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 of them you won't be able to use.
Imagine that you cannot order from some online stores. You cannot fly certain airlines. And apparently you cannot order some pizza online.
Worst of all you don't magically know whether a web site is accessible or not. You just go to web site and try it, spend some time to learn the layout - it typically takes blind peple longer to familiarize with new web sites, spend thirty minutes to fill out the details of your order and then when you try to click the submit button, you figure out that it wouldn't click for some reason. Being a developer you open HTML code just to realize that this is some weird kind of button that can only be clicked with the mouse, but not a screenreader. But hey, your screenreader can route the mouse cursor to this button and simulate a click. So you try a real mouse click and it still doesn't work for some reason, and I have no idea why. Finally, you give up.
I hope I managed to convey a typical sense of frustration with a web-site that is not that accessible. I do get arguments of other people that it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible. and I don't know where to draw a line, but I need to say that Domino's is a large enough company and even though I hate counting other companies' money, I must say they're big enough to be able to afford to make their web-site accessible.
Have you ever encountered any web sites that you feel went above and beyond in accessibility? I have sometimes wondered while debugging a site for accessibility concerns, fixing the nth input focus problem or what not, whether it would be preferable to actually just design an entirely separate optimized audible experience instead of forcing the user to infer the shape of a designed-for-sighted people website by tabbing all over the place. I imagine that a working implementation would roughly resemble a keyboard navigable phone menu, with the main point being that it would not necessarily correspond to the visual design, but would still offer all of the functionality expected and probably in a more efficient way. Is this a thing? Should it be a thing?
Ironically (I cannot seem to word this in my mind without sounding like an ass so please don't take offense), your comment is about 10 lines long on my 15 inch laptop making it somewhat difficult to read for us vision readers. A double new line every few sentences which causes a paragraph on hacker news makes it much easier.
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 its fullest. Modern day SPAs have all gone back to using wild div forests with no context or metadata available for readers. This also took much less effort than learning the rest of standards compliance. So start there!
After crossing that river, I think that accessibility is complex enough to warrant its own dedicated developer for almost any project if standards are to be achieved.
Still... until our bosses catch up, we do what we can. Here are some great resources for developers who wish to learn more about how to design for accessibility: https://a11yproject.com/resources/#further-reading
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?
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?
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.
I'm not blind but I'm laughing from reading your annecdote because: I'm a developer with typical accessability requirements who has a similar experience ordering pizza online and winds up calling ;-)
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 my siblings record on audio cassette the entire menu and their prices.
His sales from that couple shot through the roof! All of the sudden, there were all of these options for sale that they didn't even know about before, and now they wanted to try them. From that time forward, they were very faithful and consistent customers. And, of course, they were very appreciative of the gesture!
Every 6 months or so, when Schwan's updated their menu and/or pricing, we would re-record the menu, until Schwan's finally figured out an audio offering of their own.
A few years ago, my father ran into the couple when he happened to pass through their town (my father no longer sells for Schwan's, but now sells insurance and investments). The couple remembered and asked about each of us children by name, these decades later.
It's neat to see how just a little consideration (and a bit of extra work) can make a huge impact on someone else's life!
Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn't really say anything new here. They declined to hear Domino's appeal of the Ninth Circuit's (unanimous and clearly correctly decided) reversal of the District Court's absurd dismissal.
Domino's tried to claim that their due process rights were being violated since there is no federally-mandated standard for accessibility. But the ADA is clear: businesses have a legal requirement to ensure that disabled customers have "full and equal enjoyment" of their goods and services. Domino's made the tenuous argument that the lack of a specific standard meant that they didn't receive fair notice.
Robles, the plaintiff, argued that the appropriate standard to apply was WCAG 2.0. Instead of offering a different possible standard (which would have been a defensible legal rationale), Domino's position was basically, "fuck off".
It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards. Make sure your content and markup are reasonably semantic. Use standard form components for data entry. Where more complex, visual-first designs are employed, make sure there are text-based fallbacks.
If you are a professional software developer, doing this is not just your legal responsibility, it's your moral responsibility.
> It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards.
