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New Report Shows Shocking Widespread Failure of Digital Inclusion; Litigation Risk

niceuser — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:34:33 +0000

New York, November 8, 2022 – According to the new Risk INDEX: Higher Education Report from InsurTech AAAtraq, 96% of higher education websites are not accessible to people who browse the web with assistive devices, making them non-complaint with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

In today’s post-secondary education environment, 19.4% of students are disabled.1 “It’s time for a reality check,”says Lawrence Shaw, CEO of AAAtraq. “This is not the time for complacency or pointing the finger at another department, or vendor. Against a backdrop of the increasing threat of litigation, failure is now an organizational risk. It’s time to get real, or get sued.”

AAtraq’s Risk INDEX reports on accessibility across website homepages by sector, aiming to raise awareness of the scale of the digital inclusion problem, highlighting the potential exposure to litigation, and providing a benchmark. Americans with disabilities are supposed to have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in mainstream American life; that includes digitally.

The ADA protects American citizens living with disabilities against discrimination in places of public accommodation. Modeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – the ADA is an “equal opportunity” law for people with disabilities. Unfortunately, equality in theory doesn’t mean equality in practice. 32 years after ADA’s passage into law, violations continue.

Despite efforts and increasing spend on attempting to make websites inclusive, the reality is that more than 9 out of 10 of higher education websites are still non-compliant. “Compounding the problem is a false sense of security, felt by many who believe that they have matters in hand, spurred on by service providers that promise compliance but blatantly lie and lack accountability,” says Shaw. “Until there is an approach which is led by risk control, it will continue to be a feeding frenzy for opportunistic lawyers (https://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/atteam/lawsuits.html).

Get ready for the tsunami.”With non-compliance being easy to prove and hard to argue against, AAAtraq estimates the costs to settle industry-wide demands is approximately $6.62 billion. This excludes the cost of ongoing monitoring essential to ensure ongoing compliance as websites are iterative in nature, constantly being changed and updated.

Using their software, AAAtraq was able to audit the entire higher education market in 30 minutes. “Schools are paying out demands with money they should be using to buy books,” Shaw says. “It’s simple. There are only three options here. Listen to excuses. Ignore it. Or take your moral duty and legal obligation seriously and fix it by taking a risk control approach and getting a program in place.” Manual efforts to fix the problem continue to demonstrate their limitations. Using AAAtraq, evidence of failure can be identified right down to the line in the code.

Subscribers are then given step-by-step instructions on how they can fix it, as well as train staff and manage service providers to ensure ongoing ADA compliance. Paired with litigation support and costs coverage insurance, AAAtraq’s hollistic solution is a no-brainer for operating in the digital space.

About

Websites, like buildings, must adhere to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). Despite efforts, the majority are discriminating.

AAAtraq offers the first Risk Control Program for ADA (Online) offering those reliant on their website(s) the ability to remove todays widespread and unnecessary risk (wasted spend on compliance programs, litigation costs and distraction and ongoing reputation damage); AAAtraq combines insurance, risk clarity, and continuous mitigation from $99/month.

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Online ADA – Without CFO oversight, compliance failure will continue, as will wasted spend

niceuser — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:33:43 +0000

NEW YORK, US 20th January 2023 — Litigation against higher education institutions for non-compliance with online ADA shows no sign up slowing down, with recent cases against Harvard, Berkeley, Colgate, Mercer, Lafayette and Loyola – to name but a few.

Digital inclusivity is no longer simply an operational responsibility of management. It has also become a risk issue that should be squarely within the oversight responsibility of the institution’s executive board. The downsides of not complying are unattractive, both financially and reputationally.

AAAtraq published a digital inclusivity risk report in February 2022 which showed that 96% of higher education institutions were not digitally inclusive [sample size, 2000]. AAAtraq suggest that a lack of visibility and oversight at executive board level is at the heart of the problem.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of AAAtraq, said

“Discrimination against people living with disabilities isn’t intentional. The lack of executive visibility and oversight means that current expenditure on compliance initiatives is largely being wasted.”

