Making your website easy to use for the visually and mentally impaired is important. It’s the law.

But has ADA compliance sparked a new wave of predatory lawsuits? I believe this may be the case.

ADA compliance is a new enforceable set of website guidelines that help disabled people navigate and comprehend your websites content. You may view the latest guidelines to make your website ADA accessible here.

These guidelines were written by the government to help make website content more accessible to disabled Americans everywhere. At face value these new guidelines seem like a noble code to follow. However the unintended consequences may be hurting businesses throughout the U.S.

Is having a website too much of a liability now?

As long as you follow compliance, you should be safe. The issue is there are thousands of small businesses in America that can not afford professional ADA compliance web design. They may be lacking in resources or in house web design expertise. This leaves a lot of small businesses in a position where all they can afford is DIY web design platforms such as square space, wix, weebly, or Shopify. Although these are great platforms, they do not offer enough compliance tools or education in my opinion.

This leaves businesses open to lawsuits

This puts a business in between a rock and a hard place. They will have to spend the time or money to make their website compliant. Or some would rather take their website down all together to avoid the liability of potential lawsuit threats.

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Lawyers may be building email lists of websites to target for suits. They want settlement money now.

The argument can be made that it has never been easier for a lawyer to sit from home and target small businesses in mass numbers. It is not difficult to start and e-mail list of websites that do not follow these guidelines and begin threatening business owners with lawsuits and settlements with the power of email marketing tools such as Mail Chimp.

Use this do it yourself ADA compliance tool to stop predatory ADA website lawyers right in their tracks.

Do not fall victim to a lawsuit just because your website is not compliant with ADA accessibility. You can stop lawyers right in their tracks with this easy to install tool created by Userway.

This is an excellent tool but it is not an end all be all solution to this problem. Get in contact with a web designer to ensure your website will not cost you a fortune in liability.