Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
latimes.comBlind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half of them you won't be able to use. Imagine that you cannot order from some online stores. You cannot fly certain airlines. And apparently you cannot order some pizza online. Worst of all you don't magically know whether a web site is accessible or not. You just go to web site and try it, spend some time to learn the layout - it typically takes blind peple longer to familiarize with new web sites, spend thirty minutes to fill out the details of your order and then when you try to click the submit button, you figure out that it wouldn't click for some reason. Being a developer you open HTML code just to realize that this is some weird kind of button that can only be clicked with the mouse, but not a screenreader. But hey, your screenreader can route the mouse cursor to this button and simulate a click. So you try a real mouse click and it still doesn't work for some reason, and I have no idea why. Finally, you give up. I hope I managed to convey a typical sense of frustration with a web-site that is not that accessible. I do get arguments of other people that it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible. and I don't know where to draw a line, but I need to say that Domino's is a large enough company and even though I hate counting other companies' money, I must say they're big enough to be able to afford to make their web-site accessible.
Have you ever encountered any web sites that you feel went above and beyond in accessibility? I have sometimes wondered while debugging a site for accessibility concerns, fixing the nth input focus problem or what not, whether it would be preferable to actually just design an entirely separate optimized audible experience instead of forcing the user to infer the shape of a designed-for-sighted people website by tabbing all over the place. I imagine that a working implementation would roughly resemble a keyboard navigable phone menu, with the main point being that it would not necessarily correspond to the visual design, but would still offer all of the functionality expected and probably in a more efficient way. Is this a thing? Should it be a thing?
I think one problem with that approach is that blindness isn’t binary. Many registered blind people are partially sighted and use screen readers and other assistive tech to supplement low vision.
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.
It seems to me that if this ruling is enforced and becomes accepted we may see a welcome move towards 'accessibility first' design - which would be an interesting paradigm shift for many devs.
I would welcome 'accessibility first' if it means people start thinking about 'semantics' again. 10-15 years ago, the web dev world was obsessed with semantics, separation of style and content, the idea you could just edit CSS to do a complete redesign (like csszengarden.com), and your markup could remain untouched, understandable by all devices present and future. I think this notion still holds some power, but it's obviously taken a hit with the component paradigm. The modern approach of 'sprinkle-on' accessibility doesn't work as well, and just feels like a messy extra step you have to do when building a feature. It was much better when people cared about baking it in from the ground up, through considered semantics and document outlines.
> it's obviously taken a hit with the component paradigm
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.
> 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?
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.
Popular web design frameworks like Bootstrap consider accessibility and encourage it in their documentation. See: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/getting-started/accessibil...
Are there any accessibility-first web design frameworks?
I think the United States Web Design System might fit in that category. It's made by the US Digital Services, and describes itself as "A design system for the federal government. We make it easier to build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites for the American public."
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.
That kind of markup may also be useful for software analysis. Parsing prose is becoming tractable. Maybe Alexa or the (nameless) Google Assistant will be able to order the pizza for you. They're supposed to be able to do it over the phone.
This approach doesn't work. It has been tried in the past, and almost always produced the same result. The alternative version is not maintained, and after a while you end up with just a small selection of features to be useable for those which use the specially designed version. It will go out of sync, or the specially designed version will never get updated. This is the best way to create a ghetto.
Microsoft does a TON of work to make it's applications not only accessible, but user friendly to screenreader and keyboard users.
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.
Ironically (I cannot seem to word this in my mind without sounding like an ass so please don't take offense), your comment is about 10 lines long on my 15 inch laptop making it somewhat difficult to read for us vision readers. A double new line every few sentences which causes a paragraph on hacker news makes it much easier.
I appreciate this feedback, I'll keep it in mind for my future comments.
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 :)
Mildly amusing. I definitely find this a little annoying too.
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 .
Hacker News could easily set a max-width on the problematic items. Every designer (and so should every web developer) knows that the sweet spot for reading is around 60 characters and a column of text if readable between 40 and 60 characters. Check for example the free course from https://betterwebtype.com/
> Every designer (and so should every web developer) knows that the sweet spot for reading is around 60 characters and a column of text if readable between 40 and 60 characters.
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.
Source code is not text, it's all serialized trees and sequences. We don't write code in paragraphs.
If you make your browser window half width, or increase your text size, you may find it's easier to read. When I'm awake and focused, I can read smaller text across longer lines without problems. When I'm more tired, I need to increase the text size, bring the screen closer, make window widths smaller.
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.
There's other cognitive issues here. I find reading from the screen difficult, CRT, LED, OLED, but I'm fine given e-ink. Any web pages with text more than a paragraph or so is sent to an e-reader for me, otherwise I just cannot comprehend the content. I can cope with snippets.
If you need more line spacing, then you can tell your browser to do that. Either a few minutes with userContent or an extension like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/line-height-adjust...
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.
The problem isn't line spacing whatsoever, it's tracing which one of the 10 lines you are reading from one side of a screen to another as your read it.
Did you make your comment 3 paragraphs ironically?
> The problem isn't line spacing whatsoever, it's tracing which one of the 10 lines you are reading from one side of a screen to another as your read it.
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.
> That formatting is to add in small pauses
But... The lack of pauses is exactly what makes a tall paragraph hard to read?
Are you arguing that, or offering it as a potential argument? § That's not what mrep claimed made it hard to read. They said it was hard to trace lines. § And there are other ways of adding pauses, on top of those pauses not being very necessary in the first place. I could do without them just fine. § More generally, as long as a big paragraph is focused on one topic, and nobody is doing a point-by-point reply, it works just fine.
I am arguing that, and it's also how I read mrep's comment: it's a wall of text with no clear pauses, making it hard to read.
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.
> those are entirely insufficient for inserting pauses
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.
Then I think we have a different interpretation of mrep's point. (Where my interpretation has going for it that mrep themselves isn't even doing what you're saying they want.)
> Then make your window less wide. It's not the writer's problem.
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.
Problem is that tabbed interfaces make window resizing harder.
Bring back MDIs (maybe)!
It’s the opposite: if you insist on keeping your browser maximized that can mean that you probably need all the width on some other site which scales poorly.
I never keep my browser maximized.
As a reference, I maximize my browsers when I'm using developers tools or when I'm using pseudo desktop web apps, usually customer mandated. I'm thinking about Kanbanize, Trello, almost all of Google, Travis, etc. Apps that display a lot of information.
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.
Nope, problem is each window may need a different sizing. With a tabbed interface you resize the lot.
For those with your use cases the browsers should allow “per site” saved local margins.
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.
Tree-Style-Tabs (Firefox extension) prevents this issue.
Just tried out Tree style tabs, how does this prevent this issue? I have two pages in two tabs open. To read one I resize the window, I go to the other it has been resized also.
I have such bad eyesight that I gave up my driver's license. I didn't find it that burdensome to read the comment in question.
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...
> so impinged upon
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.
So the GP volunteers unasked for feedback and that's cool. I do the exact same thing they did and somehow that makes me the asshole?
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.
> somehow that makes me the asshole?
Um. No?
I don't think anyone implied you were. :S
Sounds like a pain in the ass.
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?
> 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.
Interestingly, I did learn braille. However, I didn't really learn to use paragraphs until 6th grade. Therefore, it doesn't come very naturally to me.
Is there a lint-like tool that you would recommend to developers to scan their web application for accessibility issues (and ideally suggest alternative best-practices)?
EDIT: found this Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List with 132 items listed! Anyone have advice on which ones are best?
On a related note, our app has a lot of charts. What are the best practices for making time-series graphs accessible? I'd imagine just listing the values wouldn't be particularly helpful for graphs with hundreds or more points - and being able to programmatically summarize the interesting takeaways from an arbitrary chart would probably be useful for our sighted customers as well.
Just pondering whether there is a system that converts line graphs into series of rising and falling tones, while a voice reads out the x axis markers.
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
Highcharts has put a lot of effort into designing charts to be accessible. They did a presentation about it at my workplace a few months ago and I was impressed by the passion and level of user testing they had done.
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)
Sarah Newman from prgmr.com here. It's funny you should ask this - we just kicked off an effort a week ago to work on this problem. We don't even have a website yet for the software, but please feel free to watch audiplot.org for future developments.
I’d be interested to hear more about this as well
My team at Microsoft maintains an open source browser extension for this called Accessibility Insights (https://accessibilityinsights.io), which is what Microsoft recommends internally for its own teams developing websites.
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!
I use https://khan.github.io/tota11y/ which you can add to your browser to run through your site. I also sometimes just close my eyes and run a screen reader through a site to see if I could navigate it reasonably. Neither of these options helps with catching everything but they're better than nothing.
For that, you need to know all the quick navigation shortcuts a screen reader can use. Otherwise you're not doing it very efficiently.
The lint tool in create-react-app does this out of the box. :)
A Chrome extension I've used is Siteimprove Accessibility Checker https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/siteimprove-access...
We use WAVE tool internally, but it may not be the 'coolest'
Is there some kind of "Yelp for websites for blind people"? In other words, a web site for blind people that lets you know whether a given site works with your screen reader? It seems like it could be a big time saver.
None that I'm aware of. The problem is checking whether a web site is accessible is a manual operation and therefore time-consuming. And it often happens that companies break accessibility, and then they fix it, and then they break it again...
Interesting. Accessibility sounds like an important indexing signal for search engines. At internet scale companies this seems pitch-worthy to discuss building some training data annotated and building out some automated indexing engine for accessible only filter for results.
Google do reward you for following web accessibility best practices, but it doesn't know if the actual experience is accessible.
I wanted to work on it, I even have a domain for it bought already, though other things in life, procrastination among them, stopped me for now. I will do it someday, though.
It there is one, I hope they made it styled with black on black text and/or with a braille font!
My guess is that your comment is satire, but you should be aware that 'accessible' doesn't just mean 'accessible to blind people' - among other issues, some people have reduced motor function, others can't see contrast as well as the typical human eye.
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/
I'm not blind but I'm laughing from reading your annecdote because: I'm a developer with typical accessability requirements who has a similar experience ordering pizza online and winds up calling ;-)
Easy to read/follow menu, and a phone call isn't that hard, with front door payment.
