Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 620 posts

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

#251

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

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.

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

#253

Post by carlmr »

mltony wrote: post #153
kls wrote: post #149

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…

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?

Are CLI tools inherently accessible?

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

#254

Post by carlmr »

oliveremberton wrote: post #195
elliekelly wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#255

Post by gremlinsinc »

hailk wrote: post #249
gremlinsinc wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

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.

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

#257

Post by SquareWheel »

oliveremberton wrote: post #195
elliekelly wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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

#258

Post by esyir »

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…

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.

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

#259

Post by [deleted] »

Pinckney wrote: post #231
gnicholas wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

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...

[deleted]

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

#260

Post by esyir »

chillacy wrote: post #242
litoE wrote: post #210

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…

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.
Post reply on HN