiving a complaint in Court
Eve Hill:
The next step is the complaint in court.
Chad Chelius:
Okay. So the next step is you actually go to court. And then and then you let the legal system do its thing. In that demand letter, Eve, do you typically like to give them a period of time to comply.
Eve Hill:
In the demand letter? We generally give them a period of time to respond to us with what their response is. They may say, no, we don't care about disability accessibility. “Go ahead and sue us.” That response comes, believe it or not.
Chad Chelius:
Does it really?
Eve Hill:
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah yeah.
We they may respond that they need more time to get a plan together. They may respond that they have a plan and they want to talk to us about it. So there are a bunch of different responses and sometimes they do respond “We don't care. Go away. I dare you to file suit,” basically.
Dax Castro:
Wow, that's it, I do. I would never imagine that that would be a response.
Eve Hill:
Oh it is.
Chad Chelius:
Do you like those, Eve?
Eve Hill:
I like that. Go ahead!
Chad Chelius:
You’re like, “Okay, let's throw down! right?”
Eve Hill:
Woohoo, Okay! I don’t feel bad about this at all.
Chad Chelius:
Yeah. Now things are going to get fun, right? so that's really interesting.
16:08 - Appropriate Response and Development Time
Chad Chelius:
So you first give them a period of time to respond, and what is typically two weeks a month okay. A couple of weeks?
Eve Hill:
A couple of weeks.
Chad Chelius:
So they’ve got a couple of weeks to respond and hopefully
For all of the parties involved the hope is that they respond and say “yes, you're right.” We know about this. We're actively working on it, and we're hoping to get this resolved. And I know development…
Dax Castro:
Three months probably.
Chad Chelius:
Development timelines are very that they're not like, oh we'll get it done in two days. Typically with development they're like, “oh it's going to take us three months to get this resolved.” and so I guess at that point you guys could choose to say okay, that's acceptable.
Eve Hill:
Right.
Chad Chelius:
Or no, that's not acceptable. If we're talking about a consumer website and the person is trying to purchase an item, it could be a car, it could be a boat, it could be a widget. Right? It doesn't really matter what it is, but they're trying to purchase this and they now encountered this roadblock.
If they say it's going to take us three months to resolve this, well, now they have to wait three months to be able to buy the thing that they're trying to purchase. Right. And I guess my question, right, question is like, how acceptable is that? I can say, like for most of us, it's not acceptable.
If I'm on a website trying to buy your thing and I can't buy that thing, I don't know that I'm willing to wait three months for that. So I'm just curious. How does that work? How does that play out?
Eve Hill:
Well, generally we recognize that it can't reverse time. So that does take a little time to make the things accessible. How much time we're willing to give you depends on how important the thing is that the client is trying to access. Is it medical care? You don't have three months. You got to get that worked out.
Is it a vaccine appointment for the Covid vaccine during the pandemic? That was really important. You can't wait a long time to get your act together on that. So it depends. Was I trying to buy a pair of jeans? Yeah. I'll take the hit. I'll wait for that or I'll get it another way.
Dax Castro:
I have to believe as a company, if I'm going through this process and you say you can't get this or buy this on my website, I'm going to get on the phone with you and we're going to make it happen. I am going to get you this product.
I know that when we were at John Slayton access you conference in Texas and someone had brought up the fact that they had bought a Samsung washer and dryer and that because the interface is very digital, they couldn't operate it because the screens told you what to do, and there was no tactile
Someone from Japan flew to this person's house and applied the tactile stickers on, and then made sure that the person understood how to use it.
To me, that's impressive and shows a level of caring. I guess that really makes it important. And this is actually a really interesting point I picked. I can pick any washer and dryer I want. I didn't really have a major budget. I had a big, pretty big price range. I picked the Samsung ones because of that story. Yeah. And I don't have a disability. And I'm not. I don't do well, I have a disability, I have ADHD, but I don't have one that requires the tactile interface.
But because that company cared, it influenced my decision to buy $2,000 worth of washer and dryer. So, you know, it does matter.
Eve Hill:
Yeah, the goodwill effects of accessibility and of just good customer service are immeasurable. And being open, really your first response has to be, thank you for bringing this to our attention. We're on it.
Dax Castro:
It's funny because I was at a barber and I was getting my haircut and I was talking to him about what I did, we were talking about Instagram.
I said, well, “think about this. If you're on Instagram and you're blind, how do you know what the images are?”
He goes “Blind people go on Instagram. Why would they do that?”
And it reminded me of a story I told him. I said, “you know, there was a lawsuit where a guy sued a car company because their website was inaccessible. And the question from the car company was, why does a blind person need to buy a car anyway?”
And so we had a long conversation about safety, features and color. And all of the things that are not can I see the car and drive it, you know, that really still make a person whether you're a male, female, whatever you are as a person who wants to purchase a car, it's not just because you're the head of the household or because you're the one paying the money.
Everyone should be able to understand and know what it is that you're getting into and trusting your life with. As you roll down the freeway at 60 miles an hour.
Eve Hill:
That's right.
