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

#611

Post by gamblor956 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

zarro wrote: post #598

gamblor956 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, more than two centuries of jurisprudence holds that commercial activity is not speech, and is thus is not generally subject to the protection of the Constitution. Moreover, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate Commerce. Doing business thus is validly subject to government regulations mandating that businesses do (or not do) certain things. And some of those things include not di…

Given that commercial activity affects my unalienable rights to life, liberty and property I would disagree that its not subject to the protection of the Constitution. I also find fault with the commerce clause of the constitution and think its broad interpretation as an economic defense mechanism is archaic and filled with undesirable effects (such as the drug war, limitations to trade and international tariff wars)…

Your personal interpretation disagrees with the Constitution that actually exists and with the two centuries of legal cases on constitutional rights.

The Constitution was intended to give the government broad powers. It was written in reaction to the Articles of Confederation, which created a government with limited powers that failed with 5 years. The provisions of the Constitution and the bill of Rights need to be understood within that context.

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

#612

Post by SilasX » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

disabled wrote: post #600

SilasX wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not blind. But I would be furious if I had to call to place an order rather than submit a web form, merely because the site couldn’t be bothered to adhere to basic standards and instead used meth-addled “code artisans” practicing resume-driven development.

Coming from somebody who is disabled: this is what life is like for a disabled person. There are many, many indignities that we encounter, even nearly constantly due to the way society ignores our needs. If you go and check out some disabled activists' Twitter accounts, you may be shocked at the anger and the lack of "decency". But, put yourself in their shoes, and realize that they have been forced to deal with syst…

I agree with such activists. It's stupid to have to make a phone call when a website should be perfectly capable for this role.

While I don't claim to know what such disabilities are like, I feel I have experienced analogous frustrations. Back when Linux on the desktop and Firefox were catching on, I remember it being a crapshoot about whether critical sites (like banks and tax filing) would play nice with non-IE browsers, and I had to have a PC/Windows/IE setup as a fallback. Same issue: the use the meth-addled design that breaks any non-mainstream clients.

I also use Tridactyl (and before it, Vimium and pentadactyl), an extension that lets you click links from the keyboard, which is a huge UI improvement and (along with other keyboard input methods) speeds up web browsing significantly. It's generally good at detecting links, but the same sloppy design and over-clever features make clickable elements undetectable and frustrate this enhancement.

And for the kicker ... often times, these improvements "for the disabled" end up benefiting everyone else even more, but designers/buisdev people don't get it! See my previous comment about the Curb Cut Effect [1].

The web was designed with screen readers in mind. It is a serious regression to find major sites telling blind users to call in. This isn't the 60s.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195054

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

#613

Post by ccleve » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #75

ccleve wrote: post #58

On the surface, this sounds like a fine thing. Who doesn't want accessible websites? But it really opens a can of worms. What's a place of public accommodation? With brick-and-mortar, it's easy; if you have a physical location open to the general public, it probably qualifies. But on the web? Does my personal website count? What if I sell t-shirts on it? What if I don't sell anything, but have forums where the public…

No, your personal website does not count. Yes, it does if you sell t-shirts. No, a forum is insufficient, it needs to actually be a business. Yes, aria labels are compelled speech, but they're upheld[1]. There would be an exemption if the burden was "undue", but you're not going to meet that by claiming it's a few extra hours of work. If accessibility standards change, you are compelled to upgrade your site if you're…

Thanks for the link. It says: "The ADA’s nondiscrimination mandate states that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity." So, it's based on "services", not a place of public accommodation, and it (the letter) applies to public entities only.

There's another question that this situation raises: is a website a "place", a "service", or a "product"?

If it's a place, then place-of-public-accommodation rules might apply.

If it's a service, then it's likely to be treated like other services. For example, the ADA says that a barbershop must be accessible, but it doesn't say that the barber must cut the hair of a disabled person. (That would come under anti-discrimination statutes, not the ADA. I think. Not sure about this).

