Screen readers that are limited to structured inputs can't be the end-all final solution right? It would be shortsighted to set this tech in stone with legal precedents. Do we seriously want to require every blind person to be fluent in reading html/React as the default way to consume sites?
We should be trying to improve the tech so they can consume the world just like sighted people. There are already apps that can use computer vision to caption and describe images. It can even connect you with real people if the AI sucks.
I think pouring investments into those technologies might be cheaper relative to the amount of work added to the industry as a whole.
Another example is Reddit, where a good chunk of their content is just text memes overlaid on images. For compliance, would you force people to describe their images with an alt text before submission?
The better solution would be to do what Facebook does and have builtin tools that will annotate a OCR/description with ML or crowdsourcing. In an ideal world these tools would be available to everyone with no extra work.
Don't settle for making the blind wade through a pile of HTML and call that accessible. It would be a travesty if it became law to use alt tags, because that is so far from the best we can do. Don't lock the world into dead technologies.
>The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business groups that said they represented 500,000 restaurants and 300,000 businesses joined in an appeal urging the high court to review the 9th Circuit’s decision.
Edit: Found a source that seems to discuss it but it seems it hasn't been tested in court: https://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/10/telephone-access-might-b...
Or a page has exactly one text entry box and it doesn't have focus when page first renders.
That's just sloppy.
And for those with vision problem a major problem.
I'm not even counting the number of websites breaking the system scroll speed of forcing a custom mouse cursor. I may be too sensitive here, but it is very annoying so I now just close the tab whenever it happens.
I say this after watching my mother struggle using the IRS' website this Sunday. Even though she is not blind or otherwise physically disabled (she doesn't use a screen reader, for example), she isn't the most tech savvy person. While searching for a form she clicked on a link then scrolled down straight to the footer, thinking the footer was the page's unique content, and already starting to click on links in the footer, which wouldn't have gotten her where she needed to go since what she needed was above the footer but she missed it. If she had someone she could call she would have gotten done what she needed to do faster than using the website. I helped her out, of course, but it was still helpful to watch how she used the site on her own before offering assistance.
So what if a company acknowledges that not everyone will be able to use their website and provides alternate ways for customers to engage with them that can still accomplish the same thing? When you define a business as more than just a website, is having multiple different interfaces (physical location for those nearby, website, voice call, etc) for a customer to purchase from a business not one way to provide accessibility?
If Domino's will take my order over the phone and deliver it and I can pay at the door, is that not accessible for me, even if their website isn't?
While I think it is a great goal that services should be accessible by people with special needs or restrictions, would it not be better if this could be achieved by incentives instead of hard regulation?
Perhaps as follows. 1) Create a registry for companies to self-declare that they are accessible for a given user segment by some given standard. (For essential utilities and government agencies, compliance can still be made mandatory) For registered entities, make this statement binding, and follow up breaches with fines that are sufficiently stiff that only companies that comply will register. This registry could contain information would contain information about standards that are already regulated, but could also be extended to include other needs (dietary standards, child friendliness, accessible to people with certain mental limitations, etc) 2) Make this information open to the public, and attach a rating service such as TripAdvisor where users can rate the degree of availability. This would make it easy for the beneficiaries to find services suitable for them. The data should also be made accessible through an API, so that special interest groups can mirror it on their own infrastructure. 3) Step 2 will provide an incentive in itself, but where it is not enough, introduce a tax incentive on top. Companies with the necessary accesiblity could be given a tax benefit in the order of 1-5%. This benefit should be on the profit, not the turnover, to avoid putting companies with limited profitablity out of business over this.
Usually that also makes for better home pages for other people as you don't get the type of crap "creative" web developers tend to put there to make it flashy but unusable.
And it will force companies to really think about their functionality and ensure that it's easy for common use.
I have a friend who is a wheelchair user who has been trying to get ramp access to the shops where she lives. First avenue is a friendly chat, second is a letter before action, third is court. She would much rather it was enforced by the government like most other regulations - in addition to being draining to go to court to argue for her rights, it leaves those who ignored their obvious legal responsibilities, and the friendly chat, and the letter, personally furious that she took them to court. So even victory is fairly Pyrrhic.
You jump though the hoops to make your order, make an account, choose your pizza, and enter your credit card info.
You click submit. Nothing happens. Did the order go through? Do you call to find out? Wait and hope? Order from someone else? In the future you'll have an answer (or 4 different deliveries because you went somewhere else 3 separate times until you found an accessible website).
What if you didn't have another option? Should we prevent the blind from eating pizza?
I've had this happen to me multiple times, and I'm not even disabled.
> What if you didn't have another option? Should we prevent the blind from eating pizza?
We are talking about America - the place where people eat themselves to death from over consumption of terrible foods - there is always another option.
I do wonder how far this argument goes, though. Say someone creates a new device that allows people with some incredibly rare motor impairment to access the Internet. Is it now the responsibility of everyone in the world to add support for that device?
Websites are navigable by screen readers and tons of other accessibility software by default. Hacker News is completely usable in JAWS. It's the things Domino's layered on top that broke it, so it's Domino's's job to fix it.
Having domino's create a new web browser for physical accessibility devices would be an undue burden. Having domino's fix their aria tags and tab order is not.
Why can’t congress just pass a law to make the ADA apply to websites? It’s not SCOTUS’s job to create law.
Except it hasn't. The U.S. legal system is based on precedence (common law), and other than a scattering of local Title III judgements (Long v. Live Nation Worldwide, Inc., Haynes v. Hooters of America, LLC, Winn-Dixie, Blick Art) there is no concrete or shared understanding of how ADA applies to e-commerce.
I welcome all these lawsuits, for no other reason that we'll reach a consensus sooner-than-later on compliance.
I don't usually find myself scratching my head at SCOTUS. Full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services is the pizza, not the website. The website is just one means of obtaining said pizza.
The SCOTUS isn’t making a new law. What they are saying is that the law as written covers websites as well. The law says you can’t discriminate against a person with a disability and the courts job is to work out what constitutes discrimination.
Any thoughts?
[0]: https://www.justia.com/business-operations/managing-your-bus...
https://github.com/freecode/dominos-cli Or https://github.com/jkereako/dominos-pizza-cli/blob/master/do...
Part of my work is to make the service I work on accessible so I follow this topic.
I find it absolutely disgusting that Domino would rather drag their case to the supreme court than make their site accessible.
Anecdotally, while making an app or website accessible is not particularly easy, I have found that there are some good benefits.
At least on mobile, it pushes you to avoid relying on hacky solutions and to make clear layouts instead. This also makes your code more maintainable.
I believe web accessibility is net good, though.
Legally, SCOTUS seems to be taking a specific position on what “full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services ... of any place of public accommodations.” means.
Note that US airlines have had to provide accessible websites since December 12, 2016, under the Air Carrier Access Act. So there's some existing work other industries can follow.
Example 1: Reddit is on GitHub. At the time when I was still using Reddit, I was pretty pissed with its lack of helpful accessibility. So I went on GitHub, and wrote a PR which would wrap individual articles on a page in a so-called "region" so that the screen reader could easily jump to the next article. The PR was ignored for several months. After a while, I simply closed it out of frustration.
Example 2: When I read about Bitwarden on HN, I tried it. As I am an iPhone user, the iOS app was interesting, so I installed and tested it. No surprise, almonst no button was labeled correctly, or labeled at all. So I opened an issue on GitHub. The answer I got was: "Yes, we know we are not accessible, but we are planning a rewrite anyway, so we will not change anything in the existing code". Thanks for nothing. We are not talking about rocket science here, just adding a text label to a handful of buttons. But yes, thanks, I got the message. Nobody really cares about people with disabilities.
If you have a business and are offering a service, you are doing so at-will. Your not obligated to provide anyone with any product or service, if you were, how is that not slavery? The law forces you to provide a product or service without allowing you use your own judgement.
The law itself is unconstitutional. How did it even pass?
Under the ADA, only new businesses (post ADA) are/were required to build accessibility into their business. Older businesses were grandfathered in and didn't have to make changes to existing facilities until they renovated them. In terms of websites, this means only the oldest websites would have been grandfathered in.
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990:
"No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation."
"a failure to take such steps as may be necessary to ensure that no individual with a disability is excluded, denied services, segregated or otherwise treated differently than other individuals because of the absence of auxiliary aids and services, unless the entity can demonstrate that taking such steps would fundamentally alter the nature of the good, service, facility, privilege, advantage, or accommodation being offered or would result in an undue burden;"
Are you arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act is wrong, or that making a website accessible is an undue burden? (while say, ramps for wheelchairs is not)
If I was forced to modify two of the apps I put up on the apple store to accommodate the blind I would just take them down because I could not justify the investment since it would require retooling the entire product and even re-imagining how it functions internally.
At the end of the day, this is just more red tape that will probably hurt small sites or deter them from being made.
What is a mere convenience for many people is de facto the equivalent of a flying wheelchair for handicapped people -- when it actually works for them and isn't some new "fuck you" from the world.
But if you want to order online, then you increasing often have to interact with a website. Brick and mortar have employees that could help you, websites do not.
The reverse of this situation would be telling people with wheelchairs that they should only shop online instead of expecting accessible stores.
Doing business thus is validly subject to government regulations mandating that businesses do (or not do) certain things. And some of those things include not discriminating against the disabled, and designing your business facilities to accommodate the disabled.
I also find fault with the commerce clause of the constitution and think its broad interpretation as an economic defense mechanism is archaic and filled with undesirable effects (such as the drug war, limitations to trade and international tariff wars), not to mention contradictory to the constitutional principle of liberty.
The Constitution was intended to give the government broad powers. It was written in reaction to the Articles of Confederation, which created a government with limited powers that failed with 5 years. The provisions of the Constitution and the bill of Rights need to be understood within that context.
It's your site. You have the freedom to break your own property. This is apparently a contradiction. This addition seems to say that I can't break my own property if it means some people can't see it. How is this constitutional?
"The United States Constitution presents an example of the federal government not possessing any power except what is delegated to it by the Constitution — with the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution making explicit that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved for the people and the states."