Do you follow the standards? If you show me a web site that you've developed I'll show you a site with multiple violations of WCAG 2.0. Hell, JAWS' own site is littered with WCAG violations! Yes, "accessibility at the basic level" is easy but WCAG 2.0 is not "accessibility at the basic level". It's a huge set of rules that are often unclear and ambiguous. And that's fine because WCAG 2.0 is just something that you should aspire to. But if you start defining accessibility by whether a site conforms to WCAG 2.0 or not, then I can guarantee you that every single popular site is non-accessible.
We got sued and believe me it has nothing to do with blind people. Our site is of zero interest to them. Companies are sued by scumbag lawyers, who have made a nice little racket out of this thing. It's really unfortunate that the HN crowd is siding with them, as if they are championing the rights of disabled people. It's all about money.
> Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn't really say anything new here.
A unanimous denial of certiorari (declining to hear the case) sends a pretty strong message to lawyers and their clients. It only takes 4 votes (1 less than majority) to hear a case, so the fact that there were zero justices interested is a clear message. While it is technically possible that there could in the future be a circuit split, which could then be appealed to the SCOTUS, it is unlikely SCOTUS would hear that case.
And given what happened today, it is even less likely that a competent lawyer would counsel their client to appeal a similar case up to a federal appeals court (because it looks like it would be a loser of a case).
So while the SCOTUS did not affirmatively speak today, their unanimously declining to hear the case does actually say something new, and this is being hailed as a landmark-ish case in the legal accessibility community.
FWIW, IAAL, and I run an assistive technology startup.
'Full and equal enjoyment' is quoting US code out of context. The law reads "No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation."
There is a clear difference between 'discriminating' against someone because of their disability, and a person's inability to participate in something because of a disability.
Later in the law discrimination is defined, and it gives an exception that auxiliary aids must be provided, except when providing them would be an undue burden.
If I were Dominos (I'm not a lawyer, so I probably have this wrong), based on a reading of the law, I would argue that since Dominos offers pizza ordering through the telephone it is not depriving anyone their services if the website is not accessible. The service Dominos has to provide access to is delivery of pizzas, not the use of their website, which only exists specifically for the purpose of ordering pizzas. Could a library be sued because a specific book doesn't contain braille, when the same book is available in braille? What if Dominos had two phone numbers, one that offered teletype and one that was voice only? This judgement seems to imply that they could be sued unless both their phone numbers offered TDD, because they are depriving people of the use of the other phone number?
I'm all for making websites accessible, but I find it hard to believe someone who orders a pizza over the phone is being deprived of 'equal enjoyment' of the pizza.
> It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards. Make sure your content and markup are reasonably semantic. Use standard form components for data entry.
On a basic level, yes. But what does the law consider to be reasonable? There are so many degrees of compliance, some of which often go against brand guidelines, against common js libraries, etc.
I'm not sure if this changed, but as I recalled, Domino's site was a Flash application with a pretty non-standard UI. Their lack of accessibility may be a consequence of that technical decision.
I develop accessible android apps.
Between complicated designs, broken android libraries, different talkback behaviours, and vendor bugs, accessibility can be very difficult.
The effort we expend on accessibility (including dedicated testers) is massive.
Only large organisations can afford to do this.
There are zero inferences that can be drawn from the Supreme Court not granting cert on an appeal. The Supreme Court denies the vast majority of appeals they receive, and only take a case in a narrow and not always intuitive set of circumstances. Headline is very misleading.
And at the end of the day developers worldwide like all humans choose to keep a job, maintain their livelihood and avoid getting fired.
What I find appauling is I need to be disabled to demand a website that doesn't require font.js and 600 trackers to run, that doesn't intercept my scroll wheel or make me use a Google product for captcha.
hyper text mark up language is dead. Long live the world wide web.
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 tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page. No I am not saying that this provides a great experience for the blind but it at least helps them to be able to get around the site.
