Amendments to Americans with Disabilities Act Broaden Coverage, Portend More Employment Litigation

Last week, President Bush signed into law amendments to the American Disabilities Act (ADA). Effective January 1, 2009, these changes broaden the definition of "disability", and large employers should expect an increase in employee disability claims.

ADA and Section 508 Compliance for Web Sites

For the most part, event planners outside of the Federal government ignore ADA compliance for their Web sites and online registration forms. Looking at the history of ADA applicability to the Web, a trend is becoming clear:

1. Originally, only public Web sites of U.S. Federal Government agencies had to comply with ADA Web guidelines.
2. Later, enforcement extended to state and local government Web sites if those agencies accepted federal funds (as most do)
3. Recently, Target v. National Federation of the Blind set a precedent that commercial Web sites must be ADA compliant if the site is accessible to the public
4. Now, these new ADA amendments broaden the definition of disability in the employee-employer relationship. This makes me think that soon employee-only Web sites (such as Intranets and employee event registration forms) may soon fall under ADA regulation.

What to do as a Meeting Planner?

I don’t hear a lot about ADA compliance in the meetings industry press or trade shows, but I think now is the time for organizations to create long-term plans for all of their Web sites to become compliant with the international W3C Web Content Accesibility Guidelines (which include the U.S. ADA and Section 508 guidelines).

I've previously described our strategy at Certain for doing this.

Online Registration and Housing Technology Presentation

Continuing my recent road trips, I had the opportunity to present with Jim Gowell from Passkey at the new Event Technology Expo within the HSMAI Affordable Meetings National program on September 10, 2008 in Washington D.C.

Online Registration and Housing Technology - Do More With Less

Below are a copy of our slides.

Online Travel Systems for Meetings presentation at MTE in Washington D.C.

Wednesday last week, I had the opportunity to present at the Meetings Technology Expo in Washington, D.C. On short notice, Paul Paone asked me to fill in for the Meetings Travel session, so I created a new presentation based on my experience integrating Meetings and Travel systems.


Unlike much of the marketing hype around "Travel Integration" systems, I've found that sometimes inexpensive process modifications can achieve the universal goals of unified meeting-travel reports and proper travel expense assignment for meetings.


Online Travel Systems for Meetings


Below are the slides from my presentation. Click on any image to see a larger version.

Security for Web 2.0 presentation at MTE in Washington DC.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present at the Meetings Technology Expo in Washington, D.C. I modifed my Web Security presentation from the Chicago show to include "Web 2.0" technologies. I loosely define "Web 1.0" as technology where the site owner pushes content to a user. "Web 2.0", by contrast, includes technologies where the site owner provides a platform that allows users to publish, consume, and interact with each other in a community. (For example, Blogs, wikis, social networks, forums, etc.)



Security for Web 2.0



Below are the slides from my presentation. Click on any image to see a larger version.