Another concern: as someone working on a large web development team, I think that maintaining a separate “non-visual” site would entrench a two-tier approach to quality and completeness (noticing and fixing issues, adding new features, etc). If you treat them as two separate applications they will inevitably diverge over time, despite best intentions. You might even end up with slightly different URL structures on each site, making it impossible for a blind user to find the corresponding audio version of a certain URL they found on social media, for example.
This is most obvious in the OneDrive online. The selectable list of files is implemented using Layout Grid, and thus is a single tab stop. Arrow keys can be used to navigate the grid and inline actions, and it's a single SHIFT-TAB to navigate up to the multi-selection actions.
There's ARIA controls and interactions that are defined in such a way that a non-sighted user can just hear what "type" of interaction it is and already know how to navigate it.
And by the way, it is very common that people can't find words to give me feedback - happens pretty often. So I encourage people to give me feedback - no need to feel like ass :)
If you make the browser window narrower the eye has a lot less trouble moving from the end of one line back to the start of the next.
I like wide screens because they make it better for having two apps side by side, rather than one app full width .
You may also benefit from getting your vision checked. This may be early stages of something occurring, and the sooner it's identified the better.
And long lines are trivially helped by making the window less wide.
So you've provided a good demonstration about how vastly easier things are to adjust for someone that can see.
You might want to get your eyes checked or read up on other disabilities that can impair reading ability even if your eyesight is fine. If you feel so impinged upon that it makes sense to you to ask a blind person to accommodate your needs and problems, you may have an unidentified handicap.
https://www.thevisiontherapycenter.com/discovering-vision-th...
http://www.visuallearningcenter.com/9-signs-your-child-may-h...
In the case of websites... two years ago I started adopting a11y into my front-end code. But while plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y make the job easier, it honestly was also a huge pain in the ass familiarizing myself with the grotesque state of affairs in web accessibility standards.
However, one of the biggest gains might have been learning to properly leverage every HTML tag to its fullest. Modern day SPAs have all gone back to using wild div forests with no context or metadata available for readers. This also took much less effort than learning the rest of standards compliance. So start there!
After crossing that river, I think that accessibility is complex enough to warrant its own dedicated developer for almost any project if standards are to be achieved.
Still... until our bosses catch up, we do what we can. Here are some great resources for developers who wish to learn more about how to design for accessibility: https://a11yproject.com/resources/#further-reading
P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind?
As far as I can recall, most of the blind folks on HN don't post big walls of text. Maybe younger blind people who grew up with text-to-speech and never learned braille are more likely to do that. To me, that would be a good reason for screen readers to deliberately pause for a bit between paragraphs.
EDIT: found this Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List with 132 items listed! Anyone have advice on which ones are best?
It offers a fast 5 minute scan for some of the most common/easily detectable issues, and also a much fuller assessment with a mix of automated checks and guided/assisted manual tests that aims to help web developers who aren't accessibility experts achieve full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance.
Happy to answer any questions about it!
Online shopping experiences vary widely. I love it when the interface isn't even noticed/gets out of your way.
Lately I have been part of building a quite popular website in my native country, and this time, as I have had more autonomy than before, decided to go ahead and add as much accessibility helping markup and proper elements as possible. Eg. everything that can be clicked is now a button (no more divs with onClick-handlers) and by the way, is adding tabIndex to divs even sufficient for triggering clicks? Since by default the Enter-key is not bound to trigger the click-event for elements other than buttons and links (I assume).
Anyway, I went ahead and added as much accessibility I could, but some things were bit too much of extra work that I decided not to add them. So I was just wondering, how bad is it when modals don't automatically capture the focus and you can't really travel into them unless moving all the way to end of the document (where the element lies)? From what I glanced from the aria spec, the focus should immediately move into the modal and get trapped where you can only by invoking an action (eg esc-key, click x-button or submit) dismiss them.
Also how important are the aria-labels for buttons and such? Should everything worth noticing be annotated? Or can you guess from say the button text what they are for. Also I read somewhere that inputs should always have labels, but sometimes it's problematic to add them eg dates with three inputs with only one label "Birthdate". Can I supplement the label with some aria-property instead?
Sorry for asking so many long questions, these things have been on my mind a lot and I really haven't had anyone to tell me if the accessibility fields I have added were correct or not. It's quite annoying how confusing the spec is and how difficult it's to know if the aria properties are correct/make sense or not. Eg how many aria-haspopup etc properties should a dropdown have and which of its elements have which.
I'm just going though a web course on this which is pretty good.
https://www.udacity.com/course/web-accessibility--ud891
I think moving focus into the modal is pretty helpful
Here's the video on focus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoAsayPVogE&t=65
You can set tabindex="-1" on the header of the dialog, and move focus to that. (Also set outline: none on the dialog, but not anything else). Then you can just call focus() on it, which isn't too hard.
I think it's okay if you don't remove the ability to focus on all the background stuff if the focus is at least moved into the modal.
I think for aria-labels for buttons, the best way to check this is to either use chromevox/ a screenreader and see what it says for the button. You can also inspect element, and go to the aria tab in chrome dev tools, and see what aria name is computed. You can see the order it takes them from, with aria-labelledby, aria-label, then contents.
If the name is reasonable, then you don't need a aria-label at all.
How accessible is a basic, plain vanilla, semantic HTML document? I.e., a fully server side rendered HTML doc that uses paragraph and heading and so forth tags for what they semantically mean. Are those type pages accessible, or is more work required to make them accessible?
I'd like to make sites I build more accessible, but I must admit I'm only familiar with the bare minimal guidelines I've read in a couple articles. I don't even know if they're correct or up to date. Nobody I've worked for has ever made this a priority, so I'm quite ignorant on the subject.
I'm merely a sighted user here, but I can personally attest that when you've mastered touch-typing, you can tell when you make a mistake and correct it without needing to look at the screen. It is a bit of an eerie feeling the first time you do it.
Full disclosure: I touch-typed this reply, and I made five mistakes when doing so, and fixed all of them without looking at the screen.
It has its limitations: It doesn't help you spell better, only correct typing mistakes.
https://silktide.com/resources/toolbar
It’s not a substitute for real-world testing, but it should help you appreciate the basics without having to learn a full screen reader.
We’re also working on some accessibility games right now (scores challenges for you to complete in a browser with a simulated disability), which sound a lot like what you’re suggesting.
As a note, for any sighted developers (like me) reading along: I'd highly recommend you to spend half an hour to learn and practice navigating software with a screen reader some time. It's a relatively easy step that gives you a lot of insight into low-hanging fruit in terms of accessibility improvements.
(Also, keep in mind that accessibility is not just vision impairments. Things like small click targets can make things a lot harder for people with motor issues, e.g. many elderly people.)
For small businesses I imagine the biggest problem is that they only have only one engineer to support a web site, and he is not familiar with accessibility standards (justifyably so, because there are so few blind people out there), and he'd have to learn these standards and test the web site for accessibility problems - all these actions require time.
Fewer errors from people mishearing you too.
My father is an amazing salesman. He used to sell for Schwan's food in the 90's (those big yellow trucks that delivered frozen food to your door every 2 weeks).
He had a blind couple (husband and wife) that were on one of his routes, and they bought a little bit of food every time he came by. But they could never read the menu, because Schwan's only had printed brochures. One day, he had me and my siblings record on audio cassette the entire menu and their prices.
His sales from that couple shot through the roof! All of the sudden, there were all of these options for sale that they didn't even know about before, and now they wanted to try them. From that time forward, they were very faithful and consistent customers. And, of course, they were very appreciative of the gesture!
Every 6 months or so, when Schwan's updated their menu and/or pricing, we would re-record the menu, until Schwan's finally figured out an audio offering of their own.
A few years ago, my father ran into the couple when he happened to pass through their town (my father no longer sells for Schwan's, but now sells insurance and investments). The couple remembered and asked about each of us children by name, these decades later.
It's neat to see how just a little consideration (and a bit of extra work) can make a huge impact on someone else's life!
Domino's tried to claim that their due process rights were being violated since there is no federally-mandated standard for accessibility. But the ADA is clear: businesses have a legal requirement to ensure that disabled customers have "full and equal enjoyment" of their goods and services. Domino's made the tenuous argument that the lack of a specific standard meant that they didn't receive fair notice.
Robles, the plaintiff, argued that the appropriate standard to apply was WCAG 2.0. Instead of offering a different possible standard (which would have been a defensible legal rationale), Domino's position was basically, "fuck off".
It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards. Make sure your content and markup are reasonably semantic. Use standard form components for data entry. Where more complex, visual-first designs are employed, make sure there are text-based fallbacks.
If you are a professional software developer, doing this is not just your legal responsibility, it's your moral responsibility.
I personally an color blind, which is not a disability but it is a pain in the ass at times, especially give that color has the ability to convey data visualization in a rapid manner that is subconsciously parsed by the user. It's extremity effective if one can see color. It is kind of how I got into accessibility for a time. By simple adding a secondary reference of iconography for the color blind a site can convey the same info. (e.g if you show red put a small stop sign on it, yellow use a triangle etc.)
I see no reason why even the smallest sites should not be able to provide access to the blind, whereas larger sites should be striving to go the extra mile to make it accessible and easy to parse for everyone.
As a web developer that has had to pass an accessibility review from a person who is actually blind each release for the last two years, I can tell you it’s not that hard. Make sure you have a sensible tab order and labels on forms and you are 80% there. The hard issues are creating hidden buttons for drag and drop interactions and announcing changes in the view.
Honestly it’s more keyboard nav than label work anyways. For as many vim lovers as I meet, many developers seem to falsely believe you need a mouse to use the web.
But it really opens a can of worms. What's a place of public accommodation? With brick-and-mortar, it's easy; if you have a physical location open to the general public, it probably qualifies. But on the web? Does my personal website count? What if I sell t-shirts on it? What if I don't sell anything, but have forums where the public can discuss things? What about a site which is primarily about communications, i.e. speech? Does a requirement that you put ARIA labels on things amount to compelled speech?
What if accessibility standards change? Am I compelled to upgrade my site?
