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

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/146368.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_...

>On average over the post-ADA period, employment of men with disabilities was 7.2 percentage points lower than before the act was passed. In addition, wages of disabled men did not change with the passage of the ADA.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/J...

This one is long, and they do mention some positive impact on education later. Didn't read that far though.

>while relative disabled employment declined significantly just after the ADA’s enactment in states in which these provisions were a substantial innovation relative to the pre-ADA state-level employment discrimination regime, relative disabled employment was stable in states with ADA-like employment discrimination regimes in place prior to the ADA’s enactment

Non-exhaustive search, but the data seems to indicate that ADA reduced employment for the disabled shortly after inception. I'm not certain on the longer term effects (those are also much more annoying to model here).

This is a world where we exist and do our work both in front of our screens and in the physical domain. In this world we use tools such as Fusion 360, Solidworks and online services such as Vention to design physical parts, products, machines, tooling. Altium Designer and other EDA tools to design electronics. We use both online and offline tools to manage manufacturing workflow, quality, schedules, client interaction and more. We use online and offline tools to program and manage our CNC machines, quote and manage aspects of the transition from digital to real object in your hand.

I look at this ecosystem and peripheral elements to this and I am not sure I truly understand both this decision and the context. Do you have to be a blind person to truly understand it? Can a blind person design mechanical parts using Fusion 360 or Solidworks? Or electronics using EDA tools?

Again, exposing my obvious ignorance on the subject here. Happy to do so too, as I am sure some of the contributions to this thread will serve to educate me as to some of the nuances, needs and issues in this domain.

What I fear with some of this stuff --and again, this could be truly ignorant in this case-- is that these rulings will serve ambulance-chaser type attorneys who, with a juicy new vector for revenue generation, will file a massive number of lawsuits, extract blood from small and large companies and individuals and, in the end, not necessarily serve the blind community all that well.

In other words, the lady who owns a little knitting blog will be extorted out of a few hundred bucks. After that she will either shut down the site --which means everyone loses-- or she will deploy the crappiest minimal compliant modification she can find, maintain it badly but still be in compliance...which means her blind visitors lose. The lawyers, however, will do very, very well, as they file thousands of these cases and rake-in the profits. If you can't tell, I've dealt with lawyers enough over the last three decades to have a very dim view of a certain subclass among their ranks. I firmly believe they make things worse for society rather than the opposite.

A blind person who has lost their voice could avail themselves of the textspeech service I mentioned. If they also don't speak English they may need to employ a translation dictionary or some other translation service as well, but I'm not aware of any legal obligation for private businesses to provide translation services in the US.

Basically, yes. Also, components often require extra div-nesting for robustness, and then there's the obfuscated classnames (CSS-in-JS), and the way responsiveness tends to be done these days (crude media query helper components that show/hide duplicated subsections of DOM for different devices). This all means the rendered DOM in devtools is bloated and hard to read anyway, so there's less point in caring about keeping it nice and clean.

Also, if you're mostly focused on building individual components, you probably don't feel as much ownership over the page as a whole, so you don't think about how your rendered DOM affects the document outline. Without that bigger picture, semantics isn't as interesting.

For the latter, how sure are you that the benefit outweighs the cost here. Given the current state of the law as I understand it, if websites would be classified as "public accomodations", they'd all have to provide accessibility options regardless of size. Moreover, I've taken a look at the WCAG guidelines to educate myself on what providing accessibility would be like. It's not exactly small, and while experienced, large organizations might be able to comply, smaller restaurants might have issues there, especially if they're skimping on the webdev side of things.

If I wanted to abuse this, I could crawl restaurant listings, hit them with a scary templated legal document threatening a lawsuit for compliance to some law they've probably never heard of.

From an outsider viewpoint, I don't really trust American regulation that much to improve the situation, especially looking at the bay area housing situation and the state of your public transport. The former is a precise case of regulation causing issues, and attempts to remove that highlight how hard it is to remove poor regulation.