I personally an color blind, which is not a disability but it is a pain in the ass at times, especially give that color has the ability to convey data visualization in a rapid manner that is subconsciously parsed by the user. It's extremity effective if one can see color. It is kind of how I got into accessibility for a time. By simple adding a secondary reference of iconography for the color blind a site can convey the same info. (e.g if you show red put a small stop sign on it, yellow use a triangle etc.)
I see no reason why even the smallest sites should not be able to provide access to the blind, whereas larger sites should be striving to go the extra mile to make it accessible and easy to parse for everyone.
> 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 work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to help me, but they don't know what is accessibility and what is screenreader. Is there a good document on how to make web sites accessible that I can show them?
> 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 tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page.
Not every disabled person is blind. It's not enough to set some tab indexes, add alt tags and call it a day. It's not a process that can be automated and not a simple matter of turning off your screen and using a screen reader (again not all disabled are blind). And as a small business, even if you think your website is accessible (after paying that accessibility dev who you thought fixed it), if you were pursued by a law firm and your options were to try to fight it in court or pay a settlement, you'll likely only be able to afford the latter.
I've also done a lot of accessibility work. For people looking to get into it, another crucial thing is using "Semantic HTML". If every button is a <button> tag and every link is an <a> and every form element has a corresponding <form> tag (even for AJAX), then you save about 80% of your accessibility work up front (no, this isn't an exaggeration).
> there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
Because it costs money to do so, and sometimes mom and pop sites are barely scraping by to begin with. It's also their prerogative to make the content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit - it's their loss if someone cannot buy their product, but it's also their choice to accept that loss. I think it sets a dangerous precedent to make them legally obliged to make their content available in a specific way.
I see a lot of negativity in the comments. I imagine much of that is gut reactions of web developers hearing they need to do more work.
As a web developer that has had to pass an accessibility review from a person who is actually blind each release for the last two years, I can tell you it’s not that hard. Make sure you have a sensible tab order and labels on forms and you are 80% there. The hard issues are creating hidden buttons for drag and drop interactions and announcing changes in the view.
Honestly it’s more keyboard nav than label work anyways. For as many vim lovers as I meet, many developers seem to falsely believe you need a mouse to use the web.
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 can discuss things? What about a site which is primarily about communications, i.e. speech? Does a requirement that you put ARIA labels on things amount to compelled speech?
What if accessibility standards change? Am I compelled to upgrade my site?
This issue is a lot hairier than the court imagines. Does the court really want to get into the issue of which websites need to comply and which don't?
The Supreme Court didn't say anything. All they did was decline to hear the appeal.
From skimming the petition and responses, it looks like the situation is that the 9th Circuit is allowing the case to go ahead to determine whether or not Domino's website is violating accessibility requirements, which means that there's not a lot of facts and administrative record for SCOTUS to attempt to decide if the reasoning as to how to determine how the ADA applies here. In other words, this does feel like a case that SCOTUS rejected in large part because the petition is way too premature--the respondent's brief definitely feels far more persuasive to me than the petitioner's (Domino's) briefs.
In terms of W3C specifications [1], you've got:
WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative: Accessibile Rich Internet Applications) [2], and WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [3]. The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least.
There are a number of automated accessibility testing platforms. "[W3C WAI] Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List" [5] lists quite a few. Can someone recommend a good accessibility testing tools? Is Google Lighthouse (now included with Chrome Devtools and as a standalone script) a good tool for accessibility reviews?
A number of companies have been (more or less) blatantly violating the law in this area. Framework authors in particular have often ignored the value of accessible, semantic markup. Many devs come to the web knowing only frameworks (and not the underlying web technologies), which is dangerous if those frameworks aren't accessibility-focused.
Hopefully this decision finally scares companies into action, and inspires a lot of valuable future litigation on behalf of the visually impaired.
I hope you know that's not a very strong legal precedent, which is why it keeps getting appealed to the Supreme Court from various jurisdictions. You speak (or seem to hope) as if the law is clearly on one side, which it isn't, at least not that strongly.
There is contradictory case law (like Southwest Airlines 2002) that says the ADA does not extend to virtual / online stores.
Companies are policing themselves on this issue out of liability to be sued, which is a far cry from a declarative right to have accommodations online. It is not that certain.
