Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible • Hacker News Board

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

#551

Post by triceratops » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

evunveot wrote: post #546

triceratops wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 he…

I should have said "Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about the Americans with Disabilities Act," because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law. A blind person who has lost their voice could avail themselves of the text speech service I mentioned. If they also don't speak English they may need to employ a translation dictionary or some othe…

> A blind person who has lost their voice could avail themselves of the textspeech service I mentioned

Would they know how? They wouldn't normally be accustomed to using those tools, right? A sighted person with laryngitis doesn't need to bother with learning text-to-speech for the 2 weeks they don't have their voice because they can just use the website. If blind users have to learn the tools, that's adding an extra burden on them. (And yes blind users have to learn how to use screenreaders, which sighted users don't, but that's a permanent requirement associated with their disability)

> because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law.

That's not what I said. I've added parentheses to my statement so it's easier to parse as a boolean "(blind and (speech impaired or unable to speak the local language))".

> I'm not aware of any legal obligation for private businesses to provide translation services in the US.

But Domino's provides access to their website in multiple languages. So a blind non-English-speaker isn't enjoying the "equal and full enjoyment" of Domino's services that a sighted non-English-speaker would.

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

#552

Post by julianozen » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

pakitan wrote: post #296

julianozen wrote: post #245

How could this lawsuit cost less then just fixing the website?

Because currently there is no accepted definition of "fixed" (accessible) site and if they caved, people could come after them for various technicalities forever.

This is not true. There are lots of agreed upon standards (in this case the plaintiff wants WCAG 2.0) and dominos needs to meet one of

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

#553

Post by mruts » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

coreyp_1 wrote: post #128

Small personal story: My father is an amazing salesman. He used to sell for Schwan's food in the 90's (those big yellow trucks that delivered frozen food to your door every 2 weeks). He had a blind couple (husband and wife) that were on one of his routes, and they bought a little bit of food every time he came by. But they could never read the menu, because Schwan's only had printed brochures. One day, he had me and…

Is this argument for government regulation or against? I see ss an argument against, but I’m sure most people disagree.

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

#554

Post by acbabis » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

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.

It's also a great way to persuade managers. Actually, a lot of the time you can just tell them you're doing SEO because nowadays they're fundamentally the same. Almost everything you do for accessibility has a positive impact on SEO.

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

#555

Post by acbabis » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

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…

I've also done a lot of accessibility work. For people looking to get into it, another crucial thing is using "Semantic HTML". If every button is a tag and every link is an and every form element has a corresponding tag (even for AJAX), then you save about 80% of your accessibility work up front (no, this isn't an exaggeration).

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

#556

Post by lucasmullens » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

mruts wrote: post #553

coreyp_1 wrote: post #128

Small personal story: My father is an amazing salesman. He used to sell for Schwan's food in the 90's (those big yellow trucks that delivered frozen food to your door every 2 weeks). He had a blind couple (husband and wife) that were on one of his routes, and they bought a little bit of food every time he came by. But they could never read the menu, because Schwan's only had printed brochures. One day, he had me and…

Is this argument for government regulation or against? I see ss an argument against, but I’m sure most people disagree.

It's just a nice story.

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

#557

Post by pakitan » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #529

pakitan wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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've been too busy twisting my arguments and you might have missed the link I posted earlier: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...

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

Are you now trolling me? I can't believe I need to explain this but I'll make one last attempt:

UCB posts free video lectures online. UCB is technically violating ADA by not having captions. Someone says "You're breaking the law, your free content must be available to everyone with disabilities or I'll sue you". UCB complies with the law the easiest way possible by shutting down the free lectures. You say you value the ADA law so you should be happy - UCB is in compliance now. Everyone else lost, including actual people with disabilities who might have had partial access to the videos one way or another. I'll leave it to you to decide how desirable this outcome was, nitpicking "frivolous" definition notwithstanding.

> 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.

My argument is perfectly valid. I was talking about ADA until you implied that I'm bigoted and trying to tell blind people what they should be interested in. That has nothing to do with ADA. If want to go in that direction, go all the way and tell me that I'm racist because I'm not ensuring my site is accessible in Africa.

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

#558

Post by lucasmullens » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

evunveot wrote: post #537

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…

They've likely added accessibility since the lawsuit started. Maybe check archive.org?

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

#559

Post by mltony » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #466

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…

As a developer, can you weigh in on why you think it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible? Are there inherent technical challenges that make it difficult to make accessible websites? Or is it that there's a constant churn of new front-end technologies that typically treat accessibility as an afterthought, and typically leave accessibility as an afterthought that will finally get prope…

You don't need any non-standard input elements to make web site accessible. In fact the opposite is true: if you only use standard HTML elements, chances are your web-site is going to be fully accessible. It is when developers decide to use some fancy javascript instead of a standard button, or some other fancy form controls, with tons of javascript, this is when screenreaders tend to have problems trying to figure out what's going on.

For small businesses I imagine the biggest problem is that they only have only one engineer to support a web site, and he is not familiar with accessibility standards (justifyably so, because there are so few blind people out there), and he'd have to learn these standards and test the web site for accessibility problems - all these actions require time.

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

#560

Post by lucasmullens » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

sgustard wrote: post #179

dexwiz wrote: post #48

I see a lot of negativity in the comments. I imagine much of that is gut reactions of web developers hearing they need to do more work. As a web developer that has had to pass an accessibility review from a person who is actually blind each release for the last two years, I can tell you it’s not that hard. Make sure you have a sensible tab order and labels on forms and you are 80% there. The hard issues are creating…

But the Domino's site didn't have "labels on forms," it was a whole goofy animated game where you'd drag ingredients on a pizza to order. There's no way to make that accessible without building a whole separate web app. You can argue that goofy animated games are a dumb way to run a pizza website, and I can agree with you, but we all know the web is full of that kind of thing which is now waiting to be a lawsuit magn…

> There's no way to make that accessible without building a whole separate web app

I don't buy that. There's plenty of articles on how to do accessible drag and drop, and certainly one doesn't need a "separate web app", just an accessibility mode that uses a more standard form.