This issue is a lot hairier than the court imagines. Does the court really want to get into the issue of which websites need to comply and which don't?
The Supreme Court didn't say anything. All they did was decline to hear the appeal.
From skimming the petition and responses, it looks like the situation is that the 9th Circuit is allowing the case to go ahead to determine whether or not Domino's website is violating accessibility requirements, which means that there's not a lot of facts and administrative record for SCOTUS to attempt to decide if the reasoning as to how to determine how the ADA applies here. In other words, this does feel like a case that SCOTUS rejected in large part because the petition is way too premature--the respondent's brief definitely feels far more persuasive to me than the petitioner's (Domino's) briefs.
The facts of what constitutes a sufficiently-accessible website necessarily have not been discussed, because Dominos was trying to boot the case before any factual determinations were made.
Their argument was that, as a matter of law, they could not be sued under the ADA based on their website. This argument prevailed at the District Court, lost at the Ninth Circuit, and was unanimously declined to be heard at SCOTUS.
That sends a loud and clear message, and this will essentially become the law of the land for at least the next few decades.
Note: I have not deeply read all the opinions, but I am a lawyer who is familiar with appellate procedure and the ADA.
In other words, this case only directly applies to physical businesses with an online component (buy-online-pick-up-in-store or similar).
I’ll be curious to see – assuming that Robles eventually wins – if this case is ever used to argue that an online-only business is subject to Title III. It doesn’t seem like a slam dunk connection.
(Not a lawyer, but I do enjoy reading court documents.)
We don't know that. It takes 4 votes for SCOTUS to agree to hear a case, and the voting breakdown is usually not revealed unless some justice decides to write an opinion disagreeing with the decision.
https://a11yproject.com/ has patterns, a checklist for checking web accessibility, resources, and events.
awesome-a11y has a list of a number of great resources for developing accessible applications: https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y
In terms of W3C specifications [1], you've got: WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative: Accessibile Rich Internet Applications) [2], and WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [3]. The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least.
There are a number of automated accessibility testing platforms. "[W3C WAI] Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List" [5] lists quite a few. Can someone recommend a good accessibility testing tools? Is Google Lighthouse (now included with Chrome Devtools and as a standalone script) a good tool for accessibility reviews?
[1] https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y/blob/master/topic...
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/using-aria/
[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
A number of companies have been (more or less) blatantly violating the law in this area. Framework authors in particular have often ignored the value of accessible, semantic markup. Many devs come to the web knowing only frameworks (and not the underlying web technologies), which is dangerous if those frameworks aren't accessibility-focused.
Hopefully this decision finally scares companies into action, and inspires a lot of valuable future litigation on behalf of the visually impaired.
There is contradictory case law (like Southwest Airlines 2002) that says the ADA does not extend to virtual / online stores.
Companies are policing themselves on this issue out of liability to be sued, which is a far cry from a declarative right to have accommodations online. It is not that certain.
Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) her web site is not ADA compliant; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover their time in handling this unfortunate situation".
With her sales, she can't justify spending an additional few thousand to pay a programmer to fix or redo her web site to be ADA compliant. Her only option is to just shut down the web site.
The only winners here were the lawyers.
Since it only applies to "public accommodations", it's highly unlikely that a drawing program will be covered, unless it's tied to a good, such as if you can have the drawing printed up for you.
Yes it works for pizza, but American Airlines charge $35 per ticket[1] when you call them to book.
[1] https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/optional-se...
let's shut down rental go-kart places then.
And then they'd be compliant.
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/17...
A denial of cert doesn't mean the supreme court necessarily has an opinion on the merits of the case. Courts in other circuits can still rule otherwise, and SCOTUS might eventually decide to hear such a case at a later time.
The stress around website accessibility comes from the lack of any authority who can tell you you've done enough and you can't be sued, perhaps by someone using an outdated screen reader/browser combination you'd never think to test with. It brings back bad memories of things like trying to support IE5/Mac at the same time as IE6/Windows. (Protip: embrace quirks mode.)
At what point do we just accept that security, accessibility, and similar properties are actually important, and that we shouldn't accept half baked products anymore?
I don't have a clear answer. But regulating the software industry is just going to make running a startup almost impossible. No more jobs for self taught hackers. All platforms will be a walled garden, including the web.
I'm leaning towards the viewpoint that companies (or anyone) should not be responsible for accessibility problems.
My inexpert suspicion is that investment in better screen reading technology could make millions of sites accessible which currently are not, and that there should be some way to meet in the middle -- perhaps companies funding a consortium to push screen reading tech forward while at the same time making it an order of magnitude easier for a site to be accessible.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/blind-...
It's a small, low traffic group. I'm one of the admins.
I haven’t read the actual ruling, but Domino’s provides a phone number that you can call, and a person will tell you any of the information on the website and can perform all of the services the website can perform. How is this not a sufficient “auxiliary service to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind”?
Then again pizza websites are pretty garbage from the get go. Not sure why they make them so damn convoluted.
Imagine if this were changed to tax fraud. Now we have computers that can automatically find discrepancies and we can notify violators at scale. The horror!
Whomever does the compliant would either need a ton of liability insurance, or would need contract language that actually gets them out of responsibility (similar to the language in many travel insurance and point-of-dale service plans). The former would be expensive, so you’d probably end up with the latter.
Web accessibility compliance does require a human to look at (and interact with) a site, and it requires people who either have training, or experience. That costs more. I really hope we don’t end up with “Uber for accessibility compliance”, with testers who aren’t paid enough, and who don’t get enough time to test a site.
I worry about it getting much worse, especially with the animosity the larger tech companies face from the public. What people don’t understand is that those big companies will weather any of these regulations, and that they will stop smaller startups from ever happening.
Just trying to understand this. Where are the boundaries, limits and rules? What happens if you use web technologies to control equipment, say, 3D printers, robots, etc.
To clarify, this isn’t to say I have a problem with this ruling. Not at all. Just trying to understand if this is a massive world-wide hammer anyone can wield against any website and tangentially related technologies or if the range, domain and impact have certain limits.
Put a different way: Should Mom and Pop lose sleep over the possibility of being sued out of business any given Monday or sleep well knowing the process is sensible enough to allow for a reasonable ramp to adoption?
There’s even stuff like, for example, if you have 200 domains parked with a registrar who puts-up a non-compliant page on all of them. Are you exposed?
The money should NOT go to lawyers for their fees and plaintiffs. It just creates the wrong incentive system.
And also every now and then I need to read a science paper in PDF format - somehow they still haven't figure out how to make accessible formulas in Latex-generated PDFs, so I'd have to use an OCR called InftyReader to OCR this PDF to get the formulas.
In my experience the worst offenders are drivers for printers and scanners. Every time my printer runs out of ink on my computer it'll show me a dialog, that my screenreader doesn't recognize at all. So by the presence of empty window I'll have to deduce that it's running out of ink. Scanner driver is completely inaccessible, so I had to get a linux box just to use my scanner - at least all the command-line tools are accessible.
I want to do more than just run sites through validators. Is JAWS still a good accessibility program to test with? Are there other major accessibility programs I should be testing with?
No Coffee: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbn... is quite useful to get a non-scientific empathy hit for graphic decisions and how that interacts with common sight problems (98% of people by age 51 have presbyopia) and Sim Daltonism: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ will give you a more accurate representation of all the most common colour blindnesses (1 in 12 men).
I also urge everyone to turn ON tabbing on their Mac (System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab > All Controls) and tab into their sites (unplug your mouse). I also often do a run through with Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/ which gives me some aspects of a voice interaction type system.
These tools will get you some of the way there, though there are established ways to build components which will solve 90% of all known access problems. The main solution is simply to write native HTML. A major issue is how hard it is to style native form elements (like datalist) -- it means developers can't get it past design/clients.
IIRC, the screen readers will read back texts you just typed as well, but I'm not sure that is as necessary since most folks can get by with typing just fine.
What do you think of the multiple voice assistants out there? Do you think that would be an acceptable alternative or tradeoff if Domino made a bot to take orders?
When the nerves that make my eyes work stop behaving correctly, it's also normal for the nerves in my throat to flip out so that speaking feels like breathing razor blades.
Making a call isn't an option, but using a web browser still is, if they haven't gone out of their way to break all the ways a web browser is supposed to behave.
But, just for the sake of your curiosity, American Airlines charge $35 per ticket[1] when you call them to book.
[1] https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/optional-se...
Or they just mistype something and leave it... but your screenreader reads it and you hear/know how to spell it so you introduce bugs because you're using correct or localized spellings of a variable name when everywhere else in the code uses the incorrect or other-localized version?
- Force businesses/streets to add a curb lip for wheelchairs -> Stars above, suddenly it's easier to accept deliveries and bring in luggage!
- Optimize site for slow connections, suddenly you have a torrent of previously-unserved customers. [1]
Edit: Turns out it's called the Curb Cut Effect:
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-...
[1] Summary at this HN discussion, follow through to the story for more details. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601977
Honestly, I don't remember how they took care of the cooking details, but I remember my father telling me that they talked about one of the hardest things that they had to learn to do in the blind school was to be able to cook meat, because they had to go by the sound it made while cooking in order to determine how done it was.
Truthfully, I don't have an agenda.
I can see, though, how easy it would be for someone to use this story to back up their particular viewpoint, when, in fact, it was just a memory about an experience that I had as a child... A memory that I didn't realize had such a big impact until decades later.
Do you follow the standards? If you show me a web site that you've developed I'll show you a site with multiple violations of WCAG 2.0. Hell, JAWS' own site is littered with WCAG violations! Yes, "accessibility at the basic level" is easy but WCAG 2.0 is not "accessibility at the basic level". It's a huge set of rules that are often unclear and ambiguous. And that's fine because WCAG 2.0 is just something that you should aspire to. But if you start defining accessibility by whether a site conforms to WCAG 2.0 or not, then I can guarantee you that every single popular site is non-accessible.
We got sued and believe me it has nothing to do with blind people. Our site is of zero interest to them. Companies are sued by scumbag lawyers, who have made a nice little racket out of this thing. It's really unfortunate that the HN crowd is siding with them, as if they are championing the rights of disabled people. It's all about money.
