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Research Question - Universities may have a serious problem that could make them vulnerable to litigation on multiple fronts. This problem stems from the accessibility of their official athletic program websites for visitors with disabilities who have direct affiliations to the university as students and alumni, or may simply be fans of the teams. According to the latest U.S. Census, about twenty percent of the U.S. population or over sixty million people have a disability (Census.gov), and at least half or thirty million of them are directly affected by websites that are inaccessible. In this paper we describe how the special conditions of a university's website for its athletic program could be applicable to both Title II and III of the Americans' With Disabilities Act (ADA), as well as sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In addition, we provide and discuss the results of a two year study evaluating the number of accessibility-related errors found on the home page, ticket landing page, and merchandise page for the sixty-four teams taking part in the NCAA's Men's' Basketball Tournament in 2019, and the top twentyfive football programs as ranked by ESPN, repeating the evaluations for the same teams in 2020. Method and Data - To gain a sense of the severity of the problem, we evaluated the accessibility for the official athletic program websites of universities that were either invited to take part in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament or were ranked as one of the top twentyfive football programs by ESPN in 2019. We felt this sample was representative of schools whose athletic programs would be of significant importance to student life on campus, alumni, and both geographically affiliated and non-affiliated fans of the school's programs. Each program's website was evaluated against the globally accepted World Wide Web Consortia 2.0 Guidelines (W3CG 2.0), but not against Section 508 guidelines because this standard has been replaced in favor of the W3CG 2.0 standard. The analysis was replicated for the same teams in 2020. The Sort-Site Evaluation tool was used in our research because it quantified the issues and divided them into their Priority A, AA, and AAA categories while providing performance statistics on the entire site. Sort-Site allows for evaluation of one page at a time, a group of pages, or the entire site (depending on the size of the website). Summary of Findings - Visually impaired individuals using assistive technology would find a website extremely difficult or nearly impossible to navigate without conformance to priority A success (W3C.org). Similarly, lacking conformance to priority AA success criteria would make difficult or very difficult to navigate a website for those individuals using assistive technology (W3C.org). Although the data seems to reflect that a relevant effort has been made to improve the accessibility of websites, lacking conformance to priority A translates into visually impaired individuals being unable to navigate the homepage, ticket site, and merchandise site of these teams. Focusing on priority A, only the merchandise website of two of the programs yields no A errors in 2020, reflecting the severity of the problem. Statement of Key Contributions - This research illuminates a critical policy issue for universities by exposing their potential legal vulnerabilities regarding the inaccessibility of their athletic websites for students with disabilities. Growing lawsuits are being filed against highprofile institutions because their athletic program websites are still not fully accessibility to all students. Most universities have an office dedicated to helping disabled students succeed academically and acclimate to life on campus. Additionally, many actively promote inclusion through organizations and committees dedicated to social sustainability, diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success, so inclusion for people with disabilities is a part of their mission. Our study found most university athletic program websites still lagging in providing accessibility to students with disabilities. We offer recommendations for ways to get different members of the campus community engaged to address and fix this ongoing athletic program inaccessibility problem. In addition, we contend that universities are not obtaining full potential revenue from ticket and merchandise sales because many disabled fans are often not able to use their athlete program websites. By examining the problems of disabled consumers in purchasing online, we expand the understanding and scope of the marketing theories of Expectancy Disconfirmation, Attribution, Social Identity, and Inter-group Contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we propose that anti-firm reactions will still occur from those learning of the demographic- based service failure either from someone they know or from a complete stranger, even if they do not directly share this same experience, an effect driven by empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Question This research proposes that the inaccessibility of a team's official website impacts how disabled fans-about 30 million Americans and 300 million people worldwide-purchase tickets and merchandise leading to decreased revenue for the team. Our research examines comparatively how normally-sighted and visually impaired sport fans are similar in a variety of fan related dimensions such as team support, interest in sports, knowledge, empathy, achievement, community, and fan expression. We compare how the two fan groups differ in their purchase behavior while at an official team website by examining purchase probability and intention based upon online retail quality dimensions such as ease of use, information, selection, and convenience as a proxy for accessibility for the disabled. Method and Data To show the depth and breadth of this problem, we scanned the official team websites for all the teams in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, the official university athletic sites for the top 50 NCAA basketball and football programs as ranked by ESPN, plus a large sample of professional European soccer clubs for their website accessibility using the Sort Site accessibility evaluation software tool. By demonstrating a connection between the ability to conduct transactions on a team's official website by the disabled population, based upon the accessibility of the website as made salient by the differences in online purchasing behavior, we show how sports organizations are reducing their revenues by the inadvertent closure of an important transactional channel to a large and growing segment of the population. In addition to this, an online survey was conducted targeting visually impaired and normally sighted sports fans in order to test our hypotheses. For this pretest phase the survey was electronically distributed through MTurk and also through the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), with a total of 134 respondents (53 visually impaired and 81 normally sighted). Summary of Findings Our results show that the official websites are barely accessible for many of the teams both in the professional and collegiate leagues. The problem is even more critical for the home page, the merchandise landing page, and the ticket landing page analysis, since none of these pages from an official website was free from priority A errors (compliance with level A means that all indispensable criteria for the document information to be accessible to all are met). We analyzed the results of