The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), amended in 2008, is a civil rights law that protects people with disabilities from discrimination.

Under ADA Title II, public universities are required to provide equal opportunities for people with disabilities. The Department of Justice's final rule on ADA Title II recognizes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for ensuring compliance with ADA in digital spaces. This is the standard that University of South Carolina has adopted for our digital accessibility policy.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973: Section 504

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that people with disabilities have access to programs and activities that are federally funded under Section 504. Students at University of South Carolina can request accommodations, such as assistive technology, through the Student Disability Resource Center. These accommodations help make content accessible to individuals, but digital assets still need to follow accessibility standards and best practices like WCAG to be accessible for everyone.

Consequences of Ignoring Digital Accessibility

• Individual and Class-Action Civil Lawsuits:
  Litigators are issuing individual and class-action civil lawsuits against universities and other public institutions more and more often for non-compliance with digital accessibility guidelines. Settlements for accessibility cases against universities have ranged from $100,000 to more than $8 million.
  
  
• ADA Lawsuits:
  The goal of an ADA lawsuit is to prevent future discrimination against people with disabilities. If an ADA lawsuit is filed due to inaccessible digital content, then the court order will require that the content is remediated. 
  
  
• U.S. Office of Civil Rights Case:
  The Office of Civil Rights opened a case against the University of South Carolina in 2018. By remediating accessibility issues on our USC websites and online services, we were able to close the case by 2019. However, the case can be reopened at any time if we don't keep up our accessibility efforts, which could lead to loss of federal funding.

Make Digital Content Accessible Anyway

After settlement, the universities who have been sued were required to fix their digital accessibility issues anyway. They might as well have made their content accessible to begin with.