Add to this the cost of settling legal claims and the reputational damage, and Shaw believes that the responsibility for oversight should be part of the CFO’s remit.

“The CFO has overall responsibility for regulatory compliance requirements, and is responsible for funds that are a public trust, whether they are state appropriations or gifts from private donors. Furthermore, the general public and institutional constituents expect, and assume high ethical standards prevail in higher education institutions.”

Rob Andrews, Head of Commercial Operations at AAAtraq commented “There is a lack of instant, independent and non-technical reporting. If vendors, third party service providers and web teams continue to sign-off their own work, and it takes months rather than hours to deliver an audit, institutions will continue to waste money and be exposed to the growing threat of litigation”

AAAtraq provides an automated, independent, executive audit and alerting capability which can report the ADA compliance position across an institution’s digital landscape in hours, rather than weeks or months.

Many institutions have hundreds or even thousands of websites, so a single report that expresses the compliance position is proving invaluable to AAAtraq clients across the education sector.

AAAtraq’s ‘traffic-light’ style of reporting means that no technical expertise is required to interpret the audit report. “Independent oversight enables executive boards to hold to account those responsible for delivering and maintaining website content and operations, whether internal teams or third party vendors and suppliers”. Andrews concluded.

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Online ADA – Without CFO oversight, compliance failure will continue, as will wasted spend

niceuser — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:33:29 +0000

AAAtraq published a digital inclusivity risk report in February 2022 which showed that 96% of higher education institutions were not digitally inclusive [sample size, 2000]. AAAtraq suggest that a lack of visibility and oversight at executive board level is at the heart of the problem.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of AAAtraq, said

“Discrimination against people living with disabilities isn’t intentional. The lack of executive visibility and oversight means that current expenditure on compliance initiatives is largely being wasted.”

Add to this the cost of settling legal claims and the reputational damage, and Shaw believes that the responsibility for oversight should be part of the CFO’s remit.

“The CFO has overall responsibility for regulatory compliance requirements, and is responsible for funds that are a public trust, whether they are state appropriations or gifts from private donors. Furthermore, the general public and institutional constituents expect, and assume high ethical standards prevail in higher education institutions.”

Many institutions have hundreds or even thousands of websites, so a single report that expresses the compliance position is proving invaluable to AAAtraq clients across the education sector.

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US Colleges Face Thousands in Legal Payouts… Due to their Websites

niceuser — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:24:28 +0000

NEW YORK, US, 27th July 2023 – Risk experts have revealed that 97% of US colleges do not have accessibility compliant websites and could face millions of dollars in litigation fees and payouts.

Risk management experts AAAtraq are warning college bosses that education is now one of the top three targets for lawyers – worth a whopping $600 million per month in fees – and having non-compliant websites will make them targets for litigation.

AAAtraq’s July audit shows that most of the 97% of colleges who failed The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance tests were let down on their home page, leaving them sitting ducks and exposed to unnecessary legal action.

AAAtraq’s July audit can be found at: https://aaatraq.com/index/higher-education/2023/07

Laurence Shaw, from AAAtraq, said that it took just 30 seconds to identify failings in most websites, which could save individual education institutions thousands of dollars.

“We are really concerned that colleges and universities are being told their sites are compliant, but in reality they are not and no-one knows how to check. Time and time again we are having to prove those who are providing digital services wrong. In any other sector a project would not be signed off by the supplier. There has been a distinct lack of accountability in this market, and we want to change that.

“It is becoming ever more evident that compliance methods are failing, underpinning the need for a risk managed rather than technically led approach,” he added.

AAAtraq is calling for Chief Financial Officers and Risk Managers to ensure they have control of website project sign offs to ensure someone other than the company carrying out the work is signing off on such important criteria and saving them from exposure to unnecessary legal action.

The company, which works with organizations across the US, offers a free assessment and risk audit that will help colleges identify whether they have compliance issues with their websites within 30 seconds to a minute.

Updated laws recently announced could be brutal for both education institutions and their vendors if they do not prioritize compliance ‘causing a tsunami of litigation’, with both the organization and the vendor being held accountable for what today are such simple to demonstrate compliance failures.

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