Online shopping experiences vary widely. I love it when the interface isn't even noticed/gets out of your way.
Hey, thank you for your insight into the life of blind users. I have often wondered if my sites that I've been part of building have been accessible but without proper guidance or customer requirements, nobody has really cared that much to check out.
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.
Not GP, but dev learning a11y too.
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.
Thanks, a lot appreciated!
I actually work more in backend area, so I am not that familiar with accessibility standards in HTML. I am only a user there. But looks like others have already answered some of your questions.
No problem, and I'm happy that this came up so that I can try my best to make things better for users like you :).
I have a question for you that I've always wondered about the answer, but I do not know anyone to which to pose the question.
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?
Thank you for your insight. One thing that I've wondered for a while is, what do you do about captchas? The whole point of them is to prevent access to the webpage unless a person sees the graphic. Can you sue Google under ada?
Google's recaptcha is actually somehow really good - you just click on the checkbox and somehow it magically understands that you're a human, even when using a screenreader. Other websites have audio captcha. In the worst case, you can install a captcha-solving browser extension - they are typically 90% accurate.
> Google's recaptcha is actually somehow really good - you just click on the checkbox and somehow it magically understands that you're a human,
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.
A. Whoever has the most $$, or B. (More likely), whoever is in charge of the element/component that is blocking accessibility. Since recaptcha is an embed that would be Google.
Newer recaptcha uses your google account as a heuristic if you’re logged in.
A disabled person should not need to opt into a google account to be able to browse the web
Not only a disabled person...
I think they have audio?
Pardon my curiosity, did you type this on a keyboard by touch typing? If so how do you recognize and correct typos? Or did you use speech recognition? Same question about handling errors.
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.
> Pardon my curiosity, did you type this on a keyboard by touch typing? If so how do you recognize and correct typos?
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.
I've touch-typed for 20 years and sometimes a random friend (whose job isn't related to computers) catches me doing it and is either amazed or thinks I'm showing off. To me, I'm just typing. Like other commenters, I also self-correct while doing it.
I never learned touch typing, so I was unaware of that. I pick type with both hands without looking at the keyboard, but I have to look at what I'm typing on the screen to know when I've made a typo.
Yes, touch-typing. I feel when my fingers hit two keys at the same time - that's the time to go back and check the previous word for spelling mistakes. And I use screenreader to read things for me.
Just to agree with the other's reply here: I am not blind, but do touch typing. Sometimes I don't even look at the screen or keyboard since I've learned to copy things (Such as a paper I've written by hand). You do get to a point where you develop a "sense of typo" and can simply correct the mistake.
It has its limitations: It doesn't help you spell better, only correct typing mistakes.
Typing class expected me to look at the sample I was typing, not at my own output. Being able to accurately type without looking at your output is a standard expectation for sighted people.
I don't know if this would even be possible but, since you're a programmer and all, it would be cool if you built a small webapp/task-based game for people who aren't vision-impaired to try to navigate and experience the frustrations you experience every day. A gallery full of mystery photos, random buttons that needed to be clicked a weirdly specific way or don't work at all.
We wrote a free screen reader simulator for this purpose (Chrome plugin):
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.
I was surprised to find myopia here. Is there a level of myopia that can't be corrected with glasses and thus is a disability?
Pathological myopia can't be corrected with glasses.
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.
This is great. Until now I've been using ChromeVox, but found it quite difficult to use. Many esoteric keyboard shortcuts, some of which conflict with other browser functionality.
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!
Just install a screen reader and close your eyes.
On iOS you can also enable the “Screen Curtain” to see how well voiceover will do: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443
Yep when I was doing accessibility dev, that was exactly how I tested. It's pretty effective and it also gives you a feel for how crappy the tools are for the blind.
what is the learning curve like for screen readers? ...and what form does documentation come in? I'd like to learn but not sure where to get started.
You can figure out the basics in about 20-60 minutes.
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.
Cool, I didn't even know that was a thing I could do. I suppose I imagined screen readers as some sort of expensive software.
The open source ones are basically as good as the for-pay ones at this point.
I wonder whether there's a tool that could make websites tactile. Like, a pad with pins that can be programmatically raised and touched, and are used for drawing the website's layout. You could put your hands on it, touch it and feel the layout of the website, scroll around, and eventually click your selection. It can substitute braille font for the font used on the website.
There's an idea for this called the Braille e-book. I don't think anyone's actually brought one to market, though.
In your opinion, what major sites are doing it right?
Websites from big IT companies tend to be good: Google, GMail, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, Bing.
Interestingly, the primary surprise in your comment is that you say that just about 20% of website are not accessible - I'd have expected that percentage to be far higher! Of course, there's a difference between "usable" and "easy to use", I guess.
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.)
As a developer, can you weigh in on why you think it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible? Are there inherent technical challenges that make it difficult to make accessible websites? Or is it that there's a constant churn of new front-end technologies that typically treat accessibility as an afterthought, and typically leave accessibility as an afterthought that will finally get properly nailed down just in time for the next new technology to come along? Or is it business problems such as the client demanding some overdesigned user experience that can only be accomplished by manually implementing non-standard input elements?
You don't need any non-standard input elements to make web site accessible. In fact the opposite is true: if you only use standard HTML elements, chances are your web-site is going to be fully accessible. It is when developers decide to use some fancy javascript instead of a standard button, or some other fancy form controls, with tons of javascript, this is when screenreaders tend to have problems trying to figure out what's going on.
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.
Yeah. Sorry for being unclear, but that's what I was thinking: My hunch is that standard HTML elements tend to be accessible almost by default, while non-standard JavaScript-heavy things are more likely to be inaccessible by default.
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.
Buttons simply doing nothing happens all the time, sometimes reloading the page makes them work, other times the site is complete broken and it’s time to move on.
Thank you for sharing. For you what are the best resources out there to learn how to do a proper design for blind people or having other disabilities? Also do you have some examples of website done right in UX for blind people? Like for instance I remember using tab on Youtube and they placed a very handy hidden `Skip Navigation` button after 2 tabs that makes navigation faster and easier. Do you have example of that?
Why wouldn't a blind person just call for a pizza?
Exactly the same reasons why a sighted person wouldn't.
There was also special deals which promoted the use of the online form.
Fewer errors from people mishearing you too.
Lol I do that.
You really think it's aroun 20% though? I very rarely have problems. Sure learning layouts is interesting, but problems where I flat out can't do something is rare. I'd have to agree that it's more the case when it comes to desktop applications. I'll download something and not be able to use it at all.
The demo part of this video by Tanja Kleut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHgZTeMBihQ make me understand better accessibility issues. Without understanding and experiencing, I think it's difficult to really empathize and so the priority to have better accessibility is seen as low.
I'm sure a bunch of people have inundated you with other questions, but what other pain points do you have? How are Docx and PDF to deal with?
Microsoft Word is fully accessible. As for PDFs, as long as they are not scanned, most likely they are accessible. Sometimes forms in PDF files are not very accessible.
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.
As for PDF accessibility, it heavily depends on used language. In English it's usually ok, but I saw countless PDFs (some of them written in TeX) in other languages that render ok, but the text actually consists of letters followed by appropriate diacritical mark.
Or those image PDFs that you have to use OCR with and then you get to try and clean them up afterwards because they didn't come out as cleartext. Those are always fun!
I'd like to make sure I'm testing more of the website that I work on to make sure they're as accessible as possible.
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?
The big three are Jaws and NVDA for Windows and VoiceOver for Mac. You probably don't need to test with all three every time since they are similar in terms of what kind of content they can access on the pages. But each of them has its own quirks, there are web-pages that only one of them can read.
That's great. I can push to rotate between those three on deployments.
I've typically only tested with one, so it'd be good to ensure there's nothing weird with others.
Thanks!
There are so many great tools out there now. Lighthouse in Chrome Devtools has an Access audit built in which will give you a few hints. There's also a very useful auditor that just came out from Paciello Group called the Arc toolkit: https://www.paciellogroup.com/toolkit/. Chromevox and Voiceover can be turned on to get quick screenreader-ish feedback.
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.
I’m not the parent comment, but VoiceOver and NVDA are great text-to-speech screen readers.
not trying to be an asshole but how long did it take to type this comment? do you use some sort of voice to text software?
To be fair: I can type pretty easily without looking at the keyboard. I am typing this sentence with my eyes closed, even fixing a typo while I do it. Touch typing solves a lot of this and a tab helps to hit the reply button.
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.
I never even thought about this before, you gave me a little eye opener, thank you
Thank you for a glimpse into your perspective.
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?
Curious, not trying to be a jerk. For something like ordering pizza (or even plane tickets), how much worse is calling to make the order as opposed to ordering online?
It depends. If I know I'll make an order only once, calling phone is probably easier. If that's a pizza, and say I have expectation that I might be ordering same pizza every week or every month, then ordering through website is easier, since you can save your credit card information there instead of repeating it on the phone every time. But even for one-time orders it is good to have an accessible site, since what I mentioned above - I would waste my time if the web site is not accessible. I assume if they had put a notice on their web site saying that it is not accessible for screenreaders - please call this number instead - that would be already a better solution rather than just an inaccessible web site.
Thanks for the response.
From another angle here, I occasionally have problems that make me use a screenreader.
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.
Same. I have severe convergence insufficiency (that is highly variable and cannot be corrected, from a practical standpoint) due to a rare immune-mediated neurological disease.
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.
Blind people are the same as everyone else, but with reduced vision. So when you ask "Why don't blind people just call?" you actually need to be asking "Why don't I just call?" Blind people will have the same reasons.
If they didn't have online only deals wouldn't providing a person to talk to meet their burden of enabling that user?
Most people I know prefer to use an online system to avoid talking to people especially if there's a complex process or lots of information to enter. Blind people feel the same way. A phone based option is not "offering the same service" to blind people.
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.
But maybe the commentor does just call? I usually do for pizza because pizza websites suck even for people with typical vision. IME.
I’m not blind. But I would be furious if I had to call to place an order rather than submit a web form, merely because the site couldn’t be bothered to adhere to basic standards and instead used meth-addled “code artisans” practicing resume-driven development.
Coming from somebody who is disabled: this is what life is like for a disabled person.
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.