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) her web site is not ADA compliant; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover their time in handling this unfortunate situation".
With her sales, she can't justify spending an additional few thousand to pay a programmer to fix or redo her web site to be ADA compliant. Her only option is to just shut down the web site.
"Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) one image web site is not licensed; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover the unauthorised use of the single image without license"."
That happens all the time. Enough that it's fairly well known now. I think few would just lift an image off another site these days.
If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great! A few headline cases of huge, crippling fines, and few would just put out a site without accessibility, or give a tender to developers without a contract section covering it.
So the only remaining issues are whether $4k is a reasonable sum or just a lawyer trying it on, and whether she can sue OpenCart for providing a non-accessible platform.
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.
That doesn't sound like a problem with a) or b) at all but purely with c).
Also, something is wrong with your example. Cost of buying the original platform is $X, sales (not revenue) for multiple years is $3,500, fixing it or replacing it by a compliant platform is $Y. A "fix" is clearly not more expensive than $X and that was much, much less than the revenue from the sales.
Also, it seems to me that the original product was defective (illegal), so why should she have to pay for the fix?
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.
I wonder if there is a good rule of thumb for what software and features are acceptable to not be accessible? What does it mean for a drawing program to be accessible by the legally blind? You can follow accessibility guidelines (for UI navigation and so on) but does that mean you made the program accessible if the bulk of the operations you can actually do in the software - draw - still requires seeing what you are doing? Are you expected to invent workarounds that allows people to use your software, or can you assume that "nah, no blind person is likely to be drawing anyway"? It seems there is a gray area where it's just not economically feasible to add some extreme bespooke types of accessibility, but at the same time not doing it will make it self fulfilling - of course no blind people will draw in drawing programs so long as they don't get the tools.
If you're blind, can't you just call up a Dominos to order your pizza? "Talk to a human and order your pizza" sounds like a friendlier approach than the automated screen reader or whatever they'll come up with to resolve this litigation.
A denial of cert doesn't mean the supreme court necessarily has an opinion on the merits of the case. Courts in other circuits can still rule otherwise, and SCOTUS might eventually decide to hear such a case at a later time.
I tested the Domino's home page with WAVE (I had to install the browser extension for some reason) and it found no errors and what looks like healthy use of landmarks and ARIA, though I didn't dig too deep. Would any blind HN readers care to comment on to the degree to which https://www.dominos.com/en/ is accessible to them, personally?
The stress around website accessibility comes from the lack of any authority who can tell you you've done enough and you can't be sued, perhaps by someone using an outdated screen reader/browser combination you'd never think to test with. It brings back bad memories of things like trying to support IE5/Mac at the same time as IE6/Windows. (Protip: embrace quirks mode.)
I would consider this a good thing. It really doesn’t require very much effort to be compliant and it ultimately results in UI that are more easily accessible by not only bling people, among other disabilities but also encourages better extensibility for creative purposes https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
Accessibility seems to be thrown under the bus under MVP style thinking. You are trained not to focus on issues that only affect a small number of users. I know I do this all the time. The reason is money.
At what point do we just accept that security, accessibility, and similar properties are actually important, and that we shouldn't accept half baked products anymore?
I don't have a clear answer. But regulating the software industry is just going to make running a startup almost impossible. No more jobs for self taught hackers. All platforms will be a walled garden, including the web.
I'm leaning towards the viewpoint that companies (or anyone) should not be responsible for accessibility problems.
> The ADA mandates that places of public accommodation, like Domino’s, provide auxiliary aids and services to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind
I haven’t read the actual ruling, but Domino’s provides a phone number that you can call, and a person will tell you any of the information on the website and can perform all of the services the website can perform. How is this not a sufficient “auxiliary service to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind”?
[+] [-] mltony|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertjk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrep|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soulofmischief|6 years ago|reply
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 its fullest. Modern day SPAs have all gone back to using wild div forests with no context or metadata available for readers. This also took much less effort than learning the rest of standards compliance. So start there!
After crossing that river, I think that accessibility is complex enough to warrant its own dedicated developer for almost any project if standards are to be achieved.
