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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

#491

Post by CathedralBorrow »

esyir wrote: post #260
chillacy wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes I think it's "I like regulation, but I hate regulation that puts a burden on me."

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

#492

Post by dottedmag »

u801e wrote: post #442
maigret wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News could easily set a max-width on the problematic items. Every designer (and so should every web developer) knows that the sweet spot for reading is around 60 characters and a column of text if readable between 40 and 60 characters. Check for example the free course from https://betterwebtype.com/

> Every designer (and so should every web developer) knows that the sweet spot for reading is around 60 characters and a column of text if readable between 40 and 60 characters. That is interesting. For source code, I've always preferred maintaining a maximum line length of 80 characters. But there are plenty of people who prefer significantly longer line lengths because they feel it's more readable that way.

Source code is not text, it's all serialized trees and sequences. We don't write code in paragraphs.

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

#493

Post by tremon »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #251

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…

MVP is primarily a development strategy, not a lifecycle strategy. I see no conflict here. Your product owner should include legal requirements in the project scope, it's not something individual developers should have to prioritize themselves.

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

#494

Post by TheCoelacanth »

Mirioron wrote: post #375
snek wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a website accessable isn't hard. there's a plethora of tooling available to help and most of it comes down to aria roles and color selection. It really is a bare minimum sort of task imo.

And then you get sued for $100k over your "bare minimum". This just makes front end dev seem dangerous, because you can never be sure that you meet absolutely all the guidelines without being a lawyer.

You don't have to meet absolutely all of the guidelines. Did you make an effort to have an accessible website? Did you accessibility bugs when they are reported as causing problems for users? If so, you will be fine. Domino's didn't. They basically just told blind users to fuck off and call them instead.

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

#496

Post by partiallypro »

couchand wrote: post #77

Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn't really say anything new here. They declined to hear Domino's appeal of the Ninth Circuit's (unanimous and clearly correctly decided) reversal of the District Court's absurd dismissal. Domino's tried to claim that their due process rights were being violated since there is no federally-mandated standard for accessibility. But the ADA is clear: business…

> It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards. Make sure your content and markup are reasonably semantic. Use standard form components for data entry.

On a basic level, yes. But what does the law consider to be reasonable? There are so many degrees of compliance, some of which often go against brand guidelines, against common js libraries, etc.

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

#497

Post by diffeomorphism »

litoE wrote: post #486
diffeomorphism wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like a problem with a) or b) at all but purely with c). Also, something is wrong with your example. Cost of buying the original platform is $X, sales (not revenue) for multiple years is $3,500, fixing it or replacing it by a compliant platform is $Y. A "fix" is clearly not more expensive than $X and that was much, much less than the revenue from the sales. Also, it seems to me that the original pro…

The "original product" is OpenCart. As the name implies, its open source. If it's defective, who are you going to sue?

Why are you immediately jumping to suing?

I'll ask for a fix or a refund on the $X. If they can't fix it and I can't find a competing product for $X, then the price should have been $Y to begin with and I have no basis to complain.

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

#498

Post by partiallypro »

balls187 wrote: post #212
couchand wrote: post #77

Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn't really say anything new here. They declined to hear Domino's appeal of the Ninth Circuit's (unanimous and clearly correctly decided) reversal of the District Court's absurd dismissal. Domino's tried to claim that their due process rights were being violated since there is no federally-mandated standard for accessibility. But the ADA is clear: business…

> full and equal enjoyment I know there is a snarky comment about enjoying Dominoe's pizza... But it is comical that Dominoes championed ordering pizza by tweeting an pizza emoji, but failed to address helping the bling order online.

The argument from Domino's was that you could still order over the phone, and thus they weren't discriminating against customers.

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

#499

Post by eloff »

jcranmer wrote: post #130
eloff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my curiosity, did you type this on a keyboard by touch typing? If so how do you recognize and correct typos? Or did you use speech recognition? Same question about handling errors. I'd like to make sites I build more accessible, but I must admit I'm only familiar with the bare minimal guidelines I've read in a couple articles. I don't even know if they're correct or up to date. Nobody I've worked for has ever…

> Pardon my curiosity, did you type this on a keyboard by touch typing? If so how do you recognize and correct typos? I'm merely a sighted user here, but I can personally attest that when you've mastered touch-typing, you can tell when you make a mistake and correct it without needing to look at the screen. It is a bit of an eerie feeling the first time you do it. Full disclosure: I touch-typed this reply, and I made…

I never learned touch typing, so I was unaware of that. I pick type with both hands without looking at the keyboard, but I have to look at what I'm typing on the screen to know when I've made a typo.

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

#500

Post by tyfon »

This is already EU law. You can get fined if you don't follow accessibility guidelines on your home page.

Usually that also makes for better home pages for other people as you don't get the type of crap "creative" web developers tend to put there to make it flashy but unusable.

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