I agree with such activists. It's stupid to have to make a phone call when a website should be perfectly capable for this role.
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.
What standards should those sites adhere to?
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?
WCAG 2.1
Yes.
Shrug.
See above.
Obviously you should just be allowed to use the same services as everyone else. The web is accessible by design, so all sites that are not accessible are broken. The people that made them broke them.
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...
There's no way they don't wave that fee for blind customers.
Domino's wouldn't give Robles the online price according to other articles.
Did they really go through an expensive legal process defending themselves in court rather than discount a large pizza by 10%?
Stupid franchisee. I kept a coupon active for years after the promo ended for one guy. He liked his $11.99 Veggie lovers. The coupon was hidden, but if you manually typed the code, it worked. I called him personally after he complained to corporate about the promo ending. I walked him through how to get the deal and he ordered weekly until I sold the store. The new owners deactivated all old promos. He had my cell phone number, so I got to find out, after I sold the store, thst he now orders Papa John's.
Source: former multi-store, multi-Rolex winning Domino's franchisee.
How much did it cost you to keep providing the discounted price?
It was $5 cheaper than regular menu price. But he ordered a literal 100 times a year with the coupon, tipped the delivery driver $5 every time and the order still was more profitable than $15 of chicken wings.
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.
Not only that but Domino's "look forward to presenting our case at the trial court."
Rather than working with community groups to help each other find a workable solution.
There's also no guarantee the service desk will be open or responsive when you want it.
To be honest, Domino’s pizza ain’t good. You probably better off this way.
I'm curious. How do you handle typos in code? Say you're working on a team, and they've got a lot of foreign devs who mis-spell words like color with o u r.
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?
It isn't a mis-spell. Color is used primarily in U. S. Rest of the English speaking world uses colour.
yeah but my point being if half the team is uk and half is U.S. and you have a blind programmer on each team.
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.
I once inherited code written in Spanish and I knew just enough to figure out how to maintain it. Definitely slowed me down a ton but I learned more of a real language while coding! I wouldn't recommend it though for any serious application haha. Back in the day it was on Flash and classic ASP which were both new to me too. Back then you didn't handpick your projects. You just took them and figured them out. I'd attribute a lot of my success from plunging into those types of things.
Yeah, I worked a lot on software written by russians, ukrainiens and chinese; basically the software has no usable comments for me (translation software was not helpful back then) and a lot of variable and method names were wrongly spelled english or ascii (not cyrillic etc) written russsian etc. It had a solid feeling of being obfuscated code a lot of the time. Fun times.
It’s reasonable to standardise on a flavour of English that you want your code and comments to be written in. For some teams, that’ll be US English and all developers should be expected to abide by that standardisation. For other teams it’ll be British English and US developers would be expected to meet the common coding standard too.
Screen readers are modal and I believe e.g. JAWS has a character-by-character mode to spell out the character that's under the cursor. Aside from that, from what I saw in a conference presentation, sight impaired users can use tools like Intellisense.
Small personal story:
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!
This happens more often than you might think: by doing basic steps to make your product usable, it suddenly becomes much more useful and in-demand than you anticipated. More examples are:
- 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
I'm curious as to how they knew what was what when their order came given it's all frozen food in bags/boxes with the instructions printed on the packaging on how to reheat/cook it. That seems like a much larger hurdle than ordering.
As I recall, they had their own system for how they stored food, so that they knew what was what.
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.
Great story! Thx for sharing :)
Is this argument for government regulation or against? I see ss an argument against, but I’m sure most people disagree.
I actually thought about this very question when I was writing the story.
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.
It's just a nice story.
Awesome story. Very touching.
Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn't really say anything new here. They declined to hear Domino's appeal of the Ninth Circuit's (unanimous and clearly correctly decided) reversal of the District Court's absurd dismissal.
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.
> It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards.
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.
That is a natural consequence of the way in which the United States chooses to enforce rules like this. In some other countries, there are regulators who do this kind of thing and issue relatively small fines and compliance notices. Since the regulator itself is publically funded, it does not need to live off the fine income.
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.
> but that is the system the people have decided they want
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".
"The people have decided not to bother to do anything about it" sounds like the same thing to me.
On the contrary, the power dynamics is completely different. It's one thing to come up with a ridiculous policy (which is easy for a politician to do) and put the onus on minority of affected people to fight it, while the majority is neutral. And it's another thing to ask everyone to vote on the policy before it's enacted.
Fighting the status quo is immensely more difficult than keeping it, even if the effect of that status quo is provably harmful.
The politician is not some random person removed from reality. He/she represents the people, is accountable to them and campaigned on how they want to represent them.
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.
It's interesting, at least. Usually I would actually say separations of powers are good, as are powers to the judiciary; but you are correct that we do have a problem here with this in the States with frivolous lawsuits and bloodsucking lawyers.
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.
> Our site is of zero interest to them.
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.
Is stargazing popular among blind people?
I'm going to bet a nontrivial number of visually impaired folks are very interested in tools that provide better views of the night sky and in sites with details about how to find and view celestial objects. You seem to be very lacking in imagination here. Anyway, it's not up to you to decide what they can or should be interested in, just because they experience the world differently than you do.
No, but buying a telescope for a sighted friend or relative as a present could be.
Would a blind person be interested in a painting or car insurance? Another reason I'm sure about it is if there was genuine interest, there would be calls from blind people - "Hey, I'm interested in your products but I'm blind, can you help me with figuring out some things on your site?" or "Hey I'm blind and I have problem accessing certain features on your site, can you please fix those issues?". We haven't got one single call like that. Ever. The people who sued us were never customers, neither before nor after the adjustments we made to the site. The fact they went straight to threats and offers of settlement clearly indicates that it's a racket, not someone genuinely interested in the products offered.
I'm really curious why you think a blind person wouldn't be "interested" in car insurance. They may not be able to drive themselves, but that doesn't mean they can't be the person paying the bills in a family that owns cars and thus has to have car insurance.
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.
> It also sounds like you don't really believe that disabled folks deserve any consideration.
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...
I have met a restaurant owner who had exactly the same issue. A lawyer came into his restaurant alongside someone in a wheelchair. They noticed paper rolls were not at a correct height, threatened to sue, and let them settle for less. For the restaurant owner, it didn't seem that they genuinely cared about the accessibility problem, but rather making money off using ADA.
Could the restaurant owner have been biased against the person who is compelling them to take action that they don't want to take? I would probably take the owner's psychoanalysis of them with a grain of salt.
According the restaurant owner the lawyer was suing hundreds of small restaurants in the Bay Area. Also they didn't seem to care about the restaurant at all, and were only interested in finding out all violations.
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....
That sounds like a great bill. Anything that lets people hold businesses accountable re:accessibility without opening gaping loopholes for legal shenanigans like that seems like the right balance here.
Sounds like it wouldn't have helped at all. From the article: "Proponents of HR 620 say that changes to the ADA are needed to prevent so-called drive-by lawsuits, where attorneys and people with disabilities use the ADA for their own monetary gain by filing frivolous claims. Yet, as the Democrats noted in their letter, HR 620 will do nothing to stop such cases because 'these private actions seeking damages are filed pursuant to specific State laws that unlike title III of the ADA, authorize monetary damages. HR 620 would make no change to those state laws and therefore fails to address lawsuits seeking damages.'"
I suspect the main reason for the bill was the "substantial progress" wording, which would let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant.
Thanks for pointing this out.
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 :)
>Other issues are completely out of whack and could take man-years to sort out fully.
What were these?
>Would a blind person be interested in a painting or car insurance?
Sure, why not?
But I'm confused here. Does your website somehow feature both paintings and car insurance?
No, these were obviously examples. Our site sells expensive products that require a certain level of "visual appreciation", just like paintings. No one would buy something like that, without being able to see it.
I mean, you're not making a very good case for yourself here. You won't say what your product is, and the examples you give are things that blind people would in fact be interested in.
You're really intent to get me on a technicality. Fine, I'll concede - somewhere out there, there is a blind person whose pride in life is finding the best auto insurance deals for his relatives. And somewhere out there, there is a blind person who buys random paintings online and hangs them on his walls just so he can have fun conversations about them over dinner with friends.
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.
> I'm not going to say what we sell because it's not important
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.
You're ignoring most of what OP is saying, he's completely right in saying he should have no obligation to dedicate huge resources to a potential 0.00001% of his customers which may or may not even exist, when the only benefit will be not getting hit by frivolous lawsuits.
> "he's completely right in saying he should have no obligation"
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?
OK, here is a case that we do know something about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-uc-berkel...
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.
You are moving goalposts here, are we now debating whether any ADA-related lawsuit ever has been frivolous?
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?
No goalposts were moved by me. In this thread, the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns and the UC-Berkely case is just one more datapoint. I provided an article with detailed analysis of the practice as well.
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.
> "the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns"
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.
> 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'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.
I'm not ignoring it. I simply don't believe that he/she is selling a product which would be unusually uninteresting to blind people. People with visual disabilities are a few percent of the population.
Who has got more information here, you, who has no idea what the OP is selling, or OP who is actually selling the thing?
"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.
> previous car insurance and painting anecdotes proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.
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.
My problem is that everyone in these threads acts like this all takes zero effort. There's no "turn on a11y" switch, you have to dedicate resources, money and time.
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.
Not having security vulns in your software costs money. A large number of users aren't actually harmed by vulns or don't care about them.
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.
Selling stuff requires complying with lots of laws that take time, money and effort to comply with.
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.
Sure, you can find blind people with intense interest in visual media. There have to be a few out there. However, a quick google (as you requested) on the art topic seems to indicate that art targeted at the blind is rarely of the painting variety, but of a more tactile sort. This... would not be appreciated in many museums, where touching the exhibits is typically discouraged (Admittedly, audio enjoyment of visual art does exist).
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.
I think you are forgetting the existence of partially sighted people. Most people who use screen readers can see. There wouldn't be anything odd or unexpected about such people being interested in paintings or other visual art forms. On top of that, many people who are fully blind were not blind from birth, and so are about as likely to be interested in visual arts as anyone else.
I considered them, but blind enough to appreciate visual art but too blind to use a webpage seems like a rather narrow group to me. It's one of those things where I would very much need evidence accept.
>I considered them,
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.