If it's a product, then there are probably no rules at all. There's no law that say that your faucet must be accessible to a person who can't turn small knobs, or that your book must have large-enough type to be read by the elderly.

Again, as I say, sorting all this out is going to be harder than you think.

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

#614

Post by zarro » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #611

zarro wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that commercial activity affects my unalienable rights to life, liberty and property I would disagree that its not subject to the protection of the Constitution. I also find fault with the commerce clause of the constitution and think its broad interpretation as an economic defense mechanism is archaic and filled with undesirable effects (such as the drug war, limitations to trade and international tariff wars)…

Your personal interpretation disagrees with the Constitution that actually exists and with the two centuries of legal cases on constitutional rights. The Constitution was intended to give the government broad powers. It was written in reaction to the Articles of Confederation, which created a government with limited powers that failed with 5 years. The provisions of the Constitution and the bill of Rights need to be…

Its not my personal interpretation, and just because legal cases interpreted a certain way for two centuries does not make them right. The constitution was not intended to give the government broad powers, but rather to assign limits to its scope. The context in which it "needs to be understood" is not for you to define, but up for interpretation.

"The United States Constitution presents an example of the federal government not possessing any power except what is delegated to it by the Constitution — with the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution making explicit that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved for the people and the states."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_government

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

#615

Post by hopesthoughts » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:18 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…

You really think it's aroun 20% though? I very rarely have problems. Sure learning layouts is interesting, but problems where I flat out can't do something is rare. I'd have to agree that it's more the case when it comes to desktop applications. I'll download something and not be able to use it at all.

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

#616

Post by hopesthoughts » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #436

soulofmischief wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a pain in the ass. In the case of websites... two years ago I started adopting a11y into my front-end code. But while plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y make the job easier, it honestly was also a huge pain in the ass familiarizing myself with the grotesque state of affairs in web accessibility standards. However, one of the biggest gains might have been learning to properly leverage every HTML tag to it…

> P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind? As far as I can recall, most of the blind folks on HN don't post big walls of text. Maybe younger blind people who grew up with text-to-speech and never learned braille are more likely to do that. To me, that would be a good reason for screen readers to deliberately pause for a b…

Interestingly, I did learn braille. However, I didn't really learn to use paragraphs until 6th grade. Therefore, it doesn't come very naturally to me.

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

#617

Post by hopesthoughts » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

michaelscott wrote: post #265

cwkoss wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a lint-like tool that you would recommend to developers to scan their web application for accessibility issues (and ideally suggest alternative best-practices)? EDIT: found this Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List with 132 items listed! Anyone have advice on which ones are best? https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

I use https://khan.github.io/tota11y/ which you can add to your browser to run through your site. I also sometimes just close my eyes and run a screen reader through a site to see if I could navigate it reasonably. Neither of these options helps with catching everything but they're better than nothing.

For that, you need to know all the quick navigation shortcuts a screen reader can use. Otherwise you're not doing it very efficiently.

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

#618

Post by hopesthoughts » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

mltony wrote: post #217

yoloClin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure a bunch of people have inundated you with other questions, but what other pain points do you have? How are Docx and PDF to deal with?

Microsoft Word is fully accessible. As for PDFs, as long as they are not scanned, most likely they are accessible. Sometimes forms in PDF files are not very accessible. And also every now and then I need to read a science paper in PDF format - somehow they still haven't figure out how to make accessible formulas in Latex-generated PDFs, so I'd have to use an OCR called InftyReader to OCR this PDF to get the formulas.…

Or those image PDFs that you have to use OCR with and then you get to try and clean them up afterwards because they didn't come out as cleartext. Those are always fun!

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

#619

Post by hopesthoughts » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

magashna wrote: post #424

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…

Why wouldn't a blind person just call for a pizza?

Lol I do that.

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

#620

Post by mch82 » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 10:03 AM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #521

mwcampbell wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.

I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?

@Zeldman tweeted this screen reader survey, which includes free/non-free options plus lots of usage data... https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/

Edit: source tweet is https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1180100942131277824