Here's what we know If you've been active in the game store owner groups on Facebook you've probably seen the posts recently about game stores and publishers being targeted by a law firm in New York and being sued for lack of ADA compliance. So far they've sued Crafty Games of Washington, Games of Berkeley in California, Black Rowan Games in Tracy, California, GMT Games in Hanford, California, GameScape North in San Rafael, California, GameKastle and more. This is not an exhaustive list by any means but California in particular seems to be a hotspot. But let's back it up a bit. What exactly is accessibility and ADA compliance? Without getting too into the weeds on the legislation, web accessibility is essentially a set of rules, behaviors, code standards, and design guidelines that were created by the W3C and are called the WCAG 2.1. The WCAG 2.1 is a massive 1,000-page guidebook that encapsulates a range of disabilities that go from hindering internet use to making internet use impossible without adjustments. This spectrum actually comprises 20-25% of the general population depending on if we're going with the CDC or WHO. There are many disabilities covered, and the primary categories that require attention are: ● blind people using screen-readers, ● the motor-impaired using only the keyboard to navigate, ● epilepsy, color blindness, ● cognitive and learning disabilities, ● visual impairments, and more. What are the risks of having a non-compliant website? Non-compliance penalties are no joke, as they can go as high as $75,000 even for the first violation. The more you fail to respect the requirements, the higher the penalties will be. As a small business, it is in your interest to ensure that your website is accessible to people with disabilities. Not only will this increase the number of customers you can serve, but it will also protect you from some nasty fines and lawsuits. From what we're seeing, the firm going around and suing game stores is usually looking for settlement amounts in the $20k range and they apparently do this for a living. And part of the shakedown is when they serve game stores the lawsuit, in order to become compliant they suggest working with specific companies they are associated with. So in some cases, not only do they exhort a settlement from the business, they also generate revenue for their associates at the same time. What can you do about it? So you basically have three options. Two of which I recommend and one that's mostly a waste of time. The first one is to go with a web accessibility plugin. These are usually free or very inexpensive and apparently get a website to about 10% of the way there. You probably shouldn't go this route since your business will still be exposed to the risk of lawsuits and fines, and it's not particularly effective on the actual accessibility side of things. The second is to hire a company to make the necessary changes for you. This is the most expensive option, but if you can find a good web developer to work with that can show you what needs to be changed, you can also get your staff to do the work by hand over time. For stores with big websites this can be a major challenge since even just adding alt text to potentially thousands of product images and pages is a ton of work. This kind of work can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 and takes months to accomplish. If you've built out the inventory for your online store you know what I'm talking about. Imagine doing that all over again, or paying someone else to do it. The third solution is something more AI based like AccessiBe. Full disclosure here. I recently worked with a client to figure out how we should protect their new store from these lawsuits and we settled on AccessiBe because it was clearly the best...