And I ask of you. How many are there. How large is this population. If you support regulation, give numbers to back it up. The absence of regulation is the default state, and to introduce some should require not a feel good statement, but a concrete estimate of how much impact it will have vs the potential cost.
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.
It's not the government's job to figure out what blind and partially sighted people are and aren't interested in buying. Would you really support regulation that attempted to distinguish between "products blind people are interested in" and "products blind people aren't interested in"? That seems entirely unworkable.
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.
> You have to show that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense.
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.
> Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA.
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.
It's not only the information about the thing OP is selling, it's also the information about blind people OP seems to be lacking.
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.
Your language here is really insulting. Take a step back and consider maybe you don't know everything there is to know about how visually impaired individuals live their lives. They aren't all (or even mostly) fully blind! They have families which usually include fully sighted individuals! Meanwhile they are also capable human beings who have all the same needs and concerns about day-to-day life as anyone else.
Are you surprised? He's got a product which he believes has no value to blind people and a record of exactly zero people calling to complain, but he's getting shit on by the a11y brigade anyway.
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.
> 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.
Fortunately, in America we don't believe discrimination is acceptable, and we've codified that principle in the law.
Ha. The ADA has been put into law, yes. The result was reduced employment opportunities for disabled people. Because the cost of conforming to the law is prohibitive.
Apparently, in America, its more important to appear to be virtuous than to actually do good.
The law of unintended consequences.
Can you source your claim? I am genuinely interested in reading it.
As with most research, take multiple sources. A quick survey showed this (admittedly rather old paper), but it does show the immediate effect:
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).
The negative effects on employment were a blip:
It's great to think that the ADA damage was short-lived. But rather than a 'blip', it lasted 'through the 1990s' by that reference (thanks!) which cut out the prime earning years of a whole generation of disabled people.
Again, Law of Unintended Consequences.
Of course we do, we allow and encourage discrimination on a number of fronts. The most obvious is discrimination based on socioeconomic status; we have a whole host of "luxury" products that are kept inaccessible to lower income people so they can serve as a status symbol. Education is another lateral that is generally viewed as acceptable for discrimination (i.e. jobs that require a particular degree). Financial, employment and criminal histories are all also acceptable to discriminate based on.
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).
> 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.
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.
It is entirely possible a blind person would buy a painting or a piece of artistic jewelry as a gift for a friend or family member; they may even buy one, sight unseen, to decorate their apartment or body for the enjoyment of their sighted friends.
> 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.
Isn't this exactly what you're doing here, condescendingly name-calling people and dismissing their opinions?
You seem to be under the impression that all blindness is exactly the same. There are people who have serious difficulties reading at normal screen distances, but still have enough sight to appreciate a painting.
Yes, and that impression is correct because "blind" means someone who can't see. At all. The people you mention are usually referred to as "visually impaired" or "legally blind".
This thread is about people who need visual accommodations to use websites, not completely blind people exclusively. You're the one who's been talking like they're the same thing.
I believe the idea is that you (or I, or the government) doesn't get to decide which topics should or should not be interesting for different groups.
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.
Yeah, I can imagine how many things would be different if businesses had been able to decide what blind people like.
"It's a website, which you look at, so clearly blind people aren't interested."
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.
I'm sorry you got burned, but this is not the best way to make your point.
> Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn't really say anything new here.
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.
I don't think we know it was unanimous. The orders list doesn't say anything to that effect, and the justices rarely publicly dissent from denials of cert, so their silence doesn't mean anything.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/100719zor_m6...
You're right that public dissents from cert. denial are not as common as dissents from SCOTUS opinions. However, given the questions presented, the current composition of the Court, and the fact that only 4 justices are needed to grant cert., it still seems unlikely that the Court would rule in favor of a different defendant in a different case.
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.
That's awesome to hear, thanks for clarifying.
No, the supreme court prefers to have lots of lower courts weigh in before deciding anything if at all possible. That way there are lots of well reasoned smart people who have thought about the problem and so by considering all different thoughts they are more likely to get it right. They are well aware that they are the last resort and so what they say goes even if it is wrong so they avoid being wrong.
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.
'Full and equal enjoyment' is quoting US code out of context. The law reads "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."
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.
> I'm not a lawyer, so I probably have this wrong
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.
Someone who is both blind and speech impaired or unable to speak the local language can't order food over the phone.
I'm pretty sure phone companies in the US are required to provide free text<->speech services (dictation) for people who can't speak and/or hear. They've been popular with prank callers. Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about disabilities.
> Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about disabilities.
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.
I should have said "Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about the Americans with Disabilities Act," because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law.
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.
> A blind person who has lost their voice could avail themselves of the text<->speech service I mentioned
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.
> 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)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 not sure if this changed, but as I recalled, Domino's site was a Flash application with a pretty non-standard UI. Their lack of accessibility may be a consequence of that technical decision.
Dominoes also literally has a client on every platform in existence from smart tvs to smart assitants to slack.
I'm certain they can figure out a viable option with their APIs
I develop accessible android apps. Between complicated designs, broken android libraries, different talkback behaviours, and vendor bugs, accessibility can be very difficult. The effort we expend on accessibility (including dedicated testers) is massive. Only large organisations can afford to do this.
There are zero inferences that can be drawn from the Supreme Court not granting cert on an appeal. The Supreme Court denies the vast majority of appeals they receive, and only take a case in a narrow and not always intuitive set of circumstances. Headline is very misleading.
> full and equal enjoyment
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.
The argument from Domino's was that you could still order over the phone, and thus they weren't discriminating against customers.
And at the end of the day developers worldwide like all humans choose to keep a job, maintain their livelihood and avoid getting fired.
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.
> And at the end of the day developers worldwide like all humans choose to keep a job, maintain their livelihood and avoid getting fired.
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.
So somehow along my career I fell into accessibility dev for a while. Funny enough it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did and there was always plenty of work. It is easily outsourced to a remote developer because all you really need is a browser and a screen reader. In my opinion there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility, it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page. No I am not saying that this provides a great experience for the blind but it at least helps them to be able to get around the site.
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.
> it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags
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.
This is a great comment.
Imagine the investment that would suddenly start in accessibility if Google publicly announced it was an important part of search engine rankings.
These scanners exist, and they can serve a dual purpose; scan the web for websites to sue. And yes this is happening.
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.
IF google would make it part of their rankings it doesn't matter if you could be sued or not - you will make sure you are accessible to avoid being not found.
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.
You'd be surprised. In Florida, there have been cases which have set precedent as websites being similar to libraries, which would mean the ADA applies to purely digital places. The problem is that the ADA has never set explicit rules for website accessibility.
It's also a great way to persuade managers. Actually, a lot of the time you can just tell them you're doing SEO because nowadays they're fundamentally the same. Almost everything you do for accessibility has a positive impact on SEO.
Reducing product performance for your userbase to send a message seems to be a common trend nowadays.
I did accessibility dev in the mid 2000s and hand-crafted accessible html (or stripped down templates) was - at that point - easily the number 1 search result for a relevant query.
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.
It's the argument I made yesterday in a related thread: if the screen reader can't read it, the machine can't read it. Any machine, whether it's the Turing machine that's trying to make heads or tails of your website so it can read the text to a user, or the actual machine running in some Google data center somewhere. Or the machine running your script to make life a bit less of a series of button clicks.
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.
I would argue that accessibility is already part of the ranking algorithm because accessibility and good UX go hand-in-hand.
I would be surprised if Google didn't know a given customer was disabled and serve up accessible results. Whether that is something an engineer deliberately coded or whether it was an algorithm that learned that a given cluster of users exhibits a strong preference for accessible sites.
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.
>Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven
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.
You know, I really think this would work. If Google penalised non-accessible sites and provided clear guidance on how to make sites accessible - companies and devs would take notice, and make the changes needed.
In a way it's a bit frightening that Google have that power, but it does have the opportunity to be used for good.
Honestly, if accessibility like this was one of the higher scoring mechanisms for SEO in web sites, not only would screen readers work better, but any kind of automated parsing would be orders of degrees easier.
I work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to help me, but they don't know what is accessibility and what is screenreader. Is there a good document on how to make web sites accessible that I can show them?
Consider installing a screenreader and the Lynx web browser so you can demonstrate what it’s like to access internal apps/websites with those tools. It might help to record your experience so people can watch the demo at their convenience.
Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...
What does lynx have to do with anything? No blind person I know browses the internet without JS, and every major screen reader supports it.
You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.
I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?
The most popular FOSS screen reader by a very, very large margin is NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org). It is Windows specific, though.
There's also the Orca screen reader for GNOME. And I believe TalkBack for Android and ChromeVox for Chrome OS are both open source.
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.
@Zeldman tweeted this screen reader survey, which includes free/non-free options plus lots of usage data... https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/
Edit: source tweet is https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1180100942131277824
Not blind, but an HN and lynx story. I sometimes use lynx these days because Canadian telecoms have shitty mobile bandwidth plans.
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.
We had a "professionalism" class in my CS undergrad program. A day using the web with a screen reader would do wonders, I think, for awareness of the issue.
I'm extending a standing offer to come in and give a guest lecture on accessibility, focusing on blind and low-vision users, for any university or high school in the Seattle metro area, free of charge. I've done this a few times already. My presentation would have a mix of concepts, demos (both good and bad), and practical advice. My email is in my profile if anyone is interested.
Have you done this or could you do this as a video or audio that’s posted online and available to anyone? That’d help thousands of people.
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).
The W3C preliminary check is a great document to get you to at least usable:
Google have a good course on web accessibility which includes doing a little basic coding, looking at ARIA specs and such. I'll dig out the link when I'm back later.
Are CLI tools inherently accessible?
I’d guess not necessarily.
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.
I guess 99.9% are. However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza or buy your weekly load of groceries with a CLI tool :-) If you want to interact with the rest of the world, you will likely need to use the web...
> However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza [..] with a CLI tool :-)
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.)
Have you tried Emacs?
Emacs is a GUI tool using curses (or similar). That it runs on a terminal doesn't make it a cli app in any of the regular sense...
Huh. This makes me wonder how many blind people prefer using ed.
Since 23 years now :-)
I often use w3m.
> In my opinion there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility, it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page.
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.
