ADA Cases May Have Diminished, but Legal Concerns Haven't
The number of federal, website-related ADA cases against credit unions has dwindled from well over 100 to around a dozen.
According to a CU Times analysis of court records, the number of federal, website-related ADA cases against credit unions has dwindled in the last several months from well over 100 to around a dozen. Most cases have settled, but courts have also dismissed some or part of at least 11 cases, largely finding that the plaintiffs’ lack of membership eligibility gave them no standing to sue.
Credit unions aren’t out of the woods, however, according to John Bredehoft, who is an attorney at Kaufman & Canoles and has represented several credit unions sued for alleged ADA-related website violations.
Some of the plaintiffs in the dismissed cases have appealed, for one thing, plus different plaintiffs may surface with new suits, he noted.
“Don’t put this off your radar,” Bredehoft said. “They’re going to come back. Either one of these courts of appeals is going to rule against us, or they’re going to get a member to sue. Because the standing is all about non-members. And so the most important thing to do is make sure your website is as compliant as possible, and that’s not really expensive.”
One appeals case on the minds of many involves Washington, D.C.-based Department of Labor Federal Credit Union.
That credit union, which has $91 million in assets and about 6,800 members, was sued last December in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. On February 21, 2018, a judge threw out the case, finding that, among other things, the plaintiff wasn’t eligible to join the credit union and thus didn’t have standing to sue. About a month later, however, the plaintiff appealed the decision.
On Oct. 30, the appeals court heard oral arguments in the appeals case. Bredehoft told CU Times he thinks the court will make a decision before the end of the year.
“I am confident that they will affirm the district court’s dismissal,” he said.
But the optimism, coupled with the drop-off in new cases, do not mean credit unions should stop caring about the accessibility of their websites, Bredehoft warned. The Department of Justice, which enforces the ADA, recently refused a request to issue compliance guidance for websites, keeping the debate alive over whether compliance means conforming to private standards such as the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
“In my experience, the credit unions that I talk to are more than willing to undertake, almost without exception, moving to whatever [website accessibility] standards are achievable, whether that’s the [WCAG] AA 2.0 standard, AAA standard, or some other subset of that,” Bredehoft said.
“Responsible management wants to make sure that their sight-impaired members can have a full experience, just as their hearing-impaired members can have a full experience, just as their members in a wheelchair can have a full experience. Credit unions are like that,” he added. “It’s the question of being compelled to an arbitrarily selected standard by someone who’s not a member that is problematic.”