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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

#561

Post by mltony »

tekkk wrote: post #367
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…

Hey, thank you for your insight into the life of blind users. I have often wondered if my sites that I've been part of building have been accessible but without proper guidance or customer requirements, nobody has really cared that much to check out. Lately I have been part of building a quite popular website in my native country, and this time, as I have had more autonomy than before, decided to go ahead and add as…

I actually work more in backend area, so I am not that familiar with accessibility standards in HTML. I am only a user there. But looks like others have already answered some of your questions.

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

#562

Post by foldr »

esyir wrote: post #539
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…

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 a…

I think you are forgetting the existence of partially sighted people. Most people who use screen readers can see. There wouldn't be anything odd or unexpected about such people being interested in paintings or other visual art forms. On top of that, many people who are fully blind were not blind from birth, and so are about as likely to be interested in visual arts as anyone else.

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

#563

Post by foldr »

esyir wrote: post #542
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you source your claim? I am genuinely interested in reading it.

As with most research, take multiple sources. A quick survey showed this (admittedly rather old paper), but it does show the immediate effect: 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 A…

The negative effects on employment were a blip:

https://www.nber.org/digest/nov04/w10528.html

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

#564

Post by esyir »

foldr wrote: post #562
esyir wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I think you are forgetting the existence of partially sighted people. Most people who use screen readers can see. There wouldn't be anything odd or unexpected about such people being interested in paintings or other visual art forms. On top of that, many people who are fully blind were not blind from birth, and so are about as likely to be interested in visual arts as anyone else.

I considered them, but blind enough to appreciate visual art but too blind to use a webpage seems like a rather narrow group to me. It's one of those things where I would very much need evidence accept.

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

#565

Post by weberc2 »

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.

I would be surprised if Google didn't know a given customer was disabled and serve up accessible results. Whether that is something an engineer deliberately coded or whether it was an algorithm that learned that a given cluster of users exhibits a strong preference for accessible sites.

For the SEO motivation to succeed, I think search engines would have to regress (by definition of "search engine" and its goals) to serve accessible results to users who don't need it. I'm not opposed to this as a solution, but it requires some interesting decisions: do governments stipulate how much of the search score for a given page is based on accessibility? Presumably it's a bad thing for governments to stipulate _how search engines work_. On the other hand, we could see search engines do this voluntarily; that would be cool and might just work because the search engine space isn't especially competitive, but if it ever becomes competitive, I don't think a gentleman's agreement to artificially boost accessible sites (at the expense of serving up the content that is genuinely most likely to satisfy a non-disabled person's query) is going to hold.

Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven: lots and lots of Google users (as a percentage of total users and absolutely) search via mobile--it behooves Google to improve their search experience by boosting mobile-friendly results, and it therefore behooves sites to optimize accordingly. We're talking about boosting accessibility beyond its market value--I think this is good and right, but I wouldn't expect to solve the problem the same way as for mobile.

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

#566

Post by SolaceQuantum »

esyir wrote: post #550
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is kind of an odd proposition to have though, because market sizes aren't always reasonably correct to judge. For example, beauty products previously thought that black women are a small market. In reality, black skintones have unique qualities in shade that aren't appropriately captured. The day a line of PoC oriented foundations were widely available they were so heavily demanded that stores nationwide…

Sure, but then that's an opportunity waiting to be taken, especially in your beauty product case. Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that. 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 accessib…

" Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that."

Except for ADA related things, we really did need regulation to install cutouts in curbs, and now it's a major wonderful thing everyone is advantaged by.

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

#567

Post by ryanmercer »

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…

I'm curious as to how they knew what was what when their order came given it's all frozen food in bags/boxes with the instructions printed on the packaging on how to reheat/cook it. That seems like a much larger hurdle than ordering.

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

#568

Post by wtmt »

mwcampbell wrote: post #481
lallysingh wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a "professionalism" class in my CS undergrad program. A day using the web with a screen reader would do wonders, I think, for awareness of the issue.

I'm extending a standing offer to come in and give a guest lecture on accessibility, focusing on blind and low-vision users, for any university or high school in the Seattle metro area, free of charge. I've done this a few times already. My presentation would have a mix of concepts, demos (both good and bad), and practical advice. My email is in my profile if anyone is interested.

Have you done this or could you do this as a video or audio that’s posted online and available to anyone? That’d help thousands of people.

If you have any links to your lectures online, please share them. It could perhaps be a “Tell HN” post here (I’m not entirely sure if that’d violate the guidelines).

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

#569

Post by mumblemumble »

mltony wrote: post #559
mumblemumble wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yeah. Sorry for being unclear, but that's what I was thinking: My hunch is that standard HTML elements tend to be accessible almost by default, while non-standard JavaScript-heavy things are more likely to be inaccessible by default.

And my other hunch is that using standard HTML elements is actually a less expensive way to build websites. But I'm not sure on that. I haven't touched front end in a long time.

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