21:34 - Canada's AODA Law
Dax Castro:
So let me ask you, in Canada, they have AODA, and AODA requires that every one of your companies has more than 50 employees. And you can correct me if I'm wrong here. If your company has more than 50 employees, you're required to make all your content, web content, accessible regardless of whether it's public or private or whatever.
Do you feel that that wave is eventually going to make its way to the United States?
Eve Hill:
I do, because websites don't really pay much attention to borders. and so the expectation is out there that all content on the web will be accessible and people are not going to put up with it anymore. Blind people are not going to put up with it anymore. Deaf people are not going to put up with it anymore.
They are, number one, going to go to your competitors, but they're number two going to file lawsuits against you. The most recent figures indicated that 96% of the top websites have accessibility barriers, an average of 50 barriers per home page. That's ridiculous. And it's getting worse instead of better.
So the patience has run very thin on being willing to accept a second class citizenship on the web.
22:53 - Who does ADA apply to?
Chad Chelius:
Now Eve, when we were talking before, the podcast here, you brought something up and it was something that I was not really aware of. you had said that the ADA applies to everyone.
Eve Hill:
Private businesses.
Chad Chelius:
Right? To their own private businesses.
Eve Hill:
Yeah. There are 12 categories of private businesses that it applies to. But it's mostly everything retail business is covered. Hotels, transportation, and all kinds of businesses are covered under the ADA. And they have the obligation to provide effective communication with people with disabilities, including vision disabilities and hearing disabilities. So if you're communicating to the public with your website, that website needs to communicate to people with disabilities, which means it has to be accessible.
And that's there are the only defenses to that are that it's an undue burden meeting. It would be too expensive to do in light of all your resources. It's not just in light of your accessibility budget. it's in light of all your resources and the other defenses that it would be a fundamental alteration.
There's almost nothing in a website that would be a fundamental alteration to make it accessible. So that's sort of a lost cause if you're aiming on, relying on that, but undue burden.
I'm very skeptical of undue burden, defenses. People will say, oh, it's too expensive. It's too expensive. And I and I say, it wouldn't have cost you anything if you'd done it right the first time.
It is not.
Chad Chelius:
Right.
Eve Hill:
Oh, you built an inaccessible website, and now I have to pay money to fix it.
Chad Chelius:
Well, and I guess that's a bit of a hard pill to swallow. Like, if you're a $12 billion company and you're saying that it's too expensive to make your website accessible.
Eve Hill:
Yeah, I’m not buying that at all.
Chad Chelius:
yeah, that's, that's a tough one.
Dax Castro:
Well, let's take an example that I actually received an email, I think it was last year. So we ran a PDF accessibility Facebook group. It has about 40, almost 4400 members in it.
Eve Hill:
Wow
Dax Castro:
We started it in 2016 at the end of 2016, and it's grown immensely. It's a really great group.
But I received an instant message from someone who said, “I just joined your group. I'm a veterinarian, and one of my clients asked to make my home care, documentation for their animals accessible. I didn't understand what this was. I found your group. And what am I supposed to be doing? What do I know, am I required? I didn't think I was.”
and I, we had the conversation of well, this applies mostly to government organizations but also so you're trying to serve your customers and these are your customers.
So it would be the right thing to do. I wasn't really thinking about ADA with you mentioned there's a specific section in ADA or a specific…
Eve Hill:
Title Three.
Dax Castro:
Title three that’s what I was thinking about.
Eve Hill:
Title Three Covers Business. Title Two covers state and local governments.
Dax Castro:
Gotcha. So what would you say to this person who says, I've got 150 PDFs in my cadre of care that I hand out to people about caring for the rabbit or their dog or their cat or whatever. and I'm only making, you know, 2 or $300,000 a year in my practice. It does that.
How does that play into undue burden? I'm just curious about your thoughts.
Eve Hill:
Well, all those documents probably start out as a word document. Keep it as a word document, and you've pretty much covered it. You're really pretty accessible. So give them the word version in an email and then their screen reader will be able to use it. Most likely. If you've got things that you don't have the original word version of and you've got a PDF, then you can remediate it.
You know, remediating a PDF is not rocket science. It can be done. You can get somebody to do it. And it's really important.
Dax Castro:
I think we know a few guys. We know a couple guys who could do that. Right.
Eve Hill:
And it's really important. These are the home care instructions for taking care of your pet. This is not a frivolous request. This is what I need to know. And you, the veterinarian, give these to people for a reason. Because you want them to follow these instructions. So you want your blind and hearing impaired customer to follow these instructions too.
Chad Chelius:
And I mean, in that example you gave, Dax, a veterinarian, I gotta believe that they've got a fair number of seeing eye dogs, right? So that there's a good chance that your customer base, there could be a fair number of people who, who are in fact, you know, visually impaired, and doing some like, quick math, you know, you had said docs like, you know, they have 150 PDFs on their website, right?
assuming they're like one pagers, you're talking about like $2,000 to have all those documents remediated. And for a veterinarian, that's not like a huge amount of money to spend on that. If there are two pagers, you're looking at $4,000. So it's not like it's like the know we were talking about like undue burden. Right?
