Likewise, the focus of legal action against these companies has moved online, with plaintiffs targeting a property’s digital assets in the hopes of bringing about a more accessible experience. In 2018, 3 percent of all ADA web accessibility lawsuits targeted the real estate and property industry. That number may seem low, but it reflects a growing trend that has captured the attention of owners and managers as they integrate digital assets into their accessibility efforts.
The Manhattan-based real estate developer/manager had already made significant improvements to its properties in compliance with ADA standards and quickly realized it needed to do the same for its website. The company brought on UsableNet to guide it through this process.
This would be no small task. The company’s site was complex with a lot of moving parts. It required a robust solution to meet ADA and WCAG guidelines without compromising the site’s content and functionality. The main challenge was blending two different sources of content and making them both accessible:
- A large WordPress site with many sections and dozens of pages, including a widely read blog that went back at least a decade
- A comprehensive catalog of live apartment listing data fed into the site and external media from a back-end system
The real estate developer/manager’s goal was simple—improve its site’s accessibility to the point where it would receive a score of “zero critical errors” from tools that crawl and rate sites while maintaining its extensive array of features.
