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Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

latimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#221

Post by onion2k »

michaelmrose wrote: post #207
onion2k wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#222

Post by [deleted] »

mrep wrote: post #209
Dylan16807 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#223

Post by limograf »

ncallaway wrote: post #110
mltony wrote: post #74

Blind 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…

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?

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.

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#224

Post by robomartin »

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?

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#225

Post by davedx »

cwkoss wrote: post #213
mltony wrote: post #74

Blind 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…

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? https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

The lint tool in create-react-app does this out of the box. :)

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#226

Post by belltaco »

sgustard wrote: post #179
dexwiz wrote: post #48

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…

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 magn…

Good.

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#227

Post by LoSboccacc »

thomasedwards wrote: post #144
Meekro wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#228

Post by cwkoss »

cwkoss wrote: post #213
mltony wrote: post #74

Blind 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…

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? https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

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.

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#229

Post by chillacy »

couchand wrote: post #77

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: business…

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.

Re: Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

#230

Post by gremlinsinc »

miki123211 wrote: post #203
mltony wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solv…

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.
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