>“Therefore, Winn-Dixie has violated the ADA because the inaccessibility of its website has denied Gil the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages or accommodations that Winn-Dixie offers to its sighted customers.”
Can't you argue this for literally any company of any kind?
This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
So now if I build a shitty website selling homemade candles I can get sued because I didn't use the right accessibility tags?
Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low.
This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
Isn't this entirely the point, though?
We can make a reasonable assumption that if it were generally profitable to make services and venues accessible, then it would already be done. It's precisely because it's not cost-efficient that regulation has to exist.
That assumes, of course, that you accept the central conceit that it's a good idea to ensure that people with a variety of disabilities can access services and aren't generally shut out of mainstream society.
Quite aside from anything, WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with.
How much of this is really about "adding features for the blind" and how much of it is about simply not adding things hostile to accessibility?
If this sticks, it might be a blessing to more than just disabled users. Everyone who has to suffer through the currently fashionable javascript-needed-to-do-everything web stands to benefit.
> Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low.
Really? I don't know how big the Winn-Dixe site is, but making your site accessibly friendly isn't really that hard. HTML spec is made for this, so as long as you're not actively fucking things up, you should be fine.
How much does $37k buy you in consultancy days? About 33 days (assuming $1100/day - about how much ThoughtWorks charges in Australia).
> This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
The same could be (and was) said of mandatory wheelchair ramps.
I've had to half-ass software accessibility requirements before--the company had government contracts, so they did the absolute minimum necessary to avoid violating the letter of the ADA, without any effort to actually make it usable. It made me feel sick. Just like wheelchair ramps, accessible site design is easy if you plan for it from the beginning, like you should. It's only hard if you've been half-assing it for years and then have to go back and fix it, the same as any other technical debt.
> Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low.
Not sure how realistic this estimate is, but I wonder how much Winn-Dixie has spent on their lawyers on this case to AVOID making their site ADA compatible.
The thing is, to make a website this inaccessible requires effort. You have to go way overboard with dynamic stuff and plugins, because the screen-reading software is very good at consuming and making sense of even very bad HTML.
In fact, sites that are accessible to people with disabilities tend to be pretty nice for everyone to use because most of accessibility comes from not spewing a bunch of slow, unusable crap into all your pages.
> This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
Unluckily for you, we as a society decided that we will accommodate those with disabilities rather than just look at their business value. If we only made choices based on utility, we'd already be implementing widespread eugenics and killing off anyone who gets sick or old. And it wasn't a case of not using the right accessibility tags, check out the quote in another comment, his software couldn't read any text. [0]
Yes, the long term result of adding regulations such as this to the internet will ultimately result in an internet that is exclusive to large corporations as they will be the only ones with the resources to comply.
It is the same path we have seen many industry go down. At some point, large corporation will begin to lobby for regulations in order to remove smaller competition.
"Separate but equal" was (essentially) shot down by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How can enjoyment be equal if by definition sighted people have a superset of abilities of blind people? The only way would be to not present a visual interface at all, and only provide an audio or screen-reader interface to any given website.
Oddly enough the website for my very small side-business is probably compliant, if compatibility with screen reader software is the criterion.
I've told this story before: When I first learned about HTML in a magazine article, one of the promised benefits was that you could create specialized browsers that could use the tags to interpret a site in various ways. One of the possibilities mentioned in the article was a browser for the blind.
What I think has happened subsequently is that the Web quickly went from rather plain HTML, to being a general purpose programming language for rendering arbitrary content on a specific collection of browsers.
I'd be happy to switch my site back to plain HTML, like what I wrote in an evening when I first launched my business.
Sounds like the equivalent pre internet situation would be sueing a grocery store that has a Sunday newspaper circular for them not providing it also in braille.
I've never used their bathroom. And I've never used their handicap bathroom either. So do away with both, right? Just because you haven't used it, is not proof of how little or how much the bathrooms or website are integrated with the physical store.
Did you miss the part in the article and its title where it said the man suing is blind? For someone who can't see, a website actually is a better interface to "buy groceries and prescription drugs".
I'm really sad to see so many people on HN arguing against the need for enforceable (and not onerous if you look into it) accessibility standards on the web.
