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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

#531

Post by UncleMeat »

bocalogic wrote: post #522

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 quickl…

So? If lawbreakers can be identified at scale, should that change the situation at all?

Imagine if this were changed to tax fraud. Now we have computers that can automatically find discrepancies and we can notify violators at scale. The horror!

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

#532

Post by dbjorge »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #521
mwcampbell wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The most popular FOSS screen reader by a very, very large margin is NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org). It is Windows specific, though.

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

#533

Post by triceratops »

evunveot wrote: post #528
triceratops wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 text speech 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.

> Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about disabilities.

Why not? A blind tourist in the US shouldn't be able to order some Domino's? What about a blind person who has temporarily lost their voice (e.g. due to laryngitis, or a bad cold)? A sighted person in this situation would not have had a problem, so clearly the "full and equal enjoyment" requirement is not being satisfied here.

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

#535

Post by esyir »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #443
esyir wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have ~4.77 billion people on the internet. Assuming all of Canada was blind, that's 0.77% of total users. Under most circumstances, I get that some level of accessibility is reasonable, but if you're expecting the same level of UI investment there for <1% of the population, I'd call that insane. Here, he can still call in and order the pizza.

TBH personally I find this comment exceptionally strange given the rigors of acceptable limits among software uptimes and reliability outside of accessibility concerns. Netflix would probably not tolerate an entire country's access being revoked from their service for a technical reason they could fix. If AWS had a 0.77% downtime rate for all of their services, it would be a lot of services and a ton of bad press fro…

That's an apples to oranges argument here. So first a market argument:

AWS downtime results (or the lack thereof) are what's desired by the market. Blind people are a small market, and prioritizing them equally or disproportionately is an inefficient use of resources.

This can be countered by "we can't just abandon the disabled". And we haven't; In this case, the disabled guy can call in and order a pizza. The core service is still available to him.

However, I don't see why forcing all features for every disability should be mandated. It's a small proportion of the populace, and while steps should be taken to enable usability, I don't believe that their desires warrant as much resources as the mainline, nor do I think we should force design to cater to them.

This is particularly so as, from what I get from the ADA, there is no size requirement for such. If you classify websites as "public accommodations", then all websites big or small now have yet another thing that they can be sued for.

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

#536

Post by jameslk »

dan-robertson wrote: post #345
jameslk wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 com…

I appreciate your point, but being accessible to most doesn't stop lawsuits unfortunately.

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

#537

Post by evunveot »

I tested the Domino's home page with WAVE (I had to install the browser extension for some reason) and it found no errors and what looks like healthy use of landmarks and ARIA, though I didn't dig too deep. Would any blind HN readers care to comment on to the degree to which https://www.dominos.com/en/ is accessible to them, personally?

The stress around website accessibility comes from the lack of any authority who can tell you you've done enough and you can't be sued, perhaps by someone using an outdated screen reader/browser combination you'd never think to test with. It brings back bad memories of things like trying to support IE5/Mac at the same time as IE6/Windows. (Protip: embrace quirks mode.)

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

#538

Post by andechs »

bertjk wrote: post #244
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…

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…

Microsoft does a TON of work to make it's applications not only accessible, but user friendly to screenreader and keyboard users.

This is most obvious in the OneDrive online. The selectable list of files is implemented using Layout Grid, and thus is a single tab stop. Arrow keys can be used to navigate the grid and inline actions, and it's a single SHIFT-TAB to navigate up to the multi-selection actions.

There's ARIA controls and interactions that are defined in such a way that a non-sighted user can just hear what "type" of interaction it is and already know how to navigate it.

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

#539

Post by esyir »

foldr wrote: post #412
enlyth wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has got more information here, you, who has no idea what the OP is selling, or OP who is actually selling the thing? "I simply don't believe" is not a great argument, when the previous car insurance and painting analogies proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.

> 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…

Sure, you can find blind people with intense interest in visual media. There have to be a few out there. However, a quick google (as you requested) on the art topic seems to indicate that art targeted at the blind is rarely of the painting variety, but of a more tactile sort. This... would not be appreciated in many museums, where touching the exhibits is typically discouraged (Admittedly, audio enjoyment of visual art does exist).

I'm really sick of the argument by outlier where a generally true statement is countered by an outlier case as though that invalidates the whole statement.

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

#540

Post by DubiousPusher »

rednixion wrote: post #275
DubiousPusher wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet in an increasingly online world, refusing to make one's site accessible is tantamount to refusing to install a ramp in place of stairs.

A counter to that analogy is that where/when ramp access is needed and how one should be built in order for it to be usable is defined by building codes and the concept is well understood. Without what clear definition or a method to get a website's accessibility "certified" makes it seem like allowing litigation is not going to be produce meaningful results and could be easily abused.

Perhaps rather than object to the court's decision it would be wiser to put energy towards updating the ADA to include standards for electronic access.
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