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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

#261

Post by kd5bjo »

> 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”?

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

#262

Post by mlang23 »

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.

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

#263

Post by voltagex_ »

berbec wrote: post #238
chrisco255 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ph…

How much did it cost you to keep providing the discounted price?

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

#264

Post by dawnerd »

kd5bjo wrote: post #261

> 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 “aux…

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.

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

#265

Post by michaelscott »

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/

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.

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

#266

Post by voltagex_ »

mlang23 wrote: post #262

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.

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

#267

Post by exclusiv »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #255
hailk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#268

Post by mlang23 »

bertjk wrote: post #244
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…

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 tabbi…

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.

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

#269

Post by spondyl »

cwkoss wrote: post #228
cwkoss wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d be interested to hear more about this as well

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

#270

Post by SilasX »

rgoldste wrote: post #119
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…

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?

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.
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