A huge social benefit of the Internet is to connect everyone and make information accessible to all.. It has changed our world for the better.
People with disabilities should not be excluded from this.
>I'm really sad to see so many people on HN arguing against the need for enforceable (and not onerous if you look into it) accessibility standards on the web.
Someone decided that developers must comply with disability technologies, and not have disability technologies built around the existing technologies. And most developers had no argument in that battle. Now we have aria attributes sitting inside of our HTML.
And most likely because businesses are going to push this down on their existing developers, meaning they will need to devote time and energy learning what ADA and the WCAG standards are and figure out accessibility testing while maintaining all of their previous responsibilities.
But really, we shouldn't need to do any of that.
We should have tools that allow us to comply to these standards with little effort. We should have tools for the disabled that are as brilliant as Google search. We should have testing frameworks that test our websites for this.
Why the hell are we spending money on suing companies instead of spending it on research for curing disabilities? Where's my damn artificial eyes and ears I was promised decades ago? All I got was this stupid lawsuit.
Is any of that being built for the next generations of developers who probably get no accessibility training in college or dev bootcamps or internet tutorials? Do businesses even send their devs to accessibility coding conferences or workshops?
So I think many devs are justified at arguing against having to learn yet-another-spec because someone else simply told them to. We already have enough to learn with companies cramming laundry lists of technologies and ideologies into their job postings. Accessibility will become another bullet point on that list and we'll have Full Stack Javascript Accessibility Ninjas.
I've lobbied for accessibility, including explicit support for screenreaders, at every company where I've worked since ~2007.
Politically though, I'm wholly against laws to require this sort of thing. If a company wants to alienate 15% of their potential market (the blind and colorblind), more power to them.
This is what happens when an industry purposely ignores making websites accessible and more importantly ignoring principles of progressive enhancement. This is the first of many lawsuits to come, I fear.
I hope the web development industry will self-correct itself and get serious about a11y principles in websites before laws get made that convolute what web developers do best.
Another interesting thing is building inspectors that work for the city, don't care about ADA only city codes from my understanding. I never dealt with them, but after watching this segment I can see violations all over when I go places. Like ADA is 20 years old and my city doesn't even have curb cuts for wheelchairs. Plus some small towns websites have bad low contrast or horrible fonts. I also think some flat UI designs are really horrible to tell things apart.
Sad thing, some of these lawyers doing this only cares about making money, and not actually helping accessibility.
There's a bill in Congress H.R.620
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620 that is meant to reform this. Basically you'd write a written complaint to the business, Then the business gets 60 days to reply outlining how they will improve it. Then 120 days to actually fix it. You can't just go out right suing, they get a chance to correct it. If they aren't correct it, then you get to sue. Seems fair to both the business owners, and accessibility.
There was one case I remember when watching related videos before, that someone had to pay a lawyer 5K and all the work they had to do is move the soap dispenser. Something the business owner himself was able to do with a screwdriver and 15 mins. Then someone else had to pay 5K over missing a $50 sign, another quick fix. I guess if H.R.620 was the law, with those really small changes they could just fix it right away and reply saying they already fixed it outlining how.
On the side note, making captions helps SEO find your video, and powers the transcripts. Sometimes watching a long presentation like a hour long, later I'll be working on somthing and remember hearing about the problem before... So I'll look up the video, go to transcripts and ctrl-f. I was listening to a podcast on a walk one day, and wanting to write down some notes when I got home of some points that interested me... But no transcript, so I'd have to go back and listen to find it again...
However, somethings I think might be impossible to make accessible like complex applications for 3D Virtual worlds, 3D Modeling, Camara filters, Photo editing.
Also wonder how this would apply to user generated content. Should Facebook or YouTube or the uploader be sued for some random vlogger not captioning a video, or some individual live streaming from their phone? I'd surely hope there'd be exemptions for those websites, probably Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would cover that case. However if a business uploaded a video to YouTube, then that business should caption it for sure. However, I hope lawyers don't start going after individual YouTubers... Didn't caption that video of your family at the theme park? $5,000 demand letter! That would get ridiculous if lawyers ever attempted to do that.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|8 years ago|reply
Can't you argue this for literally any company of any kind?
