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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

#431

Post by oblio »

esyir wrote: post #258
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.

Are you actually making an "tyranny of the minority" argument against disabled people? :O

This is one of those basic human rights things. Especially if the service your site is offering is important or one of a kind. And especially as more and more things become accessible only through the internet.

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

#432

Post by charliepark »

34679 wrote: post #420
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 was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did >there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility Which is it?

Those aren't orthogonal statements. Both can be true.

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

#433

Post by oblio »

Mirioron wrote: post #379
freeone3000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, your personal website does not count. Yes, it does if you sell t-shirts. No, a forum is insufficient, it needs to actually be a business. Yes, aria labels are compelled speech, but they're upheld[1]. There would be an exemption if the burden was "undue", but you're not going to meet that by claiming it's a few extra hours of work. If accessibility standards change, you are compelled to upgrade your site if you're…

> No, a forum is insufficient, it needs to actually be a business. But this means that almost every forum does count.

Most community forums are not businesses.

And if you're a business, just use forum software that has accessibility in mind.

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

#434

Post by sbarre »

34679 wrote: post #420
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 was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did >there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility Which is it?

The two are not mutually exclusive.

WCAG 2.0 Accessibility compliance is within reach of anyone following the most basic of best practices in web development these days.

There are many powerful free tools for developers to use to test and validate their work as they go, and there is a ton of literature and thought leadership out there for anyone to find and learn from.

OP may be referring to retroactively making websites accessible, since it can be a lot of work to fix something that wasn't built with accessibility in mind from the start.

Just like adding a sunroof option to a new car is much cheaper than adding a sunroof to a car that didn't come with one in the first place. ;-)

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

#435

Post by mlang23 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #266
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.

I am sorry, but I dont believe that casually raising an issue here or there will actually change anything. My experience is that it either gets ignored, or you outright receive an aswer that explains to you that your needs are not important.

Example 1: Reddit is on GitHub. At the time when I was still using Reddit, I was pretty pissed with its lack of helpful accessibility. So I went on GitHub, and wrote a PR which would wrap individual articles on a page in a so-called "region" so that the screen reader could easily jump to the next article. The PR was ignored for several months. After a while, I simply closed it out of frustration.

Example 2: When I read about Bitwarden on HN, I tried it. As I am an iPhone user, the iOS app was interesting, so I installed and tested it. No surprise, almonst no button was labeled correctly, or labeled at all. So I opened an issue on GitHub. The answer I got was: "Yes, we know we are not accessible, but we are planning a rewrite anyway, so we will not change anything in the existing code". Thanks for nothing. We are not talking about rocket science here, just adding a text label to a handful of buttons. But yes, thanks, I got the message. Nobody really cares about people with disabilities.

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

#436

Post by mwcampbell »

soulofmischief wrote: post #274
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…

Sounds like a pain in the ass. In the case of websites... two years ago I started adopting a11y into my front-end code. But while plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y make the job easier, it honestly was also a huge pain in the ass familiarizing myself with the grotesque state of affairs in web accessibility standards. However, one of the biggest gains might have been learning to properly leverage every HTML tag to it…

> P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind?

As far as I can recall, most of the blind folks on HN don't post big walls of text. Maybe younger blind people who grew up with text-to-speech and never learned braille are more likely to do that. To me, that would be a good reason for screen readers to deliberately pause for a bit between paragraphs.

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

#437

Post by foldr »

enlyth wrote: post #416
foldr wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> previous car insurance and painting anecdotes proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything. These aren’t hypothetical! Blind people really are interested in both these things, as you can easily find out by googling — or just using your common sense. Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA. People often have wildly inaccurate perceptions about what pe…

My problem is that everyone in these threads acts like this all takes zero effort. There's no "turn on a11y" switch, you have to dedicate resources, money and time. It's a perfectly valid complaint from someone that sells a product which is generally not interesting to blind people (you seem to think this is an impossibility, or that one edge case outlier invalidates this reality), to not want to do this if it will b…

Selling stuff requires complying with lots of laws that take time, money and effort to comply with.

I don't know why you keep referring to "edge cases" and "outliers". The two actual examples that the OP has given do not meet this description.

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

#438

Post by mwcampbell »

akavi wrote: post #429
mch82 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider installing a screenreader and the Lynx web browser so you can demonstrate what it’s like to access internal apps/websites with those tools. It might help to record your experience so people can watch the demo at their convenience. Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...

What does lynx have to do with anything? No blind person I know browses the internet without JS, and every major screen reader supports it.

You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.

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

#439

Post by DoreenMichele »

Mirioron wrote: post #386
DoreenMichele wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely, a large part of it is the extra burden involved in trying to understand what you actually need to do in order to be in compliance -- what's actually required and what's not. I'm handicapped and also a freelancer and I have six years of college and I worked for a Fortune 500 company at one time. I feel I'm better positioned than a lot of individuals to figure out what I need to do without an accountant an…

> because our highly regulated world sometimes seems like it is actively designed to make it impossible for people to make their lives work (without being part of a megacorp -- and what if that doesn't work for you?). I thought that everybody being part of megacorps was the intended outcome of a lot of regulations. Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation? It's particularly ironi…

... intended outcome...Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation?

"Ninety percent of everything is crap."

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."

People tend to make rules that reflect the kind of environment that is typical for them. Federal government is large, bureaucratic, etc. It's no surprise that rules coming out of it implicitly assume that everyone works in a similar environment.

Another contributing problem is that people need to justify their paycheck. Writing more rules is how politicians look productive.

I don't know what the solution is. But assuming malice rather than trying to understand the problem space in more neutral terms is not a constructive path forward.

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

#440

Post by foldr »

pakitan wrote: post #419
skywhopper wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really curious why you think a blind person wouldn't be "interested" in car insurance. They may not be able to drive themselves, but that doesn't mean they can't be the person paying the bills in a family that owns cars and thus has to have car insurance. As for paintings... there was really zero information on the site other than pictures of paintings? Nothing about the artist, the size, or the price? You appare…

> It also sounds like you don't really believe that disabled folks deserve any consideration. No, that's not at all what I believe so let me clarify what my objections are. First, by its very nature "accessibility" is open to interpretation and allowing people to sue companies for non-accessible sites gives way to frivolous lawsuits. As far as I remember, there isn't even an attempt to define "accessibility" in US la…

>Other issues are completely out of whack and could take man-years to sort out fully.

What were these?

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