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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

#511

Post by pakitan »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #479
pakitan wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, here is a case that we do know something about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-uc-berkel... Is that frivolous enough for you? That's the same law you're defending here and when that article came out, it was universally decried here on HN. Funny how things change, huh? But I guess it's not ok for someone to sue UC-Berkley for providing free non-accessible lectures, while it's totally ok for a p…

You are moving goalposts here, are we now debating whether any ADA-related lawsuit ever has been frivolous? I also have a hard time answering for an anonymous group of people, as I am not HN. You seem very eager to assign very clear and simple intentions to large and complex groups of human beings. Blind people don't like this kind of stuff, these lawsuits are frivolous, HN had this collective opinion on X but has no…

No goalposts were moved by me. In this thread, the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns and the UC-Berkely case is just one more datapoint. I provided an article with detailed analysis of the practice as well.

At the same time, all you've been doing is disingenuous interpretations of my posts and dismissing other reports as "biased", while not providing a single datapoint yourself. "GASP! How dare you say blind people are not interested in paintings! The horror and the arrogance!" Sure, there are blind people buying paintings and interested in art. How does that invalidate anything of what I said? The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people. People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?

> For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law.

Are you fine with a frivolous suit against UC-Berkeley too? Because it is possible that lawsuit is frivolous and UC-Berkeley is breaking the law. In fact that's exactly what's happened - UC-Berkeley is in technical violation of a botched law, they got threatened with a frivolous lawsuit and decided to just remove the free content. As a result everyone loses but I hope the ADA defenders are happy.

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

#512

Post by triceratops »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #327
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' is quoting US code out of context. The law reads "No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation." There is a clear difference bet…

Someone who is both blind and speech impaired or unable to speak the local language can't order food over the phone.

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

#513

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#514

Post by Scoundreller »

mch82 wrote: post #322
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?

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...

Not blind, but an HN and lynx story. I sometimes use lynx these days because Canadian telecoms have shitty mobile bandwidth plans.

Lynx would always think I was making an NNTP connection to news.ycombinator.com unless I put in the HTTP://

Slipped me up every time.

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

#515

Post by mikestew »

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.

It's the argument I made yesterday in a related thread: if the screen reader can't read it, the machine can't read it. Any machine, whether it's the Turing machine that's trying to make heads or tails of your website so it can read the text to a user, or the actual machine running in some Google data center somewhere. Or the machine running your script to make life a bit less of a series of button clicks.

If that doesn't convince you, then have some pride in your craft, some attention to detail. Visually impaired users aren't the only ones annoyed by the fact that you couldn't be bothered with tab order. We have tools, you don't need me to tell you that you're lazy (or overworked, or underbudgetted...), the machine will do that for you.

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

#516

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

tremon wrote: post #493
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.

And what about individual developers who own their own projects? Open source projects? They typically have no warranty.

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

#517

Post by [deleted] »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #491
esyir wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

[deleted]

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

#519

Post by sargram01 »

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…

Buttons simply doing nothing happens all the time, sometimes reloading the page makes them work, other times the site is complete broken and it’s time to move on.

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

#520

Post by esyir »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #491
esyir wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

To be fair, proposing regulation on people is really easy if you're not affected.

And individual rules can often sound nice at first glance, only to have disastrous consequences in practice. Add in the fact that repeal of regulation is an... onerous process, and things get even more tricky.

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