In the US, the choice was made instead to create a private right of action and to allow legal fees to be recovered. That means that lawyers who make this their business have to aim high to cover their costs (including from cases they lose) and are no incentivised to let a company off with a compliance notice and a deadline to improve.
As a result, there are a certain percentage of ADA cases which are not brought in good faith but that is the system the people have decided they want.
How do you know? It's not like blind people are all the same. They're just people with the same wide range of interests as everyone else.
I'm sorry you got burned, but this is not the best way to make your point.
A unanimous denial of certiorari (declining to hear the case) sends a pretty strong message to lawyers and their clients. It only takes 4 votes (1 less than majority) to hear a case, so the fact that there were zero justices interested is a clear message. While it is technically possible that there could in the future be a circuit split, which could then be appealed to the SCOTUS, it is unlikely SCOTUS would hear that case.
And given what happened today, it is even less likely that a competent lawyer would counsel their client to appeal a similar case up to a federal appeals court (because it looks like it would be a loser of a case).
So while the SCOTUS did not affirmatively speak today, their unanimously declining to hear the case does actually say something new, and this is being hailed as a landmark-ish case in the legal accessibility community.
FWIW, IAAL, and I run an assistive technology startup.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/100719zor_m6...
Which is to say, even if the entire court (both liberals and conservatives) thought the lower court decided wrong they probably wouldn't want to hear this case until a couple other lower courts also wrote something - just in case some argument that someone comes up over the next few years points out an angle they hadn't thought of and so they would reverse.
That is a preference though. They can of course do what they want.
There is a clear difference between 'discriminating' against someone because of their disability, and a person's inability to participate in something because of a disability.
Later in the law discrimination is defined, and it gives an exception that auxiliary aids must be provided, except when providing them would be an undue burden.
If I were Dominos (I'm not a lawyer, so I probably have this wrong), based on a reading of the law, I would argue that since Dominos offers pizza ordering through the telephone it is not depriving anyone their services if the website is not accessible. The service Dominos has to provide access to is delivery of pizzas, not the use of their website, which only exists specifically for the purpose of ordering pizzas. Could a library be sued because a specific book doesn't contain braille, when the same book is available in braille? What if Dominos had two phone numbers, one that offered teletype and one that was voice only? This judgement seems to imply that they could be sued unless both their phone numbers offered TDD, because they are depriving people of the use of the other phone number?
I'm all for making websites accessible, but I find it hard to believe someone who orders a pizza over the phone is being deprived of 'equal enjoyment' of the pizza.
IANAL, but you definitely have this wrong, in terms of the history of this case, at least. The DOJ has made clear since their first guidance in 1996 and courts have held repeatedly that the ADA applies to websites in the service of public accommodation.
Domino's absolutely has a defense if they are able to demonstrate that their services are "equally" and "effectively" provided to all. The lower court held that they didn't even need to look into the facts at issue, i.e. they don't even need to find out if the phone line provides such service. The court of appeals rightly said that, in fact, it is important to find out if there's evidence of discrimination.
On a basic level, yes. But what does the law consider to be reasonable? There are so many degrees of compliance, some of which often go against brand guidelines, against common js libraries, etc.
I'm certain they can figure out a viable option with their APIs
I know there is a snarky comment about enjoying Dominoe's pizza...
But it is comical that Dominoes championed ordering pizza by tweeting an pizza emoji, but failed to address helping the bling order online.
What I find appauling is I need to be disabled to demand a website that doesn't require font.js and 600 trackers to run, that doesn't intercept my scroll wheel or make me use a Google product for captcha.
hyper text mark up language is dead. Long live the world wide web.
Well, now, as developers we have more ammunition to backup the moral obligation.
Now we can demand the time to validate that a site is compliant with WCAG 2.0, and point to this ruling as a legal mandate to do so.
Sounds like it could be part of SEO effort. If it can be checked programmatically then search engines should add accessibilty to their ranking algorithms. It worked for mobile.
Imagine the investment that would suddenly start in accessibility if Google publicly announced it was an important part of search engine rankings.
This was when css started to become useful and if you were able to make do with little outline and lots of css magic, google would be grateful. This was before the SEO craze, of course.
If that doesn't convince you, then have some pride in your craft, some attention to detail. Visually impaired users aren't the only ones annoyed by the fact that you couldn't be bothered with tab order. We have tools, you don't need me to tell you that you're lazy (or overworked, or underbudgetted...), the machine will do that for you.
For the SEO motivation to succeed, I think search engines would have to regress (by definition of "search engine" and its goals) to serve accessible results to users who don't need it. I'm not opposed to this as a solution, but it requires some interesting decisions: do governments stipulate how much of the search score for a given page is based on accessibility? Presumably it's a bad thing for governments to stipulate _how search engines work_. On the other hand, we could see search engines do this voluntarily; that would be cool and might just work because the search engine space isn't especially competitive, but if it ever becomes competitive, I don't think a gentleman's agreement to artificially boost accessible sites (at the expense of serving up the content that is genuinely most likely to satisfy a non-disabled person's query) is going to hold.
Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven: lots and lots of Google users (as a percentage of total users and absolutely) search via mobile--it behooves Google to improve their search experience by boosting mobile-friendly results, and it therefore behooves sites to optimize accordingly. We're talking about boosting accessibility beyond its market value--I think this is good and right, but I wouldn't expect to solve the problem the same way as for mobile.
In a way it's a bit frightening that Google have that power, but it does have the opportunity to be used for good.
Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...
Not every disabled person is blind. It's not enough to set some tab indexes, add alt tags and call it a day. It's not a process that can be automated and not a simple matter of turning off your screen and using a screen reader (again not all disabled are blind). And as a small business, even if you think your website is accessible (after paying that accessibility dev who you thought fixed it), if you were pursued by a law firm and your options were to try to fight it in court or pay a settlement, you'll likely only be able to afford the latter.
Making your app/site simpler and easy to use for the large number of people with very low computer skills can often improve things for those people with good computer skills too.
Similarly if your site/app is made accessible to the surprisingly large proportion of the population with low literacy then it will also work better and faster for those people with good literacy too.
>there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
Which is it?
WCAG 2.0 Accessibility compliance is within reach of anyone following the most basic of best practices in web development these days.
There are many powerful free tools for developers to use to test and validate their work as they go, and there is a ton of literature and thought leadership out there for anyone to find and learn from.
OP may be referring to retroactively making websites accessible, since it can be a lot of work to fix something that wasn't built with accessibility in mind from the start.
Just like adding a sunroof option to a new car is much cheaper than adding a sunroof to a car that didn't come with one in the first place. ;-)
Because it costs money to do so, and sometimes mom and pop sites are barely scraping by to begin with. It's also their prerogative to make the content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit - it's their loss if someone cannot buy their product, but it's also their choice to accept that loss. I think it sets a dangerous precedent to make them legally obliged to make their content available in a specific way.
I've ordered a couple dozen of times on Domino's, mostly custom(ized) pizzas, and never seen a drag and drop on their website; possibly because I use their French website. Instead it's pressing buttons to add or remove ingredients. So it's possible and they already have the code to do it.
I don't buy that. There's plenty of articles on how to do accessible drag and drop, and certainly one doesn't need a "separate web app", just an accessibility mode that uses a more standard form.
A accessibility dev, does not need to have a deep understanding of your business processes, you back end or your dev cycle. They really just need the front end assets in a manner that they can run and access to a source control repo to check in their changes for the mainline dev team to pull in.
This is one of those basic human rights things. Especially if the service your site is offering is important or one of a kind. And especially as more and more things become accessible only through the internet.
This is also the reason many of us have to step over used needles on the way to work every day, there are people who are going to die very soon from using heroin on the sidewalk, and there are lawyers lining up to sue if anything at all is done to discourage them from shooting up and passing out on the sidewalk.
The problem isn't so much "how do I make my site accessible?" but "what counts as accessible in the eyes of the law?" Sure, you've passed an accessibility review from one person who is actually blind. But currently, what you need to do is pass an accessibility review from anyone who could ever potentially sue you over an ADA violation – many of whom don't even care, they just got roped into it by lawyers looking for easy money!
For physical accessibility, we already have rules about exactly how steep a wheelchair ramp needs to be, etc. For website accessibility, we have nothing, just a very vague "has a user complained?" Supposedly the Obama administration promised in like 2012 that they would have actual standards for what counts as accessible, but that went nowhere and in like 2017 the Trump administration just canceled that entire project.
And, like, if you've ever run a website, you know how vague "has a user complained?" is. My sighted users complain all the time, and it's not like I haven't expended years of effort making the experience good for them!
So, while it might be cumbersome, but doable for, let's say, Amazon, it could be a real problem for a new small business. Consider this: as a startup, you always wish you can satisfy all you customers. But you cannot. So you make sacrifices, trying to satisfy the customer base that brings to most money first. You always discriminate, even while US Supreme Court may not be able to see it. And there is no other way.
So what this law really means: there still will be commercial web-sites, that are not accessible for some customers. But they can be sued for it. And while it won't drastically improve lives of many of disabled customers, it will improve lives of some lawyer firms, that can use blind people to sue businesses. This won't happen to everyone, but this is one more additional risk, that every entrepreneur will have to consider
I always tend to support blind/deaf/etc people as much as I can, and I honestly care for them. But I don't feel I must be legally obligated to target my services to anyone. And I think this is a stupid law.
Not to mention even larger non-tech businesses often see tech as a cost center and probably don't want to pay to fix things until it's too late. Though, I wonder if this could be an interesting consulting angle. Sell yourself to businesses as someone who can help bring business's website to up standard
Caring happens with actions, not words.
And yes, courts really do want to get into the issue of which businesses need to comply and which don't, regardless of whether they exist physically or as a website.
There's another question that this situation raises: is a website a "place", a "service", or a "product"?
If it's a place, then place-of-public-accommodation rules might apply.
If it's a service, then it's likely to be treated like other services. For example, the ADA says that a barbershop must be accessible, but it doesn't say that the barber must cut the hair of a disabled person. (That would come under anti-discrimination statutes, not the ADA. I think. Not sure about this).
