“To amend the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to require exhaustion of administrative remedies for certain claims, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section establishes a new Title VI to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requiring exhaustion of administrative remedies before an individual may commence a civil action under Title III (public accommodations) for a private entity's failure to comply with accessibility standards for consumer-facing websites or mobile applications. (As background, Title III prohibits disability discrimination by private entities operating places of public accommodation, and some courts have applied it to websites and apps serving those entities.) Specifically, it directs individuals to (1) notify the owner or operator of noncompliance; (2) if no remedy within 180 days, file a complaint with the Department of Justice (DOJ), providing a copy to the owner or operator; and (3) if filed, await a DOJ investigation concluding within 360 days, after which a compliance determination (or failure to determine, deemed compliant) is final. It defines consumer-facing website as any website purposefully made accessible to the public for commercial purposes and mobile application as consumer-facing software executable on a mobile platform or web-based software tailored to mobile but executed on a server. (Thus, civil lawsuits cannot proceed without completing this process, potentially resolving many disputes administratively.)
This section makes a clerical amendment to the table of contents of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 by inserting after the item for section 515 a new item for Title VI—Consumer Facing Websites and Mobile Applications Owned or Operated by a Private Entity (secs. 601, Administrative remedies; 602, Definitions).