The ADA within the commercial space for non brick and mortar commerce is an opaque area. Most litigation related to the ADA and commerce tends to be settled out of court; so currently there are no laws or rulings established. For those of you familiar with Target and perhaps Southwest you may argue otherwise but they too were also settled out of court. The closest I have seen so far is the suggestion that for whatever product you sell within an actual brick and mortar store it must be just as accessible online as well; of course this completely removes Amazon from any responsibility towards ADA compliance.

As consortiums, councils, and unions gather together to discuss the endless details of compliance within aging technologies, yes I'm talking about WCAG, there might, perhaps, be another way, at least in the short term, to satisfy many ADA requirements.

The screen reader technology should focus more on the mobile version of a website vs. the .com experience. I have found through testing of various screen readers (JAWS, SuperNova, ZoomText) that there is an endless array of useless information that needs to be given through voice (yes I'm specifically talking about users with a visual impairment here - not all people with disabilities). It doesn't allow the end user any particular way to scan this information (now I have an answer for this too but that's not the point of this piece). However, for whatever reason, we recognize this with mobile. For mobile we instantly say, we can't present all this BS, or let’s limit the results to 5 instead of 100, let’s build some quick filtering and allow the user to determine what they need, or let's just put up search/product/pay as 3 easy steps...

If we could get businesses to design mobile sites, and get screen readers to point to mobile or be detected as mobile we might be able to solve a few issues quickly and efficiently and most importantly using modern and relevant technology (WCAG that's you again).

This is obviously an incomplete thought but I wanted to get it out there for potential discussion. It's interesting because I now make almost 50% of my purchases through mobile for various items that range from an MP3 to furniture. Yet currently, and I have no statistics to back this up, I doubt many .COM commerce sites allow for a user with screen reader to purchase anything with ease, if at all.

Look for more on this topic; I'll present some research into this field within the next few months.