That's not an overly ridiculous expense for a business to have to incur to, to ensure, you know, that they make their docking accessible. So one other question. I have it, it feels like the ADA is very similar to the AODA. And am I wrong in saying that.
Eve Hill:
It's a little different. It's less, it's less prescriptive than the AODA. The AODA says, “you have to make the website accessible.” You have to make it comply with WCAG 2.1, level AA or 2.0. They may be using it. So. So it's very specific that the content on the website has to be accessible. The ADA is a little more flexible.
If there is another way to make it equally effective, then you can use another way. We haven't found another way and it doesn't. The ADA currently doesn't specify what the standard is for accessibility. So if you found a way other than WCAG 2.1, then you're free to use it.
Chad Chelius:
I see, I see.
Dax Castro:
So that's what I try to correct people when they say, “oh, my document isn't ADA.” And I'm like, it's not really the correct terminology because ADA doesn't really have anything in it about document accessibility. It says you need to have equal access, that you need to treat people equally. but really section 508 or WCAG in itself, you know, is the statute that says you must meet, you know, these criteria in your documents.
Eve Hill:
It’s different for or federal entities, they have to meet section 508 that they have to meet with WCAG 2.0. They have to there's no other option for that. And for the state.
Dax Castro:
Right.
Eve Hill:
And schools the Justice Department's putting out a regulation. Now that will also specify a technical standard for web accessibility.
Dax Castro:
Right. And we have AB 1757, AB 434 here in California. And so I used to work for the California High Speed rail. And, actually in 2016, 17, when it first started rolling out as the mandate for AB 434, they came into our office, knocked on the door and said, okay, everything has to be accessible.
And my answer was who? The who, who knows what that is. And so, as somebody with ADHD, I got laser focused on it and it really just became my life's passion after that. And, you know, kind of let us down the road to where we are today.
Eve Hill:
And that's a good point. There are state laws too.
Chad Chelius:
Colorado's one that's coming up in June, July, I think. Right. You know, so I think they kind of followed suit after California. To my knowledge, they're the only two states that have implicit regulations. Or am I mistaken? Do you know Eve?
Eve Hill:
Yeah, a bunch of states have things that require state government entities to make all their stuff accessible. Texas does, a bunch of places do.
Dax Castro:
Well, there's only about ten different states. We have a slide on this chat in our, designing with accessibility in mind. slide deck, that's the map of the United States. And there's only, I think about 10 or 12, states that don't really have any state based legislation on accessibility, at least in some way. at the state level.
Chad Chelius:
So I should have known that since I teach that class. sorry about that.
Dax Castro:
That's okay. We are there. We have so many slides. I mean, you got to think, if you count all of our different classes, all the different slides we have, I bet we have a thousand slides easily. So, yeah, no worries, no worries.
31:48 - What are things we can do to help avoid a lawsuit?
Dax Castro:
What I'd like to do, as we, we, we end our in our interview here, which has been really great is kind of leave people with some of the things that you would recommend that they do to start having that conversation or minimize, you know, some easy things they can do to avoid having to come see you with their day in court.
but yeah, we'd love to hear what you said.
Eve Hill:
You should get your remediation plan going now ahead of time, before you get a complaint. You should have a way for people to make complaints to you because that's them avoiding a demand letter. And if you do, you're planning up front and get going on it and take it seriously, monitor it. That's going to save you from having a court tell you that you have to do it faster than you want to, so you want to prioritize the most important things, get your plan going, get remediation happening, and then stop digging.
Make sure your content creators know how to make things accessible from the beginning. Then it doesn't cost you anything, and you're not making the problem worse.
Dax Castro:
And finally, I would love for you to share some contact information because I know that there are remediation teams and individuals listening right now going, how can I get Eve to come talk to my supervisors to tell them from your lips to their ears. how do they get a hold of you?
Eve Hill:
While I'm at ehill@browngold.com. So E Hill At Brown, like the color, gold, like the color, dot com.
Dax Castro:
Awesome. So it's been amazing having you on. We've really enjoyed this conversation and it's such a long conversation. We could talk about this for another hour easily, but I feel like we've done some good things here. We've talked about what the risk is, how... what you can do to help, ease that process, communicate with the individuals who can come on to your website and it's okay to give them away to complain.
Don't be afraid to throw that contact information out, because it helps avoid the whole idea of going to court. We've talked about some of the legislation that's out there, and some of the ways that you can talk to your boss about accessibility and getting that plan, that accessibility plan together ahead of time. I think it's been a really good session.
Dax Castro:
So thank you so much for being on the program.
Eve Hill:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Chad Chelius:
Yeah. Thanks so much, Eve. It's been a pleasure. And, we look forward to chatting with you again, in the future.
Eve Hill:
Great.
Chad Chelius:
Well, thanks, everybody, for tuning in today. Once again, we want to thank Tamman who is sponsoring this podcast. Tamman is a full service accessibility and technology practice and partners with organizations of all sizes to shift mindsets and empower people. So wherever you are in your inclusive journey, Tamman’s team can help you with web accessibility assessments and accessible digital solutions.
My name is Chad Chelius.
Dax Castro:
And my name is Dax Castro, where each week we unravel accessibility for you.
Chad Chelius:
Thanks guys.
