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

#571

Post by SilasX » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 5:57 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…

This happens more often than you might think: by doing basic steps to make your product usable, it suddenly becomes much more useful and in-demand than you anticipated. More examples are:

- Force businesses/streets to add a curb lip for wheelchairs -> Stars above, suddenly it's easier to accept deliveries and bring in luggage!

- Optimize site for slow connections, suddenly you have a torrent of previously-unserved customers. [1]

Edit: Turns out it's called the Curb Cut Effect:

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-...

[1] Summary at this HN discussion, follow through to the story for more details. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601977

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

#572

Post by pwg » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

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…

I have a question for you that I've always wondered about the answer, but I do not know anyone to which to pose the question.

How accessible is a basic, plain vanilla, semantic HTML document? I.e., a fully server side rendered HTML doc that uses paragraph and heading and so forth tags for what they semantically mean. Are those type pages accessible, or is more work required to make them accessible?

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

#573

Post by GordonS » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

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.

You know, I really think this would work. If Google penalised non-accessible sites and provided clear guidance on how to make sites accessible - companies and devs would take notice, and make the changes needed.

In a way it's a bit frightening that Google have that power, but it does have the opportunity to be used for good.

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

#574

Post by foldr » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

esyir wrote: post #564

foldr wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I considered them,

By which you mean, you decided without actually asking any of them or doing any investigation that a certain group of people don’t appreciate visual art.

The vast majority of people using screen readers have some degree of vision. I would not assume that they have no appreciation of visual art.

The ADA is needed because people have so many assumptions about people with disabilities that they don’t bother to verify.

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

#575

Post by evunveot » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #551

evunveot wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 text speech 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 extr…

> 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)

That's all true, but I feel like there's a missing "Therefore..." at the end.

> > 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 know that's not what you said. It's what I said. I don't see what your second sentence has to do with it.

> 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.

Yeah, they got sued because blind people allegedly can't use their website. Language has nothing to do with it.

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

#576

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #394

Dylan16807 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that, or offering it as a potential argument? § That's not what mrep claimed made it hard to read. They said it was hard to trace lines. § And there are other ways of adding pauses, on top of those pauses not being very necessary in the first place. I could do without them just fine. § More generally, as long as a big paragraph is focused on one topic, and nobody is doing a point-by-point reply, it wo…

I am arguing that, and it's also how I read mrep's comment: it's a wall of text with no clear pauses, making it hard to read. And if those §'s are your other ways of adding pauses, then those are entirely insufficient for inserting pauses for most readers, including me: we're not trained to read those characters as pauses. Sure, there might be other ways. But they're not applied, making the comment harder to follow f…

> those are entirely insufficient for inserting pauses

Pretend I said "indicator of separation" instead of "pause" then.

> Sure, there might be other ways. But they're not applied, making the comment harder to follow for some people than it would be had it been subdivided into paragraphs, and mrep was merely helpfully pointing that out in case mltony wanted to keep those people in mind in the future.

By talking about "other ways" to mark a logical separation, I think you're on a completely different argument than mrep. mrep is saying that it's physically hard to track the lines when reading, which is entirely a function of line length and spacing. mrep's problems would be solved if I started adding newlines in the middle of sentences, even though that would make things worse in terms of subdividing into coherent paragraphs.

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

#577

Post by curryst » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

couchand wrote: post #455

enlyth wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you surprised? He's got a product which he believes has no value to blind people and a record of exactly zero people calling to complain, but he's getting shit on by the a11y brigade anyway. I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base. It's very easy to tell others to do something a certain way with a co…

> I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base. Fortunately, in America we don't believe discrimination is acceptable, and we've codified that principle in the law.

Of course we do, we allow and encourage discrimination on a number of fronts. The most obvious is discrimination based on socioeconomic status; we have a whole host of "luxury" products that are kept inaccessible to lower income people so they can serve as a status symbol. Education is another lateral that is generally viewed as acceptable for discrimination (i.e. jobs that require a particular degree). Financial, employment and criminal histories are all also acceptable to discriminate based on.

It's perfectly acceptable to not allow someone to rent an apartment because they have a criminal history, or a poor financial or employment history. It's also acceptable for American Express to not issue black cards to people who don't make a million dollars a year.

We have codified some traits that we do not allow discrimination based on, but generally speaking, discrimination is acceptable. Unless you change the general definition of "discrimination" to the legal one, which would seem to make the argument circular (i.e. we have banned discrimination where discrimination is the things we have banned).

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

#578

Post by hnruss » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #343

playpause wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one problem with that approach is that blindness isn’t binary. Many registered blind people are partially sighted and use screen readers and other assistive tech to supplement low vision. Another concern: as someone working on a large web development team, I think that maintaining a separate “non-visual” site would entrench a two-tier approach to quality and completeness (noticing and fixing issues, adding ne…

It seems to me that if this ruling is enforced and becomes accepted we may see a welcome move towards 'accessibility first' design - which would be an interesting paradigm shift for many devs.

Popular web design frameworks like Bootstrap consider accessibility and encourage it in their documentation. See: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/getting-started/accessibil...

Are there any accessibility-first web design frameworks?

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

#579

Post by Miraste » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #526

gabaix wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like it wouldn't have helped at all. From the article: "Proponents of HR 620 say that changes to the ADA are needed to prevent so-called drive-by lawsuits, where attorneys and people with disabilities use the ADA for their own monetary gain by filing frivolous claims. Yet, as the Democrats noted in their letter, HR 620 will do nothing to stop such cases because 'these private actions seeking damages are filed pursuant to specific State laws that unlike title III of the ADA, authorize monetary damages. HR 620 would make no change to those state laws and therefore fails to address lawsuits seeking damages.'"

I suspect the main reason for the bill was the "substantial progress" wording, which would let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant.

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

#580

Post by rstupek » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #242

litoE wrote: post #210

I know the owner of a small brick and mortar store in California. She decided to create a web site to sell her products on line. She got a domain name and a hosting account and installed a canned platform (OpenCart) which allowed her to create her own web site and started to try and sell. Total sales on the web site over three years: about $3,500. Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a…

Sounds like whoever sold her the theme didn't bother with accessibility. I think laws like this are good, but at the same time they will end up pushing people to stick to larger sites like shopify or just listing on ebay/amzn to avoid all this.

I've seen many Shopify sites which are not ADA compliant.