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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

#581

Post by dorgo »

weberc2 wrote: post #565
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.

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…

>Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven

Yes, the incentives differ. Its just that if I imagne a more accessible web and try to reverse engineer the way how it come to be I end up with ranking algorithm adjustments. Availability bias, I know :-P

There is a lot of money in SEO. Even a rumor about Google adjusting its algorithm towards accessibility could trigger improvements.

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

#582

Post by Vinnl »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #576
Vinnl wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then I think we have a different interpretation of mrep's point. (Where my interpretation has going for it that mrep themselves isn't even doing what you're saying they want.)

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

#583

Post by comex »

mlang23 wrote: post #284
carlmr wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are CLI tools inherently accessible?

I guess 99.9% are. However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza or buy your weekly load of groceries with a CLI tool :-) If you want to interact with the rest of the world, you will likely need to use the web...

> However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza [..] with a CLI tool :-)

You’d be surprised. ;) Here’s a classic from 2004:

https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782

(That specific tool probably no longer works, but Domino’s still has an API for ordering pizza… although apparently the new one isn’t officially supported.)

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

#584

Post by Mirioron »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #439
Mirioron wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because our highly regulated world sometimes seems like it is actively designed to make it impossible for people to make their lives work (without being part of a megacorp -- and what if that doesn't work for you?). I thought that everybody being part of megacorps was the intended outcome of a lot of regulations. Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation? It's particularly ironi…

... intended outcome...Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation? "Ninety percent of everything is crap." "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." People tend to make rules that reflect the kind of environment that is typical for them. Federal government is large, bureaucratic, etc. It's no surprise that rules coming out of it implicitly assume th…

I agree with you that a lot of the forces that push regulations are "random noise", but I find it difficult to believe that big players in these industries aren't pushing this along. They have something to gain from this after all.

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

#585

Post by DoreenMichele »

Mirioron wrote: post #584
DoreenMichele wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... intended outcome...Isn't that why there are no clear guidelines and limits to a lot of regulation? "Ninety percent of everything is crap." "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." People tend to make rules that reflect the kind of environment that is typical for them. Federal government is large, bureaucratic, etc. It's no surprise that rules coming out of it implicitly assume th…

I agree with you that a lot of the forces that push regulations are "random noise", but I find it difficult to believe that big players in these industries aren't pushing this along. They have something to gain from this after all.

That's true, but is fundamentally a different idea than your earlier framing suggested to me. Lobbying is absolutely a thing and tends to be funded by people with deep pockets.

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

#586

Post by tekkk »

mltony wrote: post #561
tekkk wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No problem, and I'm happy that this came up so that I can try my best to make things better for users like you :).

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

#587

Post by pakitan »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #477
pakitan wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a blind person be interested in a painting or car insurance? Another reason I'm sure about it is if there was genuine interest, there would be calls from blind people - "Hey, I'm interested in your products but I'm blind, can you help me with figuring out some things on your site?" or "Hey I'm blind and I have problem accessing certain features on your site, can you please fix those issues?". We haven't got one…

You seem to be under the impression that all blindness is exactly the same. There are people who have serious difficulties reading at normal screen distances, but still have enough sight to appreciate a painting.

Yes, and that impression is correct because "blind" means someone who can't see. At all. The people you mention are usually referred to as "visually impaired" or "legally blind".

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

#588

Post by im3w1l »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #489
im3w1l wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cicrcling back to > If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great! Given how enforcement works, I can't share your enthusiasm, and in fact I will oppose accessibility regulation.

Well, for the sake of people who need accessibility I hope you won't be successful with that.

Walk the path you propose and you will get a world where chains displace all other restaurants, where police swoop in on kids' lemonade stands.

Why? When you can make sensible regulations that target the service providers like shopify, or whatever restaurants use instead and just escape the dilemma?

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

#589

Post by PhasmaFelis »

pakitan wrote: post #587
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be under the impression that all blindness is exactly the same. There are people who have serious difficulties reading at normal screen distances, but still have enough sight to appreciate a painting.

Yes, and that impression is correct because "blind" means someone who can't see. At all. The people you mention are usually referred to as "visually impaired" or "legally blind".

This thread is about people who need visual accommodations to use websites, not completely blind people exclusively. You're the one who's been talking like they're the same thing.

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

#590

Post by kls »

sbarre wrote: post #434
34679 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did >there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility Which is it?

The two are not mutually exclusive. WCAG 2.0 Accessibility compliance is within reach of anyone following the most basic of best practices in web development these days. There are many powerful free tools for developers to use to test and validate their work as they go, and there is a ton of literature and thought leadership out there for anyone to find and learn from. OP may be referring to retroactively making webs…

Yea all the work I did was accessibility after the fact. For most cases it is just annotating what is already there. Sometimes it requires restructuring the way the page flows. It would be slightly more efficient to design for accessibility up front but it is fairly easy to bolt on after the fact.
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