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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

#91
post #21

Does the ADA really apply and enforced at all publicly available businesses? Does every Chinese restaurant in Chinatown have a Braille menu? If we really start enforcing this, only larger businesses will survive.

Restaurants don’t need a Braille menu to accommodate blind customers, a sighted employee can walk them through the ordering process. With websites that’s not always an option, which is legally and morally an issue.

It's curious then that they're suing Domino's.

Domino's has a phone number, and every capability the company offers over the web it offers over the phone. In fact, since this business in particular was built on telephone-based ordering, the the phone option is actually the first-class experience, with the web offering only a fraction of the options otherwise available.

So at least in this case, ordering pizza over the phone instead of web is precisely as suitable a substitute as speaking to a waiter instead of reading your Chinese menu in braille.

The plaintiff will argue that regardless of the fact that no business services are actually unavailable, it is the website itself that is being denied. And falling back to a compatible communication medium is inherently unsuitable regardless of whether the fallback is sufficiently functional.

And if that's the case, then it's functionally equivalent to say that failing to provide accessible menus in a restaurant, and falling back to having the menu spoken aloud, is a denial of rights.

I'm not going to say whether it's right or wrong, but it is certainly different than how the law had been interpreted in the past.

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

#92
post #16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and probably a can of worms if VR becomes a "normal" platform for this type of thing

Wouldn't VR be a lot better for a lot of these things? A huge amount of VR innovation is focused on non-sight feedback mechanisms. Implementing braille via VR interfaces would be actually be a lot easier since you're always using your hands to interact.

It's an interesting idea but it's actually harder, due to the low resolution of physical feedback currently available through VR devices. VR remains mostly visual, with input devices either approximate and 3d-spatial, or having physical input devices (in which case VR doesn't help)

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

#93
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…

Thank you for your insight. One thing that I've wondered for a while is, what do you do about captchas? The whole point of them is to prevent access to the webpage unless a person sees the graphic. Can you sue Google under ada?

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

#94
post #93
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…

Thank you for your insight. One thing that I've wondered for a while is, what do you do about captchas? The whole point of them is to prevent access to the webpage unless a person sees the graphic. Can you sue Google under ada?

I think they have audio?

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get (or use) Rewards points unless you order online. They also have online coupons and discounts. They actively encourage customers to order online, pick up in person and do carry out. Most locations have minimal seating and minimal staff. Some don't even bother to have bathrooms for their customers. Their business model actively tries to reduce the amount of overhead for the business by promoting online or…

> Some don't even bother to have bathrooms for their customers. At least in California, any business with eat-in food services is required (by law) to provide restrooms. If a Domino's franchise does not offer eat-in service, it's entirely reasonable (and legal) they don't have public restrooms.

I've eaten at a Domino's with only one or two tables and no bathroom. I don't recall what state, possibly Arizona.

But I've done a fair amount of traveling and Domino's seems to position themselves as basically a carryout window. You can call and you can order in person, but most locations seem to do the vast majority of their business via the online ordering system.

They print off labels, slap them on the appropriate boxes and begin making the food. Some locations do a brisk business while only having one or two employees on site, plus one or more delivery drivers.

The employees sometimes clearly find it to be a hardship to take orders by phone or in person. It interrupts their workflow and they are frequently very busy just trying to fill orders coming in off the website.

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

#97
Rather than crippling the rest of the world for the blind, why not improve the tools for them instead?

Screen readers that are limited to structured inputs can't be the end-all final solution right? It would be shortsighted to set this tech in stone with legal precedents. Do we seriously want to require every blind person to be fluent in reading html/React as the default way to consume sites?

We should be trying to improve the tech so they can consume the world just like sighted people. There are already apps that can use computer vision to caption and describe images. It can even connect you with real people if the AI sucks.

I think pouring investments into those technologies might be cheaper relative to the amount of work added to the industry as a whole.

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

#98
post #93
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…

Thank you for your insight. One thing that I've wondered for a while is, what do you do about captchas? The whole point of them is to prevent access to the webpage unless a person sees the graphic. Can you sue Google under ada?

Google's recaptcha is actually somehow really good - you just click on the checkbox and somehow it magically understands that you're a human, even when using a screenreader. Other websites have audio captcha. In the worst case, you can install a captcha-solving browser extension - they are typically 90% accurate.

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

#99
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…

Is there some kind of "Yelp for websites for blind people"? In other words, a web site for blind people that lets you know whether a given site works with your screen reader? It seems like it could be a big time saver.

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

#100
post #78

This is such a good plan. So many developers don't care about a11y. This just adds a cost to actually start caring and planning your code around it.

Most only care to make it look like the mockup. And the people making the mockups only care that the site looks like their design.
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