A curious thing is that lots of accessibility improvements tend to be good for all users. Getting rid of crazy Javascript things which screen readers can’t understand makes it less likely that your website is buggy and fails for some regular users. Using simpler HTML (ie with actual links and forms) decreases the chance that it fails in some of the weird browser setups that some people will have (eg old phones or computers or weird devices like smart TVs or kindles).
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.
I appreciate your point, but being accessible to most doesn't stop lawsuits unfortunately.
Yet in an increasingly online world, refusing to make one's site accessible is tantamount to refusing to install a ramp in place of stairs.
A counter to that analogy is that where/when ramp access is needed and how one should be built in order for it to be usable is defined by building codes and the concept is well understood. Without what clear definition or a method to get a website's accessibility "certified" makes it seem like allowing litigation is not going to be produce meaningful results and could be easily abused.
This could easily be solved by requiring that the disabled person first contact the company and explain how the site is not accessible and if the company refuses to provide a solution then you can sue. The idea being that it never gets to the legal part because the company knows it is much cheaper to fix their website.
This was already attempted: https://www.newsweek.com/house-republicans-americans-disabil...
And blocked: https://rewire.news/article/2018/04/03/sen-tammy-duckworth-s...
Perhaps rather than object to the court's decision it would be wiser to put energy towards updating the ADA to include standards for electronic access.
>it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did
>there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
Which is it?
The two are not mutually exclusive.
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. ;-)
Yea all the work I did was accessibility after the fact. For most cases it is just annotating what is already there. Sometimes it requires restructuring the way the page flows. It would be slightly more efficient to design for accessibility up front but it is fairly easy to bolt on after the fact.
I made $250 an hour, I could do a small website in 2 hours. I had more people beating down my door than I could service and I found the work to be mind numbing, because I like to write code and create things so I stopped doing it.
Those aren't orthogonal statements. Both can be true.
If, for example, the hourly rate is high but the hours required for a typical mom & pop site are low.
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.
I've also done a lot of accessibility work. For people looking to get into it, another crucial thing is using "Semantic HTML". If every button is a <button> tag and every link is an <a> and every form element has a corresponding <form> tag (even for AJAX), then you save about 80% of your accessibility work up front (no, this isn't an exaggeration).
> there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
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.
The United States has already decided that businesses in general (ie. brick & mortar stores) do not have the prerogative to make their content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit. Including websites makes perfect sense.
Only 3% of the US is visually impaired, and often poorer than average due to disability, so for the vast majority of individual businesses, ignoring them would be less than a rounding error in revenue, and therefore warrant no consideration of accessibility. But the point of a society is to decide collectively upon certain moral imperatives that are deemed so fundamental to our collective identity as to take precedence over Randian self-interest, righteous indignation about "muh freedumb" and "don't tread on me" notwithstanding. One of those moral imperatives in the US is the protection of the rights of vulnerable minority classes so that we don't become a caste-based society where the circumstances of your birth (or unfortunate mishap) can indelibly decide your fate by limiting your access to society. This is actually MORE meritocratic than the alternative, and so I think, upon careful consideration, you may find that it dovetails nicely with even extreme Libertarianism.
I see a lot of negativity in the comments. I imagine much of that is gut reactions of web developers hearing they need to do more work.
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 the Domino's site didn't have "labels on forms," it was a whole goofy animated game where you'd drag ingredients on a pizza to order. There's no way to make that accessible without building a whole separate web app. You can argue that goofy animated games are a dumb way to run a pizza website, and I can agree with you, but we all know the web is full of that kind of thing which is now waiting to be a lawsuit magnet.
I assume it's making REST calls behind the scenes. It's probably not too difficult to make a text based version of this system.
Indeed, they (sort of) already did; their mobile app includes a gimmicky "chatbot" feature.
Admittedly, I don't think the chatbot can actually do everything the website can. But it's a start!
> But the Domino's site didn't have "labels on forms," it was a whole goofy animated game where you'd drag ingredients on a pizza to order.
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.
> There's no way to make that accessible without building a whole separate web app
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.
Well, I don't know if that helps them from legal perspective, but I'm sure many disabled (and non) wouldn't mind if there was an alternative super simple text based version (but equal) on the web that they can lead their disabled customers on every platform needed.
Good.
It's actually really, really hard whenever you go off the beaten path with your UX. That's not really important though, what's important is that companies recognize this is needed and adequately staff it, and engineers are empowered to push back on designs that don't translate to screen readers well.
The key is actually using a screen reader and better yet having someone with accessibly needs provide feedback. Following guidelines is great but usability is only great when you actually see how someone interacts with your site. Again though, it’s not that hard.
And that's where you enter the woods. There is no "the screenreader". There are different screen readers, and each my interpret your site differently.
The same is true of mainstream browsers. Would you not bother testing in even a single browser just because there are too many options?
The differences between mainstream browsers are like different models of bicycles. The differences between screen readers are like all the varieties of two-wheeled vehicles, from segways to hoverboards to scooters.
On the other hand, there's probably two goals here. Making it work well, and avoiding a lawsuit. I imagine the latter involves a lot more work.
There are two goals only if you don't do the first one. It's like saying the two biggest goals in owning a knife: not stabbing people and staying out of prison.
Surely you don't think I meant something that simplistic. Of course the first goal is what matters. However, pretending there aren't people that will hunt for technicalities is naive.
In my experience, it's a lot LESS work. Fair or not, the people reviewing accessibility standards are likely not disabled, and the mere functioning of a website is enough to pass WCAG 2.0. It doesn't have to work well - all of the bits that make a website nice are at level AAA or are advisory, and the government's claim here is that Level A Sufficient would be enough, it just has to work.
The people filing civil lawsuits generally are disabled, since they would be the only ones that could. A civil suit doesn't just get thrown out because you passed WCAG.
Typically suits that do that without warnings or asking things to be changed are thrown out immediately. The plaintiff usually has to show that they tried getting it changed through normal channels before filing a lawsuit.
The racket goes like this - a lawyer firm, specialized in this type of "work", finds a token blind person and sends you a letter to the tune of "On date such and such, our client visited your site and it wasn't accessible. Based on such and such precedent, we're not required to give you advance notice and can to sue you for $100K. However, we're reasonable people and we're willing to settle out of court for $10K, as long as you promise to fix your site under the supervision of an accessibility expert pointed by us".
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.
did you end up settling?
Also, did they end up fixing?
Yes, of course.
It doesn't, but it's evidence in your favor, much like meeting the physical accessibility requirements would be. If there's still a legitimate problem, of course you'd have to address it.
It's also one of the most easily outsourced tasks for a dev shop that does not want to do it in house.
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 feels very much like a "tyranny of the minority" type situation though, where you have to bend backwards to aid a small subset of the population at the cost of a larger chunk of the same. There's probably a balance somewhere to be found. Not everything should have to be ported across.
In 2010 Google determined that there were more people using the internet with accessibility features than Canadians. I can't find any new data, but I find it hard to assume that has gone down since. On top of that, making your website friendly to navigate with a keyboard doesn't just help people using accessibility features, lots of people use the keyboard to quickly navigate.
We have ~4.77 billion people on the internet. Assuming all of Canada was blind, that's 0.77% of total users. Under most circumstances, < 1% is a small minority.
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.
TBH personally I find this comment exceptionally strange given the rigors of acceptable limits among software uptimes and reliability outside of accessibility concerns. Netflix would probably not tolerate an entire country's access being revoked from their service for a technical reason they could fix. If AWS had a 0.77% downtime rate for all of their services, it would be a lot of services and a ton of bad press from businesspeople that are losing money due to AWS being down. If the Bloomberg terminal went down 0.77% of the time, it'd probably be considered completely unacceptable as a service to its userbase.
0.77% is something that would be protested ordinarily, except when it comes to accessibility concerns. Why?
That's an apples to oranges argument here. So first a market argument:
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.
I think this is kind of an odd proposition to have though, because market sizes aren't always reasonably correct to judge. For example, beauty products previously thought that black women are a small market. In reality, black skintones have unique qualities in shade that aren't appropriately captured. The day a line of PoC oriented foundations were widely available they were so heavily demanded that stores nationwide were constantly sold out for months.
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.
Sure, but then that's an opportunity waiting to be taken, especially in your beauty product case. Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that.
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.
" Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that."
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.
Making a website accessable isn't hard. there's a plethora of tooling available to help and most of it comes down to aria roles and color selection. It really is a bare minimum sort of task imo.
And then you get sued for $100k over your "bare minimum". This just makes front end dev seem dangerous, because you can never be sure that you meet absolutely all the guidelines without being a lawyer.
You don't have to meet absolutely all of the guidelines. Did you make an effort to have an accessible website? Did you accessibility bugs when they are reported as causing problems for users? If so, you will be fine. Domino's didn't. They basically just told blind users to fuck off and call them instead.
Are you actually making an "tyranny of the minority" argument against disabled people? :O
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.
Sure. They can order a pizza. Notice that I mentioned that reasonable allowances for disabled people can make sense, but I see no reason that a tiny minority should dictate the design viewed by a vast majority.
I think this is a symptom of providing a legal remedy of 'you can sue'. There are dishonest lawyers with no interest in helping people with disabilities and they will sue you if they think you have enough money to make it worthwhile.
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.
Honestly, all my sites are quite accessible and it was pretty easy for me, but I still feel nervous about this ruling.
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!
No, it would be silly for a web developer to complain, because they are paid for it. But, yeah, some additional work — non trivial amounts of it — must be done. By designers, developers, QA. And all of them are paid for it. So all this costs money. Non-trivial amounts of it.
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.
> So, while it might be cumbersome, but doable for, let's say, Amazon, it could be a real problem for a new small business.
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
>and I honestly care for them
Caring happens with actions, not words.
On the surface, this sounds like a fine thing. Who doesn't want accessible websites?
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?
No, your personal website does not count. Yes, it does if you sell t-shirts. No, a forum is insufficient, it needs to actually be a business. Yes, aria labels are compelled speech, but they're upheld[1]. There would be an exemption if the burden was "undue", but you're not going to meet that by claiming it's a few extra hours of work. If accessibility standards change, you are compelled to upgrade your site if you're under the ADA.
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.