Still... until our bosses catch up, we do what we can. Here are some great resources for developers who wish to learn more about how to design for accessibility: https://a11yproject.com/resources/#further-reading
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?
[+] [-] cwkoss|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] clamprecht|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewmol|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coreyp_1|6 years ago|reply
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 my siblings record on audio cassette the entire menu and their prices.
His sales from that couple shot through the roof! All of the sudden, there were all of these options for sale that they didn't even know about before, and now they wanted to try them. From that time forward, they were very faithful and consistent customers. And, of course, they were very appreciative of the gesture!
Every 6 months or so, when Schwan's updated their menu and/or pricing, we would re-record the menu, until Schwan's finally figured out an audio offering of their own.
A few years ago, my father ran into the couple when he happened to pass through their town (my father no longer sells for Schwan's, but now sells insurance and investments). The couple remembered and asked about each of us children by name, these decades later.
It's neat to see how just a little consideration (and a bit of extra work) can make a huge impact on someone else's life!
[+] [-] couchand|6 years ago|reply
Domino's tried to claim that their due process rights were being violated since there is no federally-mandated standard for accessibility. But the ADA is clear: businesses have a legal requirement to ensure that disabled customers have "full and equal enjoyment" of their goods and services. Domino's made the tenuous argument that the lack of a specific standard meant that they didn't receive fair notice.
Robles, the plaintiff, argued that the appropriate standard to apply was WCAG 2.0. Instead of offering a different possible standard (which would have been a defensible legal rationale), Domino's position was basically, "fuck off".
It's really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards. Make sure your content and markup are reasonably semantic. Use standard form components for data entry. Where more complex, visual-first designs are employed, make sure there are text-based fallbacks.
If you are a professional software developer, doing this is not just your legal responsibility, it's your moral responsibility.
[+] [-] pakitan|6 years ago|reply
Do you follow the standards? If you show me a web site that you've developed I'll show you a site with multiple violations of WCAG 2.0. Hell, JAWS' own site is littered with WCAG violations! Yes, "accessibility at the basic level" is easy but WCAG 2.0 is not "accessibility at the basic level". It's a huge set of rules that are often unclear and ambiguous. And that's fine because WCAG 2.0 is just something that you should aspire to. But if you start defining accessibility by whether a site conforms to WCAG 2.0 or not, then I can guarantee you that every single popular site is non-accessible.
We got sued and believe me it has nothing to do with blind people. Our site is of zero interest to them. Companies are sued by scumbag lawyers, who have made a nice little racket out of this thing. It's really unfortunate that the HN crowd is siding with them, as if they are championing the rights of disabled people. It's all about money.
[+] [-] gnicholas|6 years ago|reply
A unanimous denial of certiorari (declining to hear the case) sends a pretty strong message to lawyers and their clients. It only takes 4 votes (1 less than majority) to hear a case, so the fact that there were zero justices interested is a clear message. While it is technically possible that there could in the future be a circuit split, which could then be appealed to the SCOTUS, it is unlikely SCOTUS would hear that case.
And given what happened today, it is even less likely that a competent lawyer would counsel their client to appeal a similar case up to a federal appeals court (because it looks like it would be a loser of a case).
So while the SCOTUS did not affirmatively speak today, their unanimously declining to hear the case does actually say something new, and this is being hailed as a landmark-ish case in the legal accessibility community.
FWIW, IAAL, and I run an assistive technology startup.
[+] [-] ltbarcly3|6 years ago|reply
There is a clear difference between 'discriminating' against someone because of their disability, and a person's inability to participate in something because of a disability.
Later in the law discrimination is defined, and it gives an exception that auxiliary aids must be provided, except when providing them would be an undue burden.
If I were Dominos (I'm not a lawyer, so I probably have this wrong), based on a reading of the law, I would argue that since Dominos offers pizza ordering through the telephone it is not depriving anyone their services if the website is not accessible. The service Dominos has to provide access to is delivery of pizzas, not the use of their website, which only exists specifically for the purpose of ordering pizzas. Could a library be sued because a specific book doesn't contain braille, when the same book is available in braille? What if Dominos had two phone numbers, one that offered teletype and one that was voice only? This judgement seems to imply that they could be sued unless both their phone numbers offered TDD, because they are depriving people of the use of the other phone number?