If it's a product, then there are probably no rules at all. There's no law that say that your faucet must be accessible to a person who can't turn small knobs, or that your book must have large-enough type to be read by the elderly.
Again, as I say, sorting all this out is going to be harder than you think.
But this means that almost every forum does count.
If this is the question you want to answer, then you should agree with SCOTUS that this case should not be heard. A pizza delivery company falls very clearly on one side of the question. Instead, you should wait until a case comes up that actually squarely deals with the question of if an online-only site might qualify as a place of public accommodation.
The best you can get with this case as it stands is whether or not the website of a brick-and-mortar store must be accessible. And since trial hasn't even started, you don't even have any sense yet of what the interpretation of "the website must be accessible" even means.
"Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) one image web site is not licensed; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover the unauthorised use of the single image without license"."
That happens all the time. Enough that it's fairly well known now. I think few would just lift an image off another site these days.
If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great! A few headline cases of huge, crippling fines, and few would just put out a site without accessibility, or give a tender to developers without a contract section covering it.
So the only remaining issues are whether $4k is a reasonable sum or just a lawyer trying it on, and whether she can sue OpenCart for providing a non-accessible platform.
Also, something is wrong with your example. Cost of buying the original platform is $X, sales (not revenue) for multiple years is $3,500, fixing it or replacing it by a compliant platform is $Y. A "fix" is clearly not more expensive than $X and that was much, much less than the revenue from the sales.
Also, it seems to me that the original product was defective (illegal), so why should she have to pay for the fix?
Domino's has a phone number, and every capability the company offers over the web it offers over the phone. In fact, since this business in particular was built on telephone-based ordering, the the phone option is actually the first-class experience, with the web offering only a fraction of the options otherwise available.
So at least in this case, ordering pizza over the phone instead of web is precisely as suitable a substitute as speaking to a waiter instead of reading your Chinese menu in braille.
The plaintiff will argue that regardless of the fact that no business services are actually unavailable, it is the website itself that is being denied. And falling back to a compatible communication medium is inherently unsuitable regardless of whether the fallback is sufficiently functional.
And if that's the case, then it's functionally equivalent to say that failing to provide accessible menus in a restaurant, and falling back to having the menu spoken aloud, is a denial of rights.
I'm not going to say whether it's right or wrong, but it is certainly different than how the law had been interpreted in the past.
I'm handicapped and also a freelancer and I have six years of college and I worked for a Fortune 500 company at one time. I feel I'm better positioned than a lot of individuals to figure out what I need to do without an accountant and a legal team and yadda, but I have my moments when I would like to go hide under a bed and cry and try to figure out how to kill myself because our highly regulated world sometimes seems like it is actively designed to make it impossible for people to make their lives work (without being part of a megacorp -- and what if that doesn't work for you?).
I haven't read into what the exact ruling covered I'm just pointing out it doesn't have to be black and white to the point it runs all guy large places out of business.
Edit: apparently my phone typing speed is no match for the interest in this topic :)
The future of the Internet is the present of all other industry. Take all the regulations and government interference that already exists in old industries and apply it to every business online, every commercial website. Nothing can stop this process, it's well underway now and will get radically worse over the coming 10-15 years. The regulation monster has its claws out and is beginning to sink them in (half the room will cheer that today, then complain ten years from now at the burden; oh but they went too far, you see; human nature in action).
Whatever it is you want to build, do it now before the regulators and competition (through regulatory capture) conspire even further to make it far more expensive and burdensome. Hurry, the old days of a low regulation, free Internet are rapidly fading.
The act basically requires companies to make "readily achievable" changes. So if it would bankrupt the company then it is not required. However you can’t just sleep on the issue and pocket the profits for not putting in the effort.
This is a world where we exist and do our work both in front of our screens and in the physical domain. In this world we use tools such as Fusion 360, Solidworks and online services such as Vention to design physical parts, products, machines, tooling. Altium Designer and other EDA tools to design electronics. We use both online and offline tools to manage manufacturing workflow, quality, schedules, client interaction and more. We use online and offline tools to program and manage our CNC machines, quote and manage aspects of the transition from digital to real object in your hand.
I look at this ecosystem and peripheral elements to this and I am not sure I truly understand both this decision and the context. Do you have to be a blind person to truly understand it? Can a blind person design mechanical parts using Fusion 360 or Solidworks? Or electronics using EDA tools?
Again, exposing my obvious ignorance on the subject here. Happy to do so too, as I am sure some of the contributions to this thread will serve to educate me as to some of the nuances, needs and issues in this domain.
What I fear with some of this stuff --and again, this could be truly ignorant in this case-- is that these rulings will serve ambulance-chaser type attorneys who, with a juicy new vector for revenue generation, will file a massive number of lawsuits, extract blood from small and large companies and individuals and, in the end, not necessarily serve the blind community all that well.
In other words, the lady who owns a little knitting blog will be extorted out of a few hundred bucks. After that she will either shut down the site --which means everyone loses-- or she will deploy the crappiest minimal compliant modification she can find, maintain it badly but still be in compliance...which means her blind visitors lose. The lawyers, however, will do very, very well, as they file thousands of these cases and rake-in the profits. If you can't tell, I've dealt with lawyers enough over the last three decades to have a very dim view of a certain subclass among their ranks. I firmly believe they make things worse for society rather than the opposite.
If you have multiple series, you could have different sounds running in parallel - sin wave, square wave or perhaps musical instruments each denoting a different series.
That might actually be usable if there was an automated system for creating them on the fly.
There's also this kind of approach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk
https://www.highcharts.com/docs/accessibility/accessibility-... is a good starting point to learn more about the sorts of features and considerations they've made (you can find articles, demos, and videos describing more from there)
WCAG is, from what I can tell, a reasonably good starting point and even attempting to do _some_ things and being generally aware is better than not doing anything at all. Give the guidelines a read, https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
And my other hunch is that using standard HTML elements is actually a less expensive way to build websites. But I'm not sure on that. I haven't touched front end in a long time.
That is interesting. For source code, I've always preferred maintaining a maximum line length of 80 characters. But there are plenty of people who prefer significantly longer line lengths because they feel it's more readable that way.
I greatly doubt it was anything more than mildy irritating and the grandparent never implied otherwise.
It's annoying for me to read and I have perfect vision.
Being blind doesn't make you immune to an expectation to be accomodating to others.
I already covered the fact that tracking problems can be due to reasons other than poor eyesight. I even provided supporting links for that assertion.
Part of my background is working for an educational organization that catered to the needs of gifted kids, including twice exceptional kids. It was common for early readers to have tracking problems and for parents to share practical tips on how to cope, as well as talk about at what point to get concerned and get the kids checked for something else.
Um. No?
I don't think anyone implied you were. :S
I've typically only tested with one, so it'd be good to ensure there's nothing weird with others.
Thanks!
I either use Kurzweil 3000 (Windows|Mac|Browser) (paid)|JAWS (Windows) (paid)|Voice Dream Reader (iOS|Android)| VoiceOver (iOS) (free)| Talkback (free), depending on what I am doing and how my much my eyes are affecting me at that moment.
I taught myself braille and I have a couple of refreshable braille displays, which I use, depending on how well my eyes are working.
I can digitize printed material well, including STEM material, using a program called InftyReader (Windows).
It is no fun, but you have to do what you have to do.
That is, this case presented a novel issue, and it was at a stage where the questions were legal in nature (not factual). That's the perfect opportunity for SCOTUS to take the case if they planned to interpret the ADA as not applying to business' websites. They could hypothetically weigh in on the case after Dominos has a full trial with all the facts, but if they planned to say that as a matter of law the ADA does not apply to Dominoes' website, why would they wait to do so?
And since both "sides" (liberal and conservative) of the Court have at least 4 justices right now, either could have independently granted cert. This is especially true for the conservative wing, which is typically viewed (or typically caricatured, depending on your perspective) as being more business-friendly — and which has 5 justices.
Regardless, thanks for raising this point. You're right that the absence of a cert. denial dissent does not strictly indicate a unanimous vote.
Yes, the incentives differ. Its just that if I imagne a more accessible web and try to reverse engineer the way how it come to be I end up with ranking algorithm adjustments. Availability bias, I know :-P
There is a lot of money in SEO. Even a rumor about Google adjusting its algorithm towards accessibility could trigger improvements.
Example: being a lawyer might be lucrative (just take it for the sake of argument) but their services might remain accessible to mom & pop business owners because they only need a few hours of lawyering per year, for the most part.
Admittedly, I don't think the chatbot can actually do everything the website can. But it's a start!
And if you're a business, just use forum software that has accessibility in mind.
I'll ask for a fix or a refund on the $X. If they can't fix it and I can't find a competing product for $X, then the price should have been $Y to begin with and I have no basis to complain.
I don't think that "If they can't sell broken/illegal stuff, they will just sell nothing" is a convincing argument or that nobody will show up to sell non-broken stuff.
Did you make your comment 3 paragraphs ironically?
Then make your window less wide. It's not the writer's problem.
> Did you make your comment 3 paragraphs ironically?
No, but I don't think it would be hard to read if it was one paragraph. That formatting is to add in small pauses, not to make it easier to read when lines wrap.
But... The lack of pauses is exactly what makes a tall paragraph hard to read?
Exactly. Not all we want and need to tell other people can be reduced to tweets. whoever has the windows maximised on a desktop has another option, and the paragraph was never a 140 character slogan.
If there was an online system that only worked with screen readers and the company said "sighted users can just call instead" I wouldn't use that company, and if they had the best price offering I'd be very annoyed. Making an inaccessible website is exactly the same.
If you have any links to your lectures online, please share them. It could perhaps be a “Tell HN” post here (I’m not entirely sure if that’d violate the guidelines).
It's important to note that not every site on the web falls under ADA. The crucial part of this issue is that the business must have a physical “brick and mortar” location to fall under the ADA. Presumably purely online retail businesses are not affected.
I wonder if google can be sued for not making it part of the ranking thus misleading blind users... Interesting angle for a lawyer. I hope someone at google is reading this and mitigates that risk.
