Travel e-tailer Hotels.com is being sued by a group of disabled Californian dancers because it could not guarantee reservations for customers with wheelchairs.
Bonnie Lewkowicz and Judith Smith of of the AXIS non-profit dance company filed a complaint in Alameda County Superior Court seeking an injunction that would force the internet store to account for disabled shoppers.
The complaint (pdf) argues that Hotels.com's failure to guarantee disabled access to the hotels it sells means passengers with wheelchairs may not be able to enter their room on arrival.
The pair have asked that their complaint be made a class-action lawsuit so that it can represent all Californian customers.
Kevin Knestrick, a Berkeley-based disability lawyer representing the two, told Bay City News that Hotels.com lumps accessibility in with "amenities" like king-sized beds but that accessibility is more of a necessity than an optional extra for customers with wheelchairs.
The website, which is in the same stable as Ticketmaster and Citysearch, was founded in 1991 as a telephone reservations service but was bought by IAC/InterActiveCorp in 2003.
Californian law states that all public places must be accessible to people with a disability.
Although the UK's Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) compels webmasters to create websites accessible to all. The US' Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which similarly requires all public accommodations be accessible to disabled people, was clarified by a 2002 Florida ruling that said websites do not constitute public accommodations.
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2:26PM on 24th May 2007
Pdfs, like hotels, are inaccessible if the producers don't design with accessibility in mind.
The PDF associated with this article isn't accessible - it's a scanned image -which i cannot read with my screen reader software.
Check out the Accessing PDF with screen readers link and Adobe's guidelines for producers on www.adobe.com/accessibility so you don't end up locking out disabled people, like some hotels that i've heard of might do...
Hmm, one more thing for your comments, i can't see the letters your system asks me to type in below to submit this comment, so there's another barrier of access that you need to take down.
Director of Product Development at Econsultancy
3:38PM on 24th May 2007
Hi Hugh,
Good catch on our image validation - we have an audio element to this but it isn't working, something we'll take a look at. We may roll out a logic-based validator when we revamp the website.
Cheers,
c.