I'm all for making websites accessible, but I find it hard to believe someone who orders a pizza over the phone is being deprived of 'equal enjoyment' of the pizza.
[+] [-] partiallypro|6 years ago|reply
On a basic level, yes. But what does the law consider to be reasonable? There are so many degrees of compliance, some of which often go against brand guidelines, against common js libraries, etc.
[+] [-] chillacy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bendingo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] patentatt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|6 years ago|reply
I know there is a snarky comment about enjoying Dominoe's pizza...
But it is comical that Dominoes championed ordering pizza by tweeting an pizza emoji, but failed to address helping the bling order online.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|6 years ago|reply
What I find appauling is I need to be disabled to demand a website that doesn't require font.js and 600 trackers to run, that doesn't intercept my scroll wheel or make me use a Google product for captcha.
hyper text mark up language is dead. Long live the world wide web.
[+] [-] kls|6 years ago|reply
I personally an color blind, which is not a disability but it is a pain in the ass at times, especially give that color has the ability to convey data visualization in a rapid manner that is subconsciously parsed by the user. It's extremity effective if one can see color. It is kind of how I got into accessibility for a time. By simple adding a secondary reference of iconography for the color blind a site can convey the same info. (e.g if you show red put a small stop sign on it, yellow use a triangle etc.)
I see no reason why even the smallest sites should not be able to provide access to the blind, whereas larger sites should be striving to go the extra mile to make it accessible and easy to parse for everyone.
[+] [-] dorgo|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mltony|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameslk|6 years ago|reply
Not every disabled person is blind. It's not enough to set some tab indexes, add alt tags and call it a day. It's not a process that can be automated and not a simple matter of turning off your screen and using a screen reader (again not all disabled are blind). And as a small business, even if you think your website is accessible (after paying that accessibility dev who you thought fixed it), if you were pursued by a law firm and your options were to try to fight it in court or pay a settlement, you'll likely only be able to afford the latter.
[+] [-] 34679|6 years ago|reply
>there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
Which is it?
[+] [-] acbabis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|6 years ago|reply
Because it costs money to do so, and sometimes mom and pop sites are barely scraping by to begin with. It's also their prerogative to make the content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit - it's their loss if someone cannot buy their product, but it's also their choice to accept that loss. I think it sets a dangerous precedent to make them legally obliged to make their content available in a specific way.
[+] [-] dexwiz|6 years ago|reply
As a web developer that has had to pass an accessibility review from a person who is actually blind each release for the last two years, I can tell you it’s not that hard. Make sure you have a sensible tab order and labels on forms and you are 80% there. The hard issues are creating hidden buttons for drag and drop interactions and announcing changes in the view.
Honestly it’s more keyboard nav than label work anyways. For as many vim lovers as I meet, many developers seem to falsely believe you need a mouse to use the web.
[+] [-] ccleve|6 years ago|reply
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 can discuss things? What about a site which is primarily about communications, i.e. speech? Does a requirement that you put ARIA labels on things amount to compelled speech?
What if accessibility standards change? Am I compelled to upgrade my site?
This issue is a lot hairier than the court imagines. Does the court really want to get into the issue of which websites need to comply and which don't?
[+] [-] jcranmer|6 years ago|reply
The Supreme Court didn't say anything. All they did was decline to hear the appeal.
From skimming the petition and responses, it looks like the situation is that the 9th Circuit is allowing the case to go ahead to determine whether or not Domino's website is violating accessibility requirements, which means that there's not a lot of facts and administrative record for SCOTUS to attempt to decide if the reasoning as to how to determine how the ADA applies here. In other words, this does feel like a case that SCOTUS rejected in large part because the petition is way too premature--the respondent's brief definitely feels far more persuasive to me than the petitioner's (Domino's) briefs.