This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
So now if I build a shitty website selling homemade candles I can get sued because I didn't use the right accessibility tags?
Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low.
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|8 years ago|reply
Isn't this entirely the point, though?
We can make a reasonable assumption that if it were generally profitable to make services and venues accessible, then it would already be done. It's precisely because it's not cost-efficient that regulation has to exist.
That assumes, of course, that you accept the central conceit that it's a good idea to ensure that people with a variety of disabilities can access services and aren't generally shut out of mainstream society.
Quite aside from anything, WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
If this sticks, it might be a blessing to more than just disabled users. Everyone who has to suffer through the currently fashionable javascript-needed-to-do-everything web stands to benefit.
[+] [-] protomyth|8 years ago|reply
http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
[+] [-] fattire|8 years ago|reply
Do you feel the same way about wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking?
[+] [-] madeofpalk|8 years ago|reply
Really? I don't know how big the Winn-Dixe site is, but making your site accessibly friendly isn't really that hard. HTML spec is made for this, so as long as you're not actively fucking things up, you should be fine.
How much does $37k buy you in consultancy days? About 33 days (assuming $1100/day - about how much ThoughtWorks charges in Australia).
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|8 years ago|reply
The same could be (and was) said of mandatory wheelchair ramps.
I've had to half-ass software accessibility requirements before--the company had government contracts, so they did the absolute minimum necessary to avoid violating the letter of the ADA, without any effort to actually make it usable. It made me feel sick. Just like wheelchair ramps, accessible site design is easy if you plan for it from the beginning, like you should. It's only hard if you've been half-assing it for years and then have to go back and fix it, the same as any other technical debt.
[+] [-] Rusky|8 years ago|reply
Isn't that the point of the ADA?
[+] [-] amaranth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microtherion|8 years ago|reply
Not sure how realistic this estimate is, but I wonder how much Winn-Dixie has spent on their lawyers on this case to AVOID making their site ADA compatible.
[+] [-] ubernostrum|8 years ago|reply
In fact, sites that are accessible to people with disabilities tend to be pretty nice for everyone to use because most of accessibility comes from not spewing a bunch of slow, unusable crap into all your pages.
[+] [-] cooper12|8 years ago|reply
Unluckily for you, we as a society decided that we will accommodate those with disabilities rather than just look at their business value. If we only made choices based on utility, we'd already be implementing widespread eugenics and killing off anyone who gets sick or old. And it wasn't a case of not using the right accessibility tags, check out the quote in another comment, his software couldn't read any text. [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579029
[+] [-] swiley|8 years ago|reply
The web as it is now is unreadable for sited and blind people so I really have a hard time feeling bad for site designers.
[+] [-] 13years|8 years ago|reply
It is the same path we have seen many industry go down. At some point, large corporation will begin to lobby for regulations in order to remove smaller competition.
[+] [-] IanCal|8 years ago|reply
But a huge amount of difference to a particular subset of users. Which is the point.
I highly disagree that requiring businesses have accessible services is a "dangerous precedent".
[+] [-] DanBC|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wbl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zer00eyz|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oh_sigh|8 years ago|reply
"Separate but equal" was (essentially) shot down by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How can enjoyment be equal if by definition sighted people have a superset of abilities of blind people? The only way would be to not present a visual interface at all, and only provide an audio or screen-reader interface to any given website.
[+] [-] protomyth|8 years ago|reply
Great, now instead of a manger that has no clue on estimates, we get to deal with and outside testing firm.
[+] [-] metaphor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|8 years ago|reply
I've told this story before: When I first learned about HTML in a magazine article, one of the promised benefits was that you could create specialized browsers that could use the tags to interpret a site in various ways. One of the possibilities mentioned in the article was a browser for the blind.
What I think has happened subsequently is that the Web quickly went from rather plain HTML, to being a general purpose programming language for rendering arbitrary content on a specific collection of browsers.
I'd be happy to switch my site back to plain HTML, like what I wrote in an evening when I first launched my business.
[+] [-] tyingq|8 years ago|reply
A fair amount is just common sense, but some parts require deliberate changes.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
[+] [-] jnordwick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metaphor|8 years ago|reply
Heavily integrated?? GTFO.
