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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

#281

Post by chaboud »

SilasX wrote: post #270
rgoldste wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#282

Post by boomlinde »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #236
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'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…

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.

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

#283

Post by qtplatypus »

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…

There where web only deals you couldn’t get via making a call.

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

#284

Post by mlang23 »

carlmr wrote: post #253
mltony wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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...

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

#285

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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?

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.

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

#286

Post by pakitan »

belltaco wrote: post #232
tyingq wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#287

Post by acqq »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #220
mrep wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

differentView wrote: post #155
thomasedwards wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by NotAnEconomist »

snek wrote: post #272
esyir wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Canada only accounts for 0.5% of the world population and about 1% of internet users (total Canadian population / total internet users) -- and I think it's telling that you didn't mention a bigger country, like the US which accounts for under 5% and under 10% respectively.

Your point doesn't refute the GP: if we're spending a lot of expense to support fractional or even single-digit percentages of the population, it doesn't necessarily make sense.

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

#290

Post by on_and_off »

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.

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