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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

#341

Post by dan-robertson »

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’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.

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

#342

Post by Dylan16807 »

Vinnl wrote: post #326
Dylan16807 wrote: post #220

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. 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…

> 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.

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

#343

Post by Angostura »

playpause wrote: post #302
bertjk wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ne…

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.

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

#344

Post by pmyteh »

aitchnyu wrote: post #252

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.

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

#345

Post by dan-robertson »

jameslk wrote: post #234
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…

> 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 pr…

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.

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

#346

Post by Angostura »

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.

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

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

#347

Post by maweki »

dorgo wrote: post #297
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…

> 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.

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.

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

#349

Post by Hitton »

mltony wrote: post #217
yoloClin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

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

#350

Post by Zarel »

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…

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!

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