the survey by employing a oneway ANOVA comparing the two populations: visually impaired vs. normally sighted respondents on all the scales described previously. The results show that there is no statistical difference between the two populations regarding fanship dimensions except for attending games. Our pre-test results also show that visually impaired respondents find it less convenient to buy sports-related products through the team's official website. They also reported it was hard to navigate these official websites since it requires a lot of effort and still they found it difficult to find what they were looking for. Finally, visually impaired respondents reported that they found it difficult to get the information they needed in order to make purchases. Key Contributions Typically, there are three reasons given or arguments made for a seller to consider making their products or services accessible. The first reason cited usually involves a government mandate of some kind, such as the ADA. The second reason pertains to commercial motivations where the segment is targeted or accepted as a potential customer base. The third reason is a sense of corporate social responsibility (CSR) where an inclusive environment based upon sustainability provides greater benefits to society as a whole. Profit driven motivations, such as the second reason above, are more likely to persuade sellers to make their website accessible to all as philanthropic efforts are generally done in a manner that benefits the firm. Although the ADA does not have specific guidelines in place now, it seems likely to happen in the near future, as cost estimates for designing an accessible website from the start is only about one percent higher than producing an inaccessible website. Considering the large number of patrons affected by the accessible design, improving accessibility to fans with disabilities could be a win-win scenario for all parties involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Question It is evident in today's technologically evolving marketplace that more and more commerce is being transacted online; however, this particular channel poses more challenges for the disabled community due to the inaccessibility of so many retail websites. To obtain perspectives from this population, a sample of blind and vision impaired consumers were used to gauge anti-firm behaviors such as negative word of mouth, avoidance, complaining, and third party complaining following an accessibility-related service failure online, and what negative emotions may mediate these reactions. The moderating effects of effort and whether or not the consumer believes his or her complaint will make a difference were also tested. To illustrate the breadth of this problem of online inaccessibility, we evaluated the top 100 retailers in 2014 (as per the National Federation of Retailers) for their conformance to accepted accessibility standards for online commercial websites. By revealing both the anti-firm reactions of the online consumers directly affected, and the widespread nature of the problem, the objective of the present research is to revitalize the dialogue to amend the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to include accessibility provisions for retail websites establishing equal access for disabled consumers. Method and Data Ninety-four blind and vision impaired participants were recruited for this test study from members of the local chapters of the Foundation Fighting Blindness and the National Federation of the Blind using an electronic snowball sampling technique. The survey was developed using slightly modified versions of literature established scales: Complaint Behavior (Cronbach's Alpha = .903), Third-Party Complaint Behavior (C.A. = .805), Switching (C.A. = .860), Complaint Success Likelihood (C.A. = .733), Anger (C.A. = 0.960); and Avoidance (C.A. = .910). The "Sort-Site" evaluation tool was used to test the accessibility of each website against the globally accepted World Wide Web Consortium 2.0 Guidelines which designates three levels of design flaws or errors that make it extremely difficult or impossible for someone using assistive technology to navigate websites. To determine the percentage of inaccessible content for the retail websites, we calculated the number of pages with errors out of the total number of pages available. We then tested the number of design flaws or errors on the home page, the transaction page, and on a random selection of the first twenty pages with accessibility problems. Summary of Findings The results show that accessibility-related service failures online lead to avoidance behaviors (mean = 5.08, and this effect is mediated by the negative emotion of anger (p-value = 0.000). Additionally, accessibility-related service failures online lead to negative word of mouth (mean = 4.74), and this effect is mediated by anger toward the retailer (pvalue = .003). The preliminary analysis indicates that accessibility-related service failures online will not lead to third-party complaining (mean = 3.27). These pretest results show that the effect is moderated by consumer feelings (likelihood) about whether the complaint will resolve the problem for avoidance (p-value = .021) and negative word of mouth (p-value = .016), but not for third party complaining (p-value = .554). Testing the correlation between the likelihood of a consumer complaining directly to the retailer and the feelings about whether the complaint will resolve the problem, we found a positive but not large correlation (r = .287) between these two variables. Finally, we found that the mean for the high effort condition (mean = 5.26) is larger compared to the low effort condition (mean = 4.9), and a paired t-test for a difference in means between the two conditions was highly significant (p-value = 0.0003). The evaluation of the retail websites showed many critical priority A and AA errors, and these errors appeared throughout the entirety of all retailer websites. There were no websites free from critical priority A and AA errors. However, critically important to this research, many errors appeared on the most heavily trafficked pages including the homepage, and the transaction page. Key Contributions In today's multichannel online and off-line retailing environments, sellers cannot afford to have any of their channels inaccessible to any potential market. By elucidating a problem affecting an expanding market of more than 30 million U.S. consumers, our research suggests a potential competitive opportunity exists for multi-channel sellers to better serve the oftentimes underserved blind and visionimpaired consumers. Whether due to low switching costs or feelings that their complaints will not remedy the situation, our pretest results show that disabled customers who experience an accessibility-related service failure online are unlikely to report the problem to the retailer. As ever more shopping is transacted online combined with the growing disabled population, businesses can benefit by making sure that blind and vision-impaired consumers are able to successfully navigate their websites and complete transactions. Our research findings demonstrate that manifest problems exist with many commercial websites, and that a large, growing consumer segment is adversely affected leading to lost profits. We hope these preliminary findings provoke further discussion about the competitive advantages for progressive retailers in taking the initiative to create more inclusive websites for this underserved market prior to the consideration of an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]