There are many, many indignities that we encounter, even nearly constantly due to the way society ignores our needs.
If you go and check out some disabled activists' Twitter accounts, you may be shocked at the anger and the lack of "decency". But, put yourself in their shoes, and realize that they have been forced to deal with systematic and near-constant indignities, and many of them have been forced to fight for their mere existence as human beings.
While I don't claim to know what such disabilities are like, I feel I have experienced analogous frustrations. Back when Linux on the desktop and Firefox were catching on, I remember it being a crapshoot about whether critical sites (like banks and tax filing) would play nice with non-IE browsers, and I had to have a PC/Windows/IE setup as a fallback. Same issue: the use the meth-addled design that breaks any non-mainstream clients.
I also use Tridactyl (and before it, Vimium and pentadactyl), an extension that lets you click links from the keyboard, which is a huge UI improvement and (along with other keyboard input methods) speeds up web browsing significantly. It's generally good at detecting links, but the same sloppy design and over-clever features make clickable elements undetectable and frustrate this enhancement.
And for the kicker ... often times, these improvements "for the disabled" end up benefiting everyone else even more, but designers/buisdev people don't get it! See my previous comment about the Curb Cut Effect [1].
The web was designed with screen readers in mind. It is a serious regression to find major sites telling blind users to call in. This isn't the 60s.
Are those standards sufficiently complete as to be referenced by regulatory agencies?
If so, what's keeping us from adopting standards or at least recommendations for legal compliance?
I think that Domino's assertion is that the current framework is too vague, but I regularly see the argument that there are standards to follow. So... What are those standards, and why aren't they law?
Yes.
Shrug.
See above.
Can you please explain how the component paradigm is at odds with semantic markup? Is it just that developers are now satisfied with the semantics being in their component names and props, and don't care if it actually gets rendered as undifferentiated divs?
My own hypothesis is that React gave developers permission to question some things that were previously deemed sacred in web development, and developers went too far with that. Using a component framework like React or Vue is not inherently at odds with producing good semantic markup.
Are there any accessibility-first web design frameworks?
It's a well thought-out framework and from what I've read, accessibility was taken into account in the very first stage of the redesign of the new V2
https://designsystem.digital.gov/
Totally free since it's paid for with US tax dollars.
You could see where there could be some major nomenclature issues.
Of course a good design policy could help, but someone still can mis-spell something, or even just caps in the wrong place.
Someone might make: const Sidebar and someone else calls it SideBar.
My main question is how do blind programmers deal w/ these sort of issues, I think that would be the hardest thing not being able to see.
Hell, I've mis-spelled something before and took me awhile to figure out that was what was breaking things.
Of course maybe using statically typed languages and things could help.
I'm sure their also tooling I'm unaware of, but definitely curious how they navigate these type of scenarios.
And blocked: https://rewire.news/article/2018/04/03/sen-tammy-duckworth-s...
Why not? A blind tourist in the US shouldn't be able to order some Domino's? What about a blind person who has temporarily lost their voice (e.g. due to laryngitis, or a bad cold)? A sighted person in this situation would not have had a problem, so clearly the "full and equal enjoyment" requirement is not being satisfied here.
A blind person who has lost their voice could avail themselves of the text<->speech service I mentioned. If they also don't speak English they may need to employ a translation dictionary or some other translation service as well, but I'm not aware of any legal obligation for private businesses to provide translation services in the US.
Lynx would always think I was making an NNTP connection to news.ycombinator.com unless I put in the HTTP://
Slipped me up every time.
The people haven't decided anything. As usual, someone comes up with an absurd law, or an absurd interpretation of the law and there are not enough people affected to bother challenging it. But that doesn't mean "the people have decided".
Fighting the status quo is immensely more difficult than keeping it, even if the effect of that status quo is provably harmful.
On the other hand, regulators pouring bleach on food for the homeless and secret homeless rescue operations to avoid regulators are a real thing. As are hairdressers being shut down, fined and even jailed for things like not having a license to braid hair, or giving free haircuts to the homeless. Excessive regulations also kill jobs and productivity from overzealous and power-tripping regulators. There are horrors on both sides.
Honestly, I'd bet that after you calculate the fixed costs + variable costs + opportunity costs + economic deadweight loss of all of these solutions, it'd be better to just take the total costs--what is likely 10s to 100s of thousands per person per year--and actually just give it directly to the disabled in the form of a check, and be done with this circus.
Writing a command for a cli tool is probably reasonably accessible to blind people.
But if I think of a typical workflow with unix tools (less, grep, awk, sed, sort, cut, etc), I feel like it involves a lot of glancing at the shape of a big page of results and deciding what to do. I wonder if this is harder/impossible for blind people? Maybe one just gets better at a different workflow involving eg lots of head, tail, grep -o, and less less.
I also would guess that tab-completion isn’t super accessible but maybe I’m completely wrong.
You’d be surprised. ;) Here’s a classic from 2004:
https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782
(That specific tool probably no longer works, but Domino’s still has an API for ordering pizza… although apparently the new one isn’t officially supported.)
Basically, yes. Also, components often require extra div-nesting for robustness, and then there's the obfuscated classnames (CSS-in-JS), and the way responsiveness tends to be done these days (crude media query helper components that show/hide duplicated subsections of DOM for different devices). This all means the rendered DOM in devtools is bloated and hard to read anyway, so there's less point in caring about keeping it nice and clean.
Also, if you're mostly focused on building individual components, you probably don't feel as much ownership over the page as a whole, so you don't think about how your rendered DOM affects the document outline. Without that bigger picture, semantics isn't as interesting.
TBH we call it "myopia" in the plugin because it's short and what we think most users would understand. Many visual disabilities cause a similar blurring effect, such as cataracts.
Toolbar seems a lot easier to to use for sighted developers. Less of a learning curve.
Oddly M doesn't seem to jump to the main content for me. I wonder if I've done something wrong. I'm going to play with it.
Thanks for developing this!
Windows also has a built-in screen reader called Narrator. On Windows 10 version 1703 or later, you can turn it on with Control+Windows+Enter. As of version 1903, it works reasonably well with Chrome, Edge (both Chromium-based and legacy), and IE. Another popular option on Windows is the open-source NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/).
Disclosure: I'm a developer at Microsoft, on the Narrator team, but as usual, I'm posting on my own behalf.
Immediately after reading your post, I pressed a key combo and started playing with it. I would not have guessed that getting started was literally just a key combo away. Thanks.
The majority is not neutral but assumed to be in favor of their representative's (!) proposals.
Of course, politicians can and do deviate from this, in particular where legal bribery (lobbying) is involved, but that is the base assumption of representative democracy.
I get that some level of accessibility is reasonable, but if you're expecting the same level of UI investment there for <1% of the population, I'd call that insane. Here, he can still call in and order the pizza.
0.77% is something that would be protested ordinarily, except when it comes to accessibility concerns. Why?
AWS downtime results (or the lack thereof) are what's desired by the market. Blind people are a small market, and prioritizing them equally or disproportionately is an inefficient use of resources.
This can be countered by "we can't just abandon the disabled". And we haven't; In this case, the disabled guy can call in and order a pizza. The core service is still available to him.
However, I don't see why forcing all features for every disability should be mandated. It's a small proportion of the populace, and while steps should be taken to enable usability, I don't believe that their desires warrant as much resources as the mainline, nor do I think we should force design to cater to them.
This is particularly so as, from what I get from the ADA, there is no size requirement for such. If you classify websites as "public accommodations", then all websites big or small now have yet another thing that they can be sued for.
And if those §'s are your other ways of adding pauses, then those are entirely insufficient for inserting pauses for most readers, including me: we're not trained to read those characters as pauses.
Sure, there might be other ways. But they're not applied, making the comment harder to follow for some people than it would be had it been subdivided into paragraphs, and mrep was merely helpfully pointing that out in case mltony wanted to keep those people in mind in the future.
But good for you that you're not one of those people, I guess.
Pretend I said "indicator of separation" instead of "pause" then.
> Sure, there might be other ways. But they're not applied, making the comment harder to follow for some people than it would be had it been subdivided into paragraphs, and mrep was merely helpfully pointing that out in case mltony wanted to keep those people in mind in the future.
By talking about "other ways" to mark a logical separation, I think you're on a completely different argument than mrep. mrep is saying that it's physically hard to track the lines when reading, which is entirely a function of line length and spacing. mrep's problems would be solved if I started adding newlines in the middle of sentences, even though that would make things worse in terms of subdividing into coherent paragraphs.
If you don't care so much about open source, as I said elsewhere on the thread, Mac has VoiceOver built in (Command+F5 to enable), and Windows has Narrator (Control+Windows+Enter to enable on recent versions).
Disclosure: I'm a dev on the Narrator team at Microsoft, but I'm posting on my own behalf here.
Edit: source tweet is https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1180100942131277824
And individual rules can often sound nice at first glance, only to have disastrous consequences in practice. Add in the fact that repeal of regulation is an... onerous process, and things get even more tricky.
And also to be fair, it is very easy to dismiss advocacy for regulations as naive ideals from inexperienced people who like things that sound nice but are ignorant of the realities of the world.
Instead of going for the hyperbolic "none" put an actual number to it. Is not discriminating worth it if we then only have 99 websites? 95? 50? 20?
Source: former multi-store, multi-Rolex winning Domino's franchisee.
Once the coupon left, he went to the competition. I used to spend about $1,000 a month in advertising just to get a few new customers to call. Keeping the ones you have is orders of magnitude cheaper, even if they complain about "cold pizza" once a month or so to get a free pie.
Rather than working with community groups to help each other find a workable solution.
If you use a Mac, just enable VoiceOver: https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/_1121.html
If you use Windows, I suggest NVDA - it's a free screen reader that's similar to the most-popular-but-expensive one (JAWS): https://www.nvaccess.org/download/
IMHO the best screen readers are on your phone / tablet. This might sound crazy (how can a touchscreen work when you can't see it?) but they're much better designed than their desktop equivalents. Mobile software tends to be simpler, resulting in a better experience:
iOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDm7GiKra28
Android: https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/6007...
If you work in web tech and take 1-2 hours to learn one of these you'll be able to dazzle others with it for the rest of your life.
