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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

#521

Post by VBprogrammer »

mwcampbell wrote: post #438
akavi wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?

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

#522

Post by bocalogic »

On another note, there are services that are already scraping thousands of websites and testing them for ADA compliance. If the website fails the test, the website or lead is sold off to an attorney. The attorney will then find or hire a straw client to sue the website and the company. Its very prevalent and lucrative because a lot of the law has yet to be written and the companies being sued are settling very quickly.

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

#523

Post by CathedralBorrow »

esyir wrote: post #520
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True.

And also to be fair, it is very easy to dismiss advocacy for regulations as naive ideals from inexperienced people who like things that sound nice but are ignorant of the realities of the world.

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

#524

Post by esyir »

oblio wrote: post #431
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.

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.

Sure. They can order a pizza. Notice that I mentioned that reasonable allowances for disabled people can make sense, but I see no reason that a tiny minority should dictate the design viewed by a vast majority.

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

#525

Post by acqq »

downtide wrote: post #405
acqq wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the opposite: if you insist on keeping your browser maximized that can mean that you probably need all the width on some other site which scales poorly. I never keep my browser maximized.

Nope, problem is each window may need a different sizing. With a tabbed interface you resize the lot.

For those with your use cases the browsers should allow “per site” saved local margins.

Bur it seems the ad delivery has the priority.

I simply have a separate browser window for “wide development” sites. I see nothing wrong with that.

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

#526

Post by CathedralBorrow »

gabaix wrote: post #509
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could the restaurant owner have been biased against the person who is compelling them to take action that they don't want to take? I would probably take the owner's psychoanalysis of them with a grain of salt.

According the restaurant owner the lawyer was suing hundreds of small restaurants in the Bay Area. Also they didn't seem to care about the restaurant at all, and were only interested in finding out all violations. There was a bipartisan bill that passed the House 2 years ago ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620/... ) that aimed at closing drive-by ADA shakedowns. The bill required claimants t…

That sounds like a great bill. Anything that lets people hold businesses accountable re:accessibility without opening gaping loopholes for legal shenanigans like that seems like the right balance here.

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

#527

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

Not having security vulns in your software costs money. A large number of users aren't actually harmed by vulns or don't care about them.

But if you went around saying that really it isn't important to fix vulns since they don't affect that many people you'd be rightly raked over the coals.

"It is expensive" isn't an excuse.

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

#528

Post by evunveot »

triceratops wrote: post #512
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

I'm pretty sure phone companies in the US are required to provide free textspeech services (dictation) for people who can't speak and/or hear. They've been popular with prank callers. Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about disabilities.

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

#529

Post by CathedralBorrow »

pakitan wrote: post #511
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provi…

> "the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns"

Can you source this claim? You didn't provide any data point for that. You've claimed a lot of things that you just know and seem to take offense to that being challenged.

In fact, UC Berkeley case is the only data point I've seen from you here; which feels sparse given the blanket statements you've made about the intentions of various groups of people. You won't even say what product you are selling that you know for a fact that blind people are not interested in at all.

Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?

> "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."

That depends on how much value you place on following the law.

> "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?"

Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.

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

#530

Post by esyir »

dansingerman wrote: post #315
dorgo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is a great comment. Imagine the investment that would suddenly start in accessibility if Google publicly announced it was an important part of search engine rankings.

Reducing product performance for your userbase to send a message seems to be a common trend nowadays.
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