[+] [-] westurner|6 years ago|reply
https://a11yproject.com/ has patterns, a checklist for checking web accessibility, resources, and events.
awesome-a11y has a list of a number of great resources for developing accessible applications: https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y
In terms of W3C specifications [1], you've got: WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative: Accessibile Rich Internet Applications) [2], and WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [3]. The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least.
There are a number of automated accessibility testing platforms. "[W3C WAI] Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List" [5] lists quite a few. Can someone recommend a good accessibility testing tools? Is Google Lighthouse (now included with Chrome Devtools and as a standalone script) a good tool for accessibility reviews?
[1] https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y/blob/master/topic...
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/using-aria/
[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
[5] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/
[+] [-] jasonhansel|6 years ago|reply
A number of companies have been (more or less) blatantly violating the law in this area. Framework authors in particular have often ignored the value of accessible, semantic markup. Many devs come to the web knowing only frameworks (and not the underlying web technologies), which is dangerous if those frameworks aren't accessibility-focused.
Hopefully this decision finally scares companies into action, and inspires a lot of valuable future litigation on behalf of the visually impaired.
[+] [-] supernova87a|6 years ago|reply
There is contradictory case law (like Southwest Airlines 2002) that says the ADA does not extend to virtual / online stores.
Companies are policing themselves on this issue out of liability to be sued, which is a far cry from a declarative right to have accommodations online. It is not that certain.
[+] [-] litoE|6 years ago|reply
Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) her web site is not ADA compliant; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover their time in handling this unfortunate situation".
With her sales, she can't justify spending an additional few thousand to pay a programmer to fix or redo her web site to be ADA compliant. Her only option is to just shut down the web site.
The only winners here were the lawyers.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
"Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) one image web site is not licensed; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover the unauthorised use of the single image without license"."
That happens all the time. Enough that it's fairly well known now. I think few would just lift an image off another site these days.
If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great! A few headline cases of huge, crippling fines, and few would just put out a site without accessibility, or give a tender to developers without a contract section covering it.
So the only remaining issues are whether $4k is a reasonable sum or just a lawyer trying it on, and whether she can sue OpenCart for providing a non-accessible platform.
[+] [-] chillacy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diffeomorphism|6 years ago|reply
Also, something is wrong with your example. Cost of buying the original platform is $X, sales (not revenue) for multiple years is $3,500, fixing it or replacing it by a compliant platform is $Y. A "fix" is clearly not more expensive than $X and that was much, much less than the revenue from the sales.
Also, it seems to me that the original product was defective (illegal), so why should she have to pay for the fix?
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yostrovs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Meekro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pinckney|6 years ago|reply
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/17...
A denial of cert doesn't mean the supreme court necessarily has an opinion on the merits of the case. Courts in other circuits can still rule otherwise, and SCOTUS might eventually decide to hear such a case at a later time.
[+] [-] evunveot|6 years ago|reply
The stress around website accessibility comes from the lack of any authority who can tell you you've done enough and you can't be sued, perhaps by someone using an outdated screen reader/browser combination you'd never think to test with. It brings back bad memories of things like trying to support IE5/Mac at the same time as IE6/Windows. (Protip: embrace quirks mode.)
[+] [-] rudolph9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etaioinshrdlu|6 years ago|reply
At what point do we just accept that security, accessibility, and similar properties are actually important, and that we shouldn't accept half baked products anymore?
I don't have a clear answer. But regulating the software industry is just going to make running a startup almost impossible. No more jobs for self taught hackers. All platforms will be a walled garden, including the web.
I'm leaning towards the viewpoint that companies (or anyone) should not be responsible for accessibility problems.
[+] [-] brickpaste|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/blind-...
It's a small, low traffic group. I'm one of the admins.
[+] [-] kd5bjo|6 years ago|reply
I haven’t read the actual ruling, but Domino’s provides a phone number that you can call, and a person will tell you any of the information on the website and can perform all of the services the website can perform. How is this not a sufficient “auxiliary service to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind”?
[+] [-] qtplatypus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawnerd|6 years ago|reply
Then again pizza websites are pretty garbage from the get go. Not sure why they make them so damn convoluted.