Thanks for the link. It says: "The ADA’s nondiscrimination mandate states that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity." So, it's based on "services", not a place of public accommodation, and it (the letter) applies to public entities only.
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.
>No, a forum is insufficient, it needs to actually be a business.
But this means that almost every forum does count.
Most community forums are not businesses.
And if you're a business, just use forum software that has accessibility in mind.
> 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?
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.
Some clarity on the matter:
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.
This is actually a big deal because what was ruled on was the legal matter of whether a business could be sued based on their website.
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.
It’s a little more tightly scoped than that. From what I’m seeing, no parties are arguing that websites are themselves Title III “public accommodations”. Rather, the 9th circuit held that the Domino’s websites were part of the Domino’s services at their brick & mortar restaurants.
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.)
> was unanimously declined to be heard at SCOTUS
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.
"a11y": Accessibility
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/
There has been a long standing precedent around the ADA requiring web accessibility: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_B....
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.
I hope you know that's not a very strong legal precedent, which is why it keeps getting appealed to the Supreme Court from various jurisdictions. You speak (or seem to hope) as if the law is clearly on one side, which it isn't, at least not that strongly.
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.
I guess a lot of things going online and some going online-only in the intervening 17 years since 2002 has redefined "place of public accommodation" to include cyberspace.
I know the owner of a small brick and mortar store in California. She decided to create a web site to sell her products on line. She got a domain name and a hosting account and installed a canned platform (OpenCart) which allowed her to create her own web site and started to try and sell. Total sales on the web site over three years: about $3,500.
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.
Alright. How about:
"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.
An unlicensed image is something you consciously include - every image you don't explicitly have the license for is considered unlicensed. You can then get a guarantee in writing when you buy a license for an image. Nothing like that exists for accessibility. There is no 30 second test that will guarantee you that you are not going to get sued over accessibility problems on your website. Now imagine if that even has the possibility of bankrupting you. Would you even consider the risk of making a website? Now it's not just the people with disability that can't use the website - nobody can, because the website doesn't exist.
This has always applied in the UK since the disability act.
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.
Seems like an undue burden to place on a small business owner. Having to both defend in one lawsuit and sue another party when they likely aren't knowledgeable or willing to take the risk of either.
shrug That's the legal system. I didn't make it.
A clause in supplier contract guaranteeing whatever - accessibility or all images being licensed covers you.
Cicrcling back to
> 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.
Well, for the sake of people who need accessibility I hope you won't be successful with that.
Walk the path you propose and you will get a world where chains displace all other restaurants, where police swoop in on kids' lemonade stands.
Why? When you can make sensible regulations that target the service providers like shopify, or whatever restaurants use instead and just escape the dilemma?
Sounds like whoever sold her the theme didn't bother with accessibility. I think laws like this are good, but at the same time they will end up pushing people to stick to larger sites like shopify or just listing on ebay/amzn to avoid all this.
This just sounds to me like "I like regulation, but hate over-regulation". Except that here, like potentially many other cases, there weren't any sane bounds on said regulation.
Sometimes I think it's "I like regulation, but I hate regulation that puts a burden on me."
To be fair, proposing regulation on people is really easy if you're not affected.
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.
True.
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.
If the case the GP described is an intended outcome of the law working as designed, I don't think it is a good law.
What is wrong with a) and b)? Remove c) and this sounds like a great intended outcome: "Notice stuff is broken. Notify. Stuff gets fixed".
Because the actual outcome isn't that you now have a website that's accessible. The actual outcome is that you now don't have a website at all. I suppose that does mean that everybody has equal accessibility - none.
That is needlessly black and white and hyperbole. Out of 100 websites you will have now, some of them are currently discriminatory. Some of them will shutdown, some will stop discriminating, some never discriminated to begin with.
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?
I've seen many Shopify sites which are not ADA compliant.
That doesn't sound like a problem with a) or b) at all but purely with c).
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?
So, are you going to argue that the developer needs to now be held legally responsible for this? Because I can foresee how this makes lots of front end devs stop providing services.
The developer sold me a product that is unsuitable for its purpose. Of course they should either fix it or stop selling it.
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.
The "original product" is OpenCart. As the name implies, its open source. If it's defective, who are you going to sue?
Why are you immediately jumping to suing?
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.
Pure shakedown
Does the ADA really apply and enforced at all publicly available businesses? Does every Chinese restaurant in Chinatown have a Braille menu? If we really start enforcing this, only larger businesses will survive.
Restaurants don’t need a Braille menu to accommodate blind customers, a sighted employee can walk them through the ordering process. With websites that’s not always an option, which is legally and morally an issue.
It's curious then that they're suing Domino's.
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 believe the lawsuit is that there were deals which were web-only - meaning the blind person could not take advantage of them.
That's a good point, though something I see commonly is a rather sizeable discount for doing an online-only order. Yes, you lose the discount if you call in.
But you can call your local Domino's on the phone.
You can't get (or use) Rewards points unless you order online. They also have online coupons and discounts.
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.
Seems like they missed a demographic with their strategy. It shouldn’t be hard to add accessibility support to their site.
I think that misses the point. There's a mile of difference between adding sufficient accessibility to serve a demographic vs adding new legal requirements.
(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.)
Most handicapped people live in poverty. I'm quite convinced that a lot of privileged people are also moderately or significantly handicapped and hiding it. If you are important enough, people meet all your whackadoodle requirements without wondering why in the hell you can't do it "normally."
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 fear of lawsuits means businesses end up making their websites accessible to disabled people, then… mission accomplished?
> Some don't even bother to have bathrooms for their customers.
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.
I've eaten at a Domino's with only one or two tables and no bathroom. I don't recall what state, possibly Arizona.
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.
This is a state-by-state thing. In Michigan, restrooms are required if dine-in is available. In NYC and Boston, there are numerous eat-in places with no bathroom. Good luck washing your hands before eating.
"Sighted people only" discounts is really not a good look though.
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.
ADA in general has different levels of mandatory compliance based on business size and type. I can't find specific rules about website compliance though.
Where the ADA applies is different than where it's enforced. This ruling only permits individual blind people to sue a business-- it doesn't force anyone to sue a business.
I’m not usually one for more regulation, but I think this is a good thing. As far as regulations go, this is one of the cheaper ones, or at least it will be when developers are properly trained in accessibility and every serious CMS supports accessibility out of the box.
Properly trained in accessibility is basically impossible. Freelancers are not going to be trained in it nor are people from all across the world.
One of two scenarios will happen depending on how easy it is to retrofit an existing website for accessibility. If it is easy, some subset of developers will specialize in retrofitting. If it is not easy, all developers who want to compete for contracts that require ADA accessibility will have to do so. If some freelancers here or internationally refuse to learn for whatever reason, then they will not be eligible for those contracts, plain and simple.
It’s a myth that reasonable accommodations are too much of a burden for a small business to handle. Having a menu made into Braille for example isn’t going to cost a ton. On the upside, they would also now have business available that they didn’t have in the past.
After a few years in web development I began working for my dad’s business - we sell commercial doors and hardware and do a lot of work in SF. ADA requirements now force many restaurant to add an auto-door operator (push button that opens door) to their main entry. The total cost can be in the range of $10-15k for hardware, electrical work, union labor etc. this absolutely is a burden that some owners really struggle to afford so I’d argue the “myth” is very much alive. And I’m one of the people making money off this transaction. I have mixed feelings about it.
Most likely, a large part of it is the extra burden involved in trying to understand what you actually need to do in order to be in compliance -- what's actually required and what's not.
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?).
>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 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).
... intended outcome...Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation?
"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.
I agree with you that a lot of the forces that push regulations are "random noise", but I find it difficult to believe that big players in these industries aren't pushing this along. They have something to gain from this after all.
That's true, but is fundamentally a different idea than your earlier framing suggested to me. Lobbying is absolutely a thing and tends to be funded by people with deep pockets.
The issue is deciding what "reasonable" means in this context, which is the crux of this whole debate. This lawsuit allows blind people to due retailers for their websites, what if someone was both blind and deaf? There are a range of disabilities that put burdens on businesses from small to massive depending what disability we are talking about and what sort of services are being offered by the business.
I wonder why Domino's having a phone number to call in orders isn't enough of an accommodation in this case?
My understanding, from a quick 5 minute skim, is that it may be. It's being sent back to the district court for reconsideration.
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.
From footnote 4:
> 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.
It probably is sufficient; the issue here was Domino's said the website wasn't covered by the ADA at all.
And there might be trouble with some of Domino's coupons being online-only.
How do you know what’s for sale at Domino’s?
You can call them and ask?
How would you like it if you couldn't thoroughly peruse a restaurant menu and coupons at your own pace, but instead had to call a customer service rep and ask them to talk you through it, knowing that they need to get your order completed and get you off the phone as fast as possible? Putting these things online is really ideal for everyone, as long as the web developer doesn't screw up accessibility.
It depends what is considered "accessible enough". E.g. they may not have a braille menu but there is a person you can communicate with. In the same regard maybe a site that signals "you can call this number to have assisted service" is alright.
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 :)
I am not familiar with the details of ADA. Would it not suffice if a server reads the menu out loud upon request by a blind patron?
Yes, it would! This is actually an example used in compliance guidelines: https://www.ada.gov/regs2010/smallbusiness/smallbusprimer201...
I wonder if there is a good rule of thumb for what software and features are acceptable to not be accessible? What does it mean for a drawing program to be accessible by the legally blind? You can follow accessibility guidelines (for UI navigation and so on) but does that mean you made the program accessible if the bulk of the operations you can actually do in the software - draw - still requires seeing what you are doing? Are you expected to invent workarounds that allows people to use your software, or can you assume that "nah, no blind person is likely to be drawing anyway"? It seems there is a gray area where it's just not economically feasible to add some extreme bespooke types of accessibility, but at the same time not doing it will make it self fulfilling - of course no blind people will draw in drawing programs so long as they don't get the tools.
Well, the law provides for a number of balancing tests to ensure that a court will respect the rights of all parties. A rule of thumb is unlikely to be specific and precise enough for any practical use. For specific details, consult an attorney.
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.
If you're blind, can't you just call up a Dominos to order your pizza? "Talk to a human and order your pizza" sounds like a friendlier approach than the automated screen reader or whatever they'll come up with to resolve this litigation.