The chain of liability is similar, the requirement for clause in supplier contract is similar. Yet the third-party (OpenCart) appears to be where liability rests. So she needs to counter sue her supplier. That's just how it works.
So I see no difference at all for an aware store owner who wants a website.
A clause in supplier contract guaranteeing whatever - accessibility or all images being licensed covers you.
I thought that everybody being part of megacorps was the intended outcome of a lot of regulations. Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation? It's particularly ironic that the government themselves can't even seem to keep up with a lot of regulations (reminds me of GDPR and how the EU commission's websites didn't follow them).
"Ninety percent of everything is crap."
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
People tend to make rules that reflect the kind of environment that is typical for them. Federal government is large, bureaucratic, etc. It's no surprise that rules coming out of it implicitly assume that everyone works in a similar environment.
Another contributing problem is that people need to justify their paycheck. Writing more rules is how politicians look productive.
I don't know what the solution is. But assuming malice rather than trying to understand the problem space in more neutral terms is not a constructive path forward.
Would they know how? They wouldn't normally be accustomed to using those tools, right? A sighted person with laryngitis doesn't need to bother with learning text-to-speech for the 2 weeks they don't have their voice because they can just use the website. If blind users have to learn the tools, that's adding an extra burden on them. (And yes blind users have to learn how to use screenreaders, which sighted users don't, but that's a permanent requirement associated with their disability)
> because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law.
That's not what I said. I've added parentheses to my statement so it's easier to parse as a boolean "(blind and (speech impaired or unable to speak the local language))".
> I'm not aware of any legal obligation for private businesses to provide translation services in the US.
But Domino's provides access to their website in multiple languages. So a blind non-English-speaker isn't enjoying the "equal and full enjoyment" of Domino's services that a sighted non-English-speaker would.
That's all true, but I feel like there's a missing "Therefore..." at the end.
> > because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law.
> That's not what I said. I've added parentheses to my statement so it's easier to parse as a boolean "(blind and (speech impaired or unable to speak the local language))".
I know that's not what you said. It's what I said. I don't see what your second sentence has to do with it.
> But Domino's provides access to their website in multiple languages. So a blind non-English-speaker isn't enjoying the "equal and full enjoyment" of Domino's services that a sighted non-English-speaker would.
Yeah, they got sued because blind people allegedly can't use their website. Language has nothing to do with it.
The person I was originally responding to was arguing that blind people could simply order on the phone and that was an acceptable substitute for the lack of web accessibility. I was pointing out the reasons that it's not as good. Language absolutely is pertinent here.
> That's all true, but I feel like there's a missing "Therefore..." at the end.
Therefore websites should be accessible. Phone ordering isn't a good enough substitute in these other situations and the blind are placed at a disadvantage compared to the sighted.
Unless it doesn't. Yes, it gives you an audio captcha. No, it's not a good solution, as it's in english only, and a pretty good command of the language is required to solve it, especially now.
If you use TOR for some reason (nosy admin in my case). They always ask you to solve the challenge, but when you click audio, you get a spoken prompt saying "this computer is sending too many automated requests, so audio captchas have been blocked". I don't know who you'd need to sue, though. Either Google for not providing you the audio version, Cloudflare from preventing you access (and outsourcing the verification to Google), or the website itself for getting Cloudflare protection.
Bring back MDIs (maybe)!
I never keep my browser maximized.
HN and other text based sites are more readable in narrower windows or on a phone.
HN on a phone suffers when comments are deeply nested (this one) and when somebody quotes text using spaces as of it was a block of code.
As for paintings... there was really zero information on the site other than pictures of paintings? Nothing about the artist, the size, or the price? You apparently don't realize that a lot of people who rely on screen readers are able to see to some extent. They may use the screen reader to navigate your site or make purchases, but they may still be able to see the paintings (sometimes by magnifying the screen greatly and looking closely at the details) if not in exactly the same way that you do.
I don't disbelieve that shakedowns like you describe happen. But there is a reason for the rules that you are apparently breaking. It also sounds like you don't really believe that disabled folks deserve any consideration.
You say you don't hear from them, asking questions or complaining, probably because the vast majority just give up when they encounter websites like the ones you create. They are likely very tired of contacting website owners (assuming they can figure out how to do so--not easy if the site isn't accessible!) who send back insults about how they can't possibly be interested in the contents of the site or accusing them of trying to shake the website owner down.
The sort of thinking you are putting on display here is exactly why the ADA is so important.
No, that's not at all what I believe so let me clarify what my objections are. First, by its very nature "accessibility" is open to interpretation and allowing people to sue companies for non-accessible sites gives way to frivolous lawsuits. As far as I remember, there isn't even an attempt to define "accessibility" in US law. Currently it's something like "Go look at WCAG and see what you can do". This is further exacerbated by the way these lawsuits work - it makes sense to settle even if you think everything is OK with your site. The plaintiff doesn't pay anything, his lawyers work on contingency so even if you "win", you'd spend a fortune on defense and you're not allowed to recoup those expenses from the plaintiff.
Second, these are private businesses we're talking about. They should be allowed to weigh in the ROI of investing in accessibility vs the potential income from disabled customers. I'm a reasonable guy and I was happy to fix some legit issues that the lawyers pointed out. They were relatively easy to fix and I would have done it even without any threats. Not in the least because they could have affected sighted customers as well. Other issues are completely out of whack and could take man-years to sort out fully. I don't have that kind of time. So, let me reverse the question. Do you believe everyone with disability must be able to use any service, no matter the expense to the business? Do you draw the line somewhere? What about people with nut allergies? Should we force restaurants to offer guaranteed nut-free food along with their other products? Why should a blind person be able to enjoy a pizza from Domino's but a person with nut allergy shouldn't?
> I don't disbelieve that shakedowns like you describe happen.
You seem to think that the shakedowns are the minority and most cases are legit. It's the other way around if you do a quick "ADA lawsuits" search. Here is good article about the practice: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...
Sure, why not?
But I'm confused here. Does your website somehow feature both paintings and car insurance?
As but one example: there are blind people skiing now, with echolocation and other methods. I bet ski lift operators would have argued that they have nothing to offer to blind people, making that particular expansion of freedom more difficult.
"It's a website, which you look at, so clearly blind people aren't interested."
They actively encourage customers to order online, pick up in person and do carry out. Most locations have minimal seating and minimal staff. Some don't even bother to have bathrooms for their customers.
Their business model actively tries to reduce the amount of overhead for the business by promoting online ordering and carryout service. So, no, ordering by phone isn't the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
(Especially new requirements for which customers are financially incentivised to file suits, and for it's trivially simple to code up automated scanning to find businesses you can target.)
At least in California, any business with eat-in food services is required (by law) to provide restrooms. If a Domino's franchise does not offer eat-in service, it's entirely reasonable (and legal) they don't have public restrooms.
But I've done a fair amount of traveling and Domino's seems to position themselves as basically a carryout window. You can call and you can order in person, but most locations seem to do the vast majority of their business via the online ordering system.
They print off labels, slap them on the appropriate boxes and begin making the food. Some locations do a brisk business while only having one or two employees on site, plus one or more delivery drivers.
The employees sometimes clearly find it to be a hardship to take orders by phone or in person. It interrupts their workflow and they are frequently very busy just trying to fill orders coming in off the website.
If they argue that the website doesn't need to be accessible because blind people can call, that's what all their online only coupons are.
Basically what seems to have happened is this:
1. Robles sued Dominoes alleging their website violated the ADA.
2. The district court dismissed the suit, saying the DOJ needs to provide guidance on the standards that websites must meet, if the court is to hold them to the ADA. They don't examine the question of the phone.
3. The appeals court steps in and says that no, the district court was wrong to dismiss it for that reasons, and sends it back to the district court.
4. Dominoes appeals to SCOTUS, saying "help, the appeals court got it wrong, please step in!" SCOTUS declines to get involved, so the case will go back to the district court, which may still find that the phone access provided is an adequate accommodation.
> However, the district court did not reach whether a genuine issue of material fact existed as to the telephone hotline’s compliance with the ADA, including whether the hotline guaranteed full and equal enjoyment and "protect[ed] the privacy and independence of the individual with a disability." ... We believe that the mere presence of the phone number, without discovery on its effectiveness, is insufficient to grant summary judgment in favor of Domino’s.
And there might be trouble with some of Domino's coupons being online-only.
We've already learned this via curb cutouts. An argument like yours was proposed (eg. we don't need cutouts in curbs for wheelchairs, so few people have wheelchairs) but it turns out that everyone benefits from the thing installed (child strollers, luggage pulling, movers, anything on wheels suddenly benefited). The position here is that this is similar.
Having something that is readable to the blind could suddenly benefit a wide, diverse range of people- colorblind folk, people who just underwent eye surgery, cataract sufferers, even photosensitive or light-induced migraine sufferers suddenly benefit! You could even argue that it would help reduce blue light exposure at night if you could browse without turning on your screen and suddenly theres an opportunity for literally everyone using a screen to benefit from ADA compliant websites for the blind.
For the latter, how sure are you that the benefit outweighs the cost here. Given the current state of the law as I understand it, if websites would be classified as "public accomodations", they'd all have to provide accessibility options regardless of size. Moreover, I've taken a look at the WCAG guidelines to educate myself on what providing accessibility would be like. It's not exactly small, and while experienced, large organizations might be able to comply, smaller restaurants might have issues there, especially if they're skimping on the webdev side of things.
If I wanted to abuse this, I could crawl restaurant listings, hit them with a scary templated legal document threatening a lawsuit for compliance to some law they've probably never heard of.
From an outsider viewpoint, I don't really trust American regulation that much to improve the situation, especially looking at the bay area housing situation and the state of your public transport. The former is a precise case of regulation causing issues, and attempts to remove that highlight how hard it is to remove poor regulation.
Except for ADA related things, we really did need regulation to install cutouts in curbs, and now it's a major wonderful thing everyone is advantaged by.
Bur it seems the ad delivery has the priority.
I simply have a separate browser window for “wide development” sites. I see nothing wrong with that.