10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie...until today, number of instances I've visited their website: precisely zero
[+] [-] tchaffee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooper12|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbarre|8 years ago|reply
A huge social benefit of the Internet is to connect everyone and make information accessible to all.. It has changed our world for the better.
People with disabilities should not be excluded from this.
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|8 years ago|reply
Someone decided that developers must comply with disability technologies, and not have disability technologies built around the existing technologies. And most developers had no argument in that battle. Now we have aria attributes sitting inside of our HTML.
And most likely because businesses are going to push this down on their existing developers, meaning they will need to devote time and energy learning what ADA and the WCAG standards are and figure out accessibility testing while maintaining all of their previous responsibilities.
But really, we shouldn't need to do any of that.
We should have tools that allow us to comply to these standards with little effort. We should have tools for the disabled that are as brilliant as Google search. We should have testing frameworks that test our websites for this.
Why the hell are we spending money on suing companies instead of spending it on research for curing disabilities? Where's my damn artificial eyes and ears I was promised decades ago? All I got was this stupid lawsuit.
Is any of that being built for the next generations of developers who probably get no accessibility training in college or dev bootcamps or internet tutorials? Do businesses even send their devs to accessibility coding conferences or workshops?
So I think many devs are justified at arguing against having to learn yet-another-spec because someone else simply told them to. We already have enough to learn with companies cramming laundry lists of technologies and ideologies into their job postings. Accessibility will become another bullet point on that list and we'll have Full Stack Javascript Accessibility Ninjas.
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|8 years ago|reply
I've lobbied for accessibility, including explicit support for screenreaders, at every company where I've worked since ~2007.
Politically though, I'm wholly against laws to require this sort of thing. If a company wants to alienate 15% of their potential market (the blind and colorblind), more power to them.
[+] [-] technojunkie|8 years ago|reply
I hope the web development industry will self-correct itself and get serious about a11y principles in websites before laws get made that convolute what web developers do best.
[+] [-] Keverw|8 years ago|reply
ABC15 Arizona also did a story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D60we_4VZGY
Another interesting thing is building inspectors that work for the city, don't care about ADA only city codes from my understanding. I never dealt with them, but after watching this segment I can see violations all over when I go places. Like ADA is 20 years old and my city doesn't even have curb cuts for wheelchairs. Plus some small towns websites have bad low contrast or horrible fonts. I also think some flat UI designs are really horrible to tell things apart.
Sad thing, some of these lawyers doing this only cares about making money, and not actually helping accessibility.
There's a bill in Congress H.R.620 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620 that is meant to reform this. Basically you'd write a written complaint to the business, Then the business gets 60 days to reply outlining how they will improve it. Then 120 days to actually fix it. You can't just go out right suing, they get a chance to correct it. If they aren't correct it, then you get to sue. Seems fair to both the business owners, and accessibility.
There was one case I remember when watching related videos before, that someone had to pay a lawyer 5K and all the work they had to do is move the soap dispenser. Something the business owner himself was able to do with a screwdriver and 15 mins. Then someone else had to pay 5K over missing a $50 sign, another quick fix. I guess if H.R.620 was the law, with those really small changes they could just fix it right away and reply saying they already fixed it outlining how.
On the side note, making captions helps SEO find your video, and powers the transcripts. Sometimes watching a long presentation like a hour long, later I'll be working on somthing and remember hearing about the problem before... So I'll look up the video, go to transcripts and ctrl-f. I was listening to a podcast on a walk one day, and wanting to write down some notes when I got home of some points that interested me... But no transcript, so I'd have to go back and listen to find it again...
However, somethings I think might be impossible to make accessible like complex applications for 3D Virtual worlds, 3D Modeling, Camara filters, Photo editing.
Also wonder how this would apply to user generated content. Should Facebook or YouTube or the uploader be sued for some random vlogger not captioning a video, or some individual live streaming from their phone? I'd surely hope there'd be exemptions for those websites, probably Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would cover that case. However if a business uploaded a video to YouTube, then that business should caption it for sure. However, I hope lawyers don't start going after individual YouTubers... Didn't caption that video of your family at the theme park? $5,000 demand letter! That would get ridiculous if lawyers ever attempted to do that.
[+] [-] wbl|8 years ago|reply