Some deals were online only. Presumably to encourage people to use the website and not bother employees with having to answer the phone.
That's a fair point. Sounds like this can be resolved with a simple new rule: if you're blind, you can get online-only deals over the phone.
It's probably easier to just rework the website than to try to enact that policy. Training, print collateral, keeping employees updated on current coupons verifying blindness. Vs some front end changes.
So now everyone can pretend to be blind to take advantage of online only deals on the phone?
Indeed, what honest business can hope to survive in the face of such reckless malevolence? Truly, it is the end of e-commerce as we know it!
I mean, they could already get the deals, by going online. I'm a little confused about what you see wrong with this scenario.
The discounts are given since orders on phone cost the company more than orders from their website, in terms of employee labor and cost of manning the phones.
People who are blind should have the same access as everyone else. The web is accessible by design, so all sites that are not accessible are broken. The people that made them broke them.
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...
> People who are blind should have the same access as everyone else
let's shut down rental go-kart places then.
You're getting the "blind" part, but assuming someone can talk to a human? Not to mention "sounds like"...
I don’t have a screen reader handy, but I wonder if someone using that would be able to navigate to the local store’s phone number from the front page.
Maybe they can just add a "screenreader" version that erases the whole page and replaces it with the string: "Call (510) 420-1155 to order a pizza!"
And then they'd be compliant.
Be aware that not everyone who uses a screen reader is blind or visually impaired. People with processing disorders like dyslexia or reading comprehension disorders may use screen readers in order to intake the content/information in a way they can understand.
Here's the ruling from the 9th circuit:
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.
I tested the Domino's home page with WAVE (I had to install the browser extension for some reason) and it found no errors and what looks like healthy use of landmarks and ARIA, though I didn't dig too deep. Would any blind HN readers care to comment on to the degree to which https://www.dominos.com/en/ is accessible to them, personally?
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.)
They've likely added accessibility since the lawsuit started. Maybe check archive.org?
I would consider this a good thing. It really doesn’t require very much effort to be compliant and it ultimately results in UI that are more easily accessible by not only bling people, among other disabilities but also encourages better extensibility for creative purposes https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
Accessibility seems to be thrown under the bus under MVP style thinking. You are trained not to focus on issues that only affect a small number of users. I know I do this all the time. The reason is money.
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.
MVP is primarily a development strategy, not a lifecycle strategy. I see no conflict here. Your product owner should include legal requirements in the project scope, it's not something individual developers should have to prioritize themselves.
And what about individual developers who own their own projects? Open source projects? They typically have no warranty.
Target.com is accessible because of a similar case from 2006. This appears to be a decent summary: https://www.jimthatcher.com/law-target.htm
Are screen readers still as terrible as that article makes them sound? Regretfully, I've never actually tried to use one, nor worked with anyone who needed one. I imagine they are basically horrific to use on almost any modern website.
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.
It's like the Internet Explorer debate all over again: is the problem that my website doesn't support your screen reader, or is the problem that your screen reader doesn't support my website?
Mac OS X has one built in, if you are looking to play around with one.
Specifically, you can turn on VoiceOver on Mac with Command+F5.
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.
A lot of people in this thread and others have recommended devs to try out screen readers to get familiar with developing for them, and I added to my mental checklist "look up screen readers and try to find a good one to try out eventually", which really I'm not sure I'd ever get around to, and even if I did, I'd probably get distracted from choice paralysis because I wasn't sure which screen reader is worth trying.
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.
FYI for those interested, there is a Google Group called blind dev works:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/blind-...
It's a small, low traffic group. I'm one of the admins.
> The ADA mandates that places of public accommodation, like Domino’s, provide auxiliary aids and services to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind
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”?
There where web only deals you couldn’t get via making a call.
Don’t they also have voice ordering via amazon echo / google home?
Then again pizza websites are pretty garbage from the get go. Not sure why they make them so damn convoluted.
On another note, there are services that are already scraping thousands of websites and testing them for ADA compliance. If the website fails the test, the website or lead is sold off to an attorney. The attorney will then find or hire a straw client to sue the website and the company. Its very prevalent and lucrative because a lot of the law has yet to be written and the companies being sued are settling very quickly.
So? If lawbreakers can be identified at scale, should that change the situation at all?
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!
Sounds like a great start-up opportunity. Turnkey and ongoing accessibility compliance.
I really hope not. I don’t think “X compliance” is a good idea for a startup, because of trust and liability.
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.
There’s a lot of businesses that focus on legal compliance. Maybe they aren’t “uber for compliance”, but there’s plenty of compliance centric work out there
There have been businesses that provide compliance services for forever. I would expect ADA compliance to be dramatically simpler and easier than HIPPA or SOC or GDPR.
Like it or not, these businesses will pop up. There are already companies doing similar things for privacy compliance.
What you're describing already exists for most businesses. Try opening a restaurant without hiring a specialist firm to do compliance reviews (rhetorical: is food safety more important than privacy protections?). Bricks & mortar businesses often have a parade of compliance and certification hoops to keep spinning that they live or die by.
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.
I don't think that's a new market actually. But I guess startups can be anything now.
A start-up is nothing more than a new business. Has no relationship with market segment or particular technology or whether that tech is new or old.
All new business are not startups, a startup is a new business but primarily focused on finding a repeatable business model. A new business might not be a startup because they are executing an existing proven business model.
Check out userway.org
Blind person here. While I definitely appreciate any efforts towards accessibility, I believe this is not the way. What people don't realize is that, at a certain point, most companies do accessibility anyway. Some of them, like Apple or Microsoft, even turn it into a marketing advantage. There are exceptions, sure, but this doesn't justify government regulation. I believe the days of John and Chuck, two dropouts from MIT making a tech startup and becoming billionaires are almost over. There's more and more regulation introduced around technology, first the absolutely ridiculous COPPA, then GDPR, then California's privacy initiative and now this. I believe that, in five to tech years, our tech landscape will consist of a few big companies who will have the resources to comply, and many walled gardens, as each country will have their own laws, wildly different from any others. The UK is already starting to go this way, i.e. with the proposal to ban Facebook likes for users under 18 and introduce mandatory age verification. I think that a small company making a website in 2030 is as likely as a small company making their own car or drug now. Some groups might benefit from this, but, ultimately, we, as a society, will be worse off. This one particular case seems beneficial when consideret in separation from anything else. The wider trend is not.
I think accessibility is very important, but I share your worry about the future for very small startup projects. I think it’s already almost impossible.
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.
What happens to every game on Steam, every app in the two main app stores, websites and software for 3D mechanical CAD (Solidworks, Fusion 360), ECAD, etc?
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?
IANAL but games are not public accomodations/commercial facilities in terms of the ADA. There has been very strong law that restaurants are such a thing.
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.
I need to do a bit more research on this. I live in a world where it is hard to imagine blind people being able to perform. I say this admitting I might be truly ignorant about this.
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.
This law is ripe for exploitative lawsuits. Instead of damages going to the plaintiff, of which actual damages are very dubious, it should go to a fund that helps web site developers increase accessibility. Maybe an open source foundation that integrates this into regular HTML.
The money should NOT go to lawyers for their fees and plaintiffs. It just creates the wrong incentive system.
Rather than crippling the rest of the world for the blind, why not improve the tools for them instead?
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.
React/Vue/etc are all accessible. Almost all web technology that exists is accessible. The trouble is you can’t just do what you want, and you have to test it to ensure it’s accessible. Most companies put it to the bottom of the list or forget about it. It really isn’t that hard, no new tools are required, everything is already there: you just have to do it.
You are thinking of the most trivial of apps. For example I have worked on a web-based image editor that is practically impossible to make accessible to the blind. Not with current screen reader technology.
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 law requires only "readily achievable"changes. So something that is practically impossible isn’t required.
Sure, the companies involved can improve the tools. A bunch of them joined the lawsuit via briefs. If they can cooperate to fight it, they can cooperate to mitigate it by making better tools.
>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.
Is there really any requirement to make a website accessible if you could provide "full and equal enjoyment" via old fashioned phone support? I see this being vastly cheaper and less risky to provide for most non-"web app" websites (e.g. retail websites) for the smaller number of users who need it.
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...
I live to use keyboard shortcuts, mostly TAB. It's amazing how many websites don't even have that working correctly.
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.
As someone now living in Japan, I think I can understand how frustrating the user experience is for disabled people. While not disabled, I often need to use Google translate or lookup for Kanjis/Words in a dictionary. There are a crazy amount of websites (and mobile applications) where text selection is disabled or where text is written inside images, which often completely prevents me from using the website...
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.
According to the article, the Supreme Court did not rule on the case, the 9th Circuit did. Sometimes the Supreme Court will turn down a case on a technicality while still leaving open the possibility for future ruling on a matter.
I really don’t see anything wrong with this. I blame the modern web a lot for this As javascript hijacks functionality of the browser, and the browser is typically better accessible
Honest question from a web developer, and I'm ashamed I don't know more, is there a clear concise guide to building accessible websites? I've had to support ARIA for U.S. Government websites, and certain color schemes for color accessibility, but I really don't feel like I know how to build a web product with accessibility in mind. I am genuinely sorry that I haven't developed the skill more, and would like to take this opportunity to learn more.
In fear of sounding insensitive, what if a business has decided that their website is just one way that customers can engage with them (much like their physical storefront is another), and that there are other ways as well that customers can purchase from them -- such as via phone (, etc). They can handle anyone's needs over the phone (, etc) if they can't use the website... much like the website enables them to engage with customers who can't visit their physical location, which could be in a different state or country. Can't visit our location? We still want your business, buy from our website. Having trouble using our website? We still want your business. Here, give us a call (, etc) and we can take your order. Once we have your order ready, we'll give you a secure PCI-compliant interface to enter your payment info for the order, that's totally accessible in whatever form it is, but is certainly separate from the rest of the not-so-accessible site, since your primary means of interaction with our business for this purchase is via [phone call or some other accessible interface separate from the website].
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?
The sum of all kinds of regulations like this one is great news for mega-corporations. Economies of scale mean that the costs are small for them, and proportonaly much bigger for smaller companies.
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.