I've been in situations where I had privilege and I've been in situations where I couldn't get adequate accommodation for my handicap. Having privilege usually beats the tar out of having handicap accommodation.
If there are any genuinely blind people managing to supposedly "game the system" in the manner you describe, more power to them. Because trying to play it straight and do the right thing and earn my way and blah blah blah mostly seems to get me absolutely crapped all over.
> If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great!
Given how enforcement works, I can't share your enthusiasm, and in fact I will oppose accessibility regulation.
Why? When you can make sensible regulations that target the service providers like shopify, or whatever restaurants use instead and just escape the dilemma?
For small companies, even if you're in the right, the only thing that makes sense is to settle. Going to court is way too risky.
But by and large, blind people don't buy auto insurance because they don't drive and they don't buy paintings because they can't see them. Forcing these businesses to invest excessive efforts to serve 0.0001% of their potential target audience is idiotic.
And no, I'm not going to say what we sell because it's not important and this was clearly an extortion case.
It seems to me that what you sell is the central issue here, as you're claiming that blind people wouldn't be interested in it. I'm not really willing to take your word for it, given the other examples you've used.
In the case of car insurance, it's obvious that people don't only buy insurance for cars that they drive. Consider e.g. an employee of a company looking to buy insurance for company cars.
There are also lots of blind artists and blind people interested in visual arts, as you can discover from a simple google search.
It's worth remembering also that many "blind" people are partially sighted, so that they may be unable to read text but still appreciate visual arts in a direct perceptual way. On top of that, there are people who have lost their sight, and who may still have a keen interest in the visual arts formed when they were still able to see.
There was a bipartisan bill that passed the House 2 years ago (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620/...) that aimed at closing drive-by ADA shakedowns. The bill required claimants to give 120 days to business to fix issue. It seems the bill hasn't been signed by the Senate (not sure why, if anyone knows more let me know). This is a good bill, hopefully it will pass.
edit: Found why it didn't pass the Senate. Democrats in Senate promised to filibuster any attempt to bring the bill to the floor. https://rewire.news/article/2018/04/03/sen-tammy-duckworth-s....
What were these?
I suspect the main reason for the bill was the "substantial progress" wording, which would let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant.
Their first argument is that because state laws exist, there should not be a federal reform. I thought federal laws were there to set a default law for states. If they don't agree with the abuse they should work and reforming the federal law first.
Their second argument is that it 'let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant'. I don't understand. A 120-day heads-up isn't a way to get away with penalties.
And what is missing (and maybe they did say it but it is not mentioned in the article) is what they suggest as an alternative. Surely if you vow to block a reform but agree on the problem they should come up with solutions. There should be a way to both make more businesses compliant and prevent ADA shakedowns.
I am discovering how hard it is to make our laws evolve :)
I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base.
It's very easy to tell others to do something a certain way with a condescending tone from behind your screen if you've got no stakes and don't have to do any of the work involved.
Fortunately, in America we don't believe discrimination is acceptable, and we've codified that principle in the law.
Apparently, in America, its more important to appear to be virtuous than to actually do good.
The law of unintended consequences.
It's perfectly acceptable to not allow someone to rent an apartment because they have a criminal history, or a poor financial or employment history. It's also acceptable for American Express to not issue black cards to people who don't make a million dollars a year.
We have codified some traits that we do not allow discrimination based on, but generally speaking, discrimination is acceptable. Unless you change the general definition of "discrimination" to the legal one, which would seem to make the argument circular (i.e. we have banned discrimination where discrimination is the things we have banned).
You might believe it, but the law apparently says otherwise. It’s ok to disagree with laws while still complying with them, and if you’re so passionate about it... it’s ok to work to change them.
I might believe that my healthcare business shouldn’t have to comply with HIPPA but if I don’t comply I should expect to be sued.
I might believe my online store shouldn’t need to be PCI compliant and that it’s unfair, but if I don’t imply I should expect to pay for it.
Through (imperfect) representative democracy, the public has decided that being sloppy with health information, improperly protecting credit card information, and providing access to your business to disabled people are important enough to enforce via the law. It doesn’t really matter what the business owner’s beliefs are at that point.
Anyone who really thinks it’s so important to deny blind people equal access to their web site is free to run for Congress or find a politician who agrees with them to vote for.
Isn't this exactly what you're doing here, condescendingly name-calling people and dismissing their opinions?
Is he right because you agree with him? I don't think he's right. The law also doesn't think he's right.
There's also quite a few assumptions that you seem to have made in not very good faith, because how could you know how much effort it would take to fix accessibility for a website that you don't even know what sells? You've also assumed some exaggerated fraction of a percent, and assumed that a lawsuit that you don't know anything about was frivolous.
Based on what information did you assume all those things?
Is that frivolous enough for you? That's the same law you're defending here and when that article came out, it was universally decried here on HN. Funny how things change, huh? But I guess it's not ok for someone to sue UC-Berkley for providing free non-accessible lectures, while it's totally ok for a private business to be sued for having a non-accessible website.
"I simply don't believe" is not a great argument, when the previous car insurance and painting analogies proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/146368.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_...
>On average over the post-ADA period, employment of men with disabilities was 7.2 percentage points lower than before the act was passed. In addition, wages of disabled men did not change with the passage of the ADA.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/J...
This one is long, and they do mention some positive impact on education later. Didn't read that far though.
>while relative disabled employment declined significantly just after the ADA’s enactment in states in which these provisions were a substantial innovation relative to the pre-ADA state-level employment discrimination regime, relative disabled employment was stable in states with ADA-like employment discrimination regimes in place prior to the ADA’s enactment
Non-exhaustive search, but the data seems to indicate that ADA reduced employment for the disabled shortly after inception. I'm not certain on the longer term effects (those are also much more annoying to model here).
Again, Law of Unintended Consequences.
I also have a hard time answering for an anonymous group of people, as I am not HN.
You seem very eager to assign very clear and simple intentions to large and complex groups of human beings. Blind people don't like this kind of stuff, these lawsuits are frivolous, HN had this collective opinion on X but has now changed its mind.
For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law. Do you have a labeled box for me?
At the same time, all you've been doing is disingenuous interpretations of my posts and dismissing other reports as "biased", while not providing a single datapoint yourself. "GASP! How dare you say blind people are not interested in paintings! The horror and the arrogance!" Sure, there are blind people buying paintings and interested in art. How does that invalidate anything of what I said? The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people. People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?
> For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law.
Are you fine with a frivolous suit against UC-Berkeley too? Because it is possible that lawsuit is frivolous and UC-Berkeley is breaking the law. In fact that's exactly what's happened - UC-Berkeley is in technical violation of a botched law, they got threatened with a frivolous lawsuit and decided to just remove the free content. As a result everyone loses but I hope the ADA defenders are happy.
Can you source this claim? You didn't provide any data point for that. You've claimed a lot of things that you just know and seem to take offense to that being challenged.
In fact, UC Berkeley case is the only data point I've seen from you here; which feels sparse given the blanket statements you've made about the intentions of various groups of people. You won't even say what product you are selling that you know for a fact that blind people are not interested in at all.
Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?
> "The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people."
That depends on how much value you place on following the law.
> "People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?"
Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.
These aren’t hypothetical! Blind people really are interested in both these things, as you can easily find out by googling — or just using your common sense.
Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA. People often have wildly inaccurate perceptions about what people with visual disabilities can or can’t do and about what they may or may not be interested in. If “I don’t think blind people would be into this” were a valid excuse, then virtually nothing would be accessible in practice.
As the OP has already demonstrated that they have mistaken ideas about blind people, I’m not willing to take their word for it that they have some kind of special product which couldn’t possibly be of interest to the visually impaired. They are free to reveal what they actually sell, if they think they have a slam dunk case.
It's a perfectly valid complaint from someone that sells a product which is generally not interesting to blind people (you seem to think this is an impossibility, or that one edge case outlier invalidates this reality), to not want to do this if it will bring no new business and make no-one's life easier.
But if you went around saying that really it isn't important to fix vulns since they don't affect that many people you'd be rightly raked over the coals.
"It is expensive" isn't an excuse.
I don't know why you keep referring to "edge cases" and "outliers". The two actual examples that the OP has given do not meet this description.
I'm really sick of the argument by outlier where a generally true statement is countered by an outlier case as though that invalidates the whole statement.
Firmly agree. It's amazing to see how many cling to the view that people with disabilities are this alien group of "others" that think differently and are probably only interested in things for disabled people.
Like, how can anyone state that "blind people aren't interested in this" seriously? Like there exists a bullet list of things that blind people like.
You've been too busy twisting my arguments and you might have missed the link I posted earlier: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...
> Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?
Are you now trolling me? I can't believe I need to explain this but I'll make one last attempt:
UCB posts free video lectures online. UCB is technically violating ADA by not having captions. Someone says "You're breaking the law, your free content must be available to everyone with disabilities or I'll sue you". UCB complies with the law the easiest way possible by shutting down the free lectures. You say you value the ADA law so you should be happy - UCB is in compliance now. Everyone else lost, including actual people with disabilities who might have had partial access to the videos one way or another. I'll leave it to you to decide how desirable this outcome was, nitpicking "frivolous" definition notwithstanding.
> Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.
My argument is perfectly valid. I was talking about ADA until you implied that I'm bigoted and trying to tell blind people what they should be interested in. That has nothing to do with ADA. If want to go in that direction, go all the way and tell me that I'm racist because I'm not ensuring my site is accessible in Africa.
By which you mean, you decided without actually asking any of them or doing any investigation that a certain group of people don’t appreciate visual art.
The vast majority of people using screen readers have some degree of vision. I would not assume that they have no appreciation of visual art.
The ADA is needed because people have so many assumptions about people with disabilities that they don’t bother to verify.
You don't need to convince me that it would make some people's life better. That could be said of any expense made on somebody's behalf. You have to show that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense.
If you wish to continue making unwarranted assumptions about what blind people are interested in buying, that's your call. But the law doesn't (and shouldn't) back you up.
Why? No one is saying that it's always a sound business idea to accommodate people with disabilities. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But not everything is about the business owner's bottom line.