Because there are a myriad of perceptual issues and the idea of reporting specific perceptual needs is likely an unnecessarily severe data disclosure, wouldn't it be best for non-app websites to have their content mapped out according to some standardized API for consumption by their client?
Would a chat bot interface to order pizza's count as blind accessible? Or even a live person on a phone?
This is already EU law. You can get fined if you don't follow accessibility guidelines on your home page.
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.
Suppose I can't use a product because of a disability. Do I sue a company for making the product available to others who can use it? The ADA says I have the legal right to do so, but the mentality that "if I can't enjoy something, nobody should" is immoral.
As a fully sighted person (well, I wear glasses to drive), I'm thrilled about this. Websites that are easier to use for the blind are easier to use for everyone. If your website is a giant picture of text, this is just karma.
Misleading title. SCOTUS refused to hear the case, not ruled in favour of the cause.
This sounds like it's great for web developers like myself. We'll have jobs for years to come!
And it will force companies to really think about their functionality and ensure that it's easy for common use.
Is there a EU/Australian/British equivalent? I'm an Indian employee developing for EU and want to scare people into cutting back the design madness that makes sites unreadable and slow.
The UK has the Equality Act 2010 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents) particularly parts 2 and 3. There is a private right of enforcement through the county court.
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.
Followup question for those in the know: If domino's hadn't had online-only deals/rewards/etc, would the availability of the phone line have counted as accessible?
This is a just outcome. The disabled have a right to access society.
I don't get it. Why can't he just order from someone else that has an accessible website? I choose not to use lousy webapps for all sorts of reasons.
Imagine the website is only partially accessible.
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?
> 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
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.
The issue here appears to be whether or not it's Domino's legal (and moral) obligation to make their website compatible with some specific piece of screen-reader software. To me, it seems like they probably should; the APIs are relatively clear, standardized, and easy to use, and there are quite a few people who can't use the website otherwise.
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?
"Undue burden" is the test used. Essentially, how much work is it to create an accessible website?
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.
That makes sense, thanks!
This opens a huge can of worms, given that there is no clear standard for this. W3C has varying degrees of compliance, some of them near impossible to abide by.
This seems like overreach. Clearly the law doesn’t cover websites.
Why can’t congress just pass a law to make the ADA apply to websites? It’s not SCOTUS’s job to create law.
The law has covered websites for decades. It used to be not that much of a problem because screen readers worked well enough with plain html.
> The law has covered websites for decades.
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.
Pretty sure the law doesn't say anything in particular about websites.
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.
As I said in another comment about another case that didn't make it, the acceptance rate of the Supreme Court is single-digit percentages. Don't overinterpret them not accepting a case. They have to not accept a lot of cases. It may not be entirely meaningless, but it isn't very meaningful either. There will be another case about this in the future if they do choose to take it up. I'm sure this is a perennial topic.
Robles claims Domino's wouldn't sell the same goods for the same price over the phone.
How is a website not a public accommodation?
That would be a bad way to operate law. Every new technology would have tomget its own law. It makes more sense to pass a law that applies to the entire calls of public accommodations and allow regulations and precedent deal with it.
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.
lol no...
I'm not seeing much mention of Net Neutrality or what this means in the grand scheme of open & free web vs Gov't control of it.
Any thoughts?
There are already lots of regulations that target e-commerce [0]. Net neutrality isn't about the freedom to serve any content you want, it's about the discrimination and prioritization of certain types of network traffic [1].
[0]: https://www.justia.com/business-operations/managing-your-bus...
Is there a checker to see if a website is accessible, and how to make it accessible (like the ones for SEO and site-speed optimizations)?
Lighthouse is pretty good: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/
There’s a javascript library called aXE that’s pretty good at catching the major things. There’s also a browser plugin to check a site by hand.
I've read a bunch of comments; surprised not to see mention of DevTools / Lighthouse Audits / Accessibility.
I’m a bit shocked that the Dominos CLI wasn’t brought up as a defense.
https://github.com/freecode/dominos-cli Or https://github.com/jkereako/dominos-pizza-cli/blob/master/do...
That does not in any way appear to be associated with, or endorsed by, the Dominoes business, which is likely why it was never mentioned.
Good.
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.
What’s wrong with using a phone to order pizza? Seems like a reasonable alternative.
Great, now make it possible to sue owners of sites unusable without JS.
How could this lawsuit cost less then just fixing the website?
Because currently there is no accepted definition of "fixed" (accessible) site and if they caved, people could come after them for various technicalities forever.
This is not true. There are lots of agreed upon standards (in this case the plaintiff wants WCAG 2.0) and dominos needs to meet one of
what is a retailer? does this mean that if i make a website to sell my small indie game, i have to follow all the ephemeral accessibility rules or else be sued?
I wonder why having having a voice ordering system by phone wouldn't be a valid defense for Dominos. Should the ADA apply to every channel of sales if there are supported alternatives by the same company.
and probably a can of worms if VR becomes a "normal" platform for this type of thing
Wouldn't VR be a lot better for a lot of these things? A huge amount of VR innovation is focused on non-sight feedback mechanisms. Implementing braille via VR interfaces would be actually be a lot easier since you're always using your hands to interact.
It's an interesting idea but it's actually harder, due to the low resolution of physical feedback currently available through VR devices. VR remains mostly visual, with input devices either approximate and 3d-spatial, or having physical input devices (in which case VR doesn't help)
While on the surface that seems like a good argument, wouldn’t that mean that as long as they had Braille and a wheelchair ramp at their stores they’d be compliant? Etc etc
I don't think that's a fair conclusion to reach. One channel can reasonably be done from home while the other requires going to the store.
I believe web accessibility is net good, though.
It would need a usability measure. For instance, are accessibility features for the blind on the web better, worse or exactly equivalent to using a voice menu on a phone?
The pace of their VRU reading out toppings, coupons, crusts, sizes, etc would likely be maddening. As would other things, like reliably getting customer info like payment, address, etc. An accessible website would allow for screen readers customized to the individual user pace and preferred voicing, Braille, enlarged text, etc.
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.
This is the most PC shit ive read about this year.
web dev should start using vanilla html + css, following w3c guidelines for accessibility and stop all the fancy js shit.
This is such a good plan. So many developers don't care about a11y. This just adds a cost to actually start caring and planning your code around it.
Most only care to make it look like the mockup. And the people making the mockups only care that the site looks like their design.
I just became an a11y programmer :)
hiQ vs Linkedin was a Heller vs DC. This feels congruent.
This would be wonderful news. I am blind, and can report that accessibility on websites is getting worse and worse with every new web framework invented. Accessibility is usually bolted on as an afterthought, with all the quality issues implied. However, I only believe this headline when I see the first lawsuits being won. Lets hope this is no clickbait.
Can you provide any examples of sites that might be using particular frameworks that are inaccessible? If open source, I reckon I could raise an issue or two on your behalf if that's OK.
I am sorry, but I dont believe that casually raising an issue here or there will actually change anything. My experience is that it either gets ignored, or you outright receive an aswer that explains to you that your needs are not important.
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.
Yep. I get it. I'm in a wheelchair. But I can't not try, at least in some small way. It's really frustrating that these projects don't take this stuff seriously.
The ADA law actually doesn't make sense to me. I get they are trying to stop discrimination, but the means they take is misguided and an encroachment on peoples rights.
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?
That is literally the opposite of the truth. If you have a business in the US, you have a duty not to discriminate against protected classes that trumps free speech rights.
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.
I don't see how its acceptable to use coercion to enforce an opinion of "duties that trump free speech rights" that don't involve force, fraud, or defamation.
In the US, more than two centuries of jurisprudence holds that commercial activity is not speech, and is thus is not generally subject to the protection of the Constitution. Moreover, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate Commerce.
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.
Given that commercial activity affects my unalienable rights to life, liberty and property I would disagree that its not subject to the protection of the Constitution.
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.
Your personal interpretation disagrees with the Constitution that actually exists and with the two centuries of legal cases on constitutional rights.
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.
Its not my personal interpretation, and just because legal cases interpreted a certain way for two centuries does not make them right. The constitution was not intended to give the government broad powers, but rather to assign limits to its scope. The context in which it "needs to be understood" is not for you to define, but up for interpretation.
"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."
I'm in favor of requiring that all deals and coupons be available via all methods of ordering, with things such as app-required deals only being legal if the app is accessible to the blind. Other than that, I fail to see how having phone ordering doesn't completely cover the accessibility requirement. It's very easy to get silly with these requirements. Should comedians be required to provide transcripts for deaf people? Should paintings come with exhaustive descriptions attached to their frames?
They already are on TV.
Then the Supreme Court is wrong (which isn't impossible, by the way). If I draw on my street with chalk, should I also be compelled to play a cassette on repeat outside my driveway describing what the picture is? This is absurd.
This would not apply to your street art.
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)
I would say that yes -- sometimes. Often making a piece of software accessible to the blind for a small time developer or a small business owner is an undue burden.
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.
Thank you for this snippet. The ADA is somewhat reasonable for having included the "undue burden" clause, however, it is probably an undue burden for a small online website to prove that supporting disabled users would be an undue burden.
At the end of the day, this is just more red tape that will probably hurt small sites or deter them from being made.
It's not an undue burden. Either don't break screen readers with javascript bullshit, or un-break them by having a sane tab order and present aria tags and image descriptions. Try it with keyboard navigation, listen to what it sounds like, and if it's functional, you pass. It's not that hard.
> Either don't break screen readers with javascript bullshit
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?
It's you're site that you can do with as you please right up until you're running a business and selling goods. Everything changes then, even without the ADA.
People with disabilities need online access more than "normal" people so as to help make the rest of their lives work. Disabilities that make it difficult to get out and about and effectively go about their business in person can be hugely mitigated by options like online ordering, assuming the online experience is accessible.
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.
Your street chalk is art, and isn’t required by anyone.
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.
If modifying your shop to be accessible to everyone is not profitable for you, then you shouldn't be doing it. All this law does is require businesses to spend more money before they can operate. For now, this will hurt the economy more than it helps it.
It's not profitable. It will never be profitable. The entire point of antidiscrimination legislation like the ADA is to make things that "profit" will not cause to happen, happen, because the alternative is to exclude people based on traits they cannot change.