5 ms·

they are truly scummy esp with their ADA shakedowns. ADA was a great way for people with disabilities to get equal access but now I fear its future due to the

they are truly scummy esp with their ADA shakedowns. ADA was a great way for people with disabilities to get equal access but now I fear its future due to the constant abuse by scumbags like Prenda and others.

raverbashing 10y ago
* its future
- vermontdevil 10y ago
  d'oh
bbarn 10y ago
Is, not was. We're starting to see patent trolls migrating to the much greener government agency sue-able territory of section 508 law suits instead. Only this time, there's practically a for the children argument behind it.
Bluestrike2 10y ago
It's actually a relatively straight-forward fix to kill the "drive by" ADA lawsuit industry simply by allowing written notice of a violation to business owners and giving them time to fix it prior to allowing suit to be filed. Activist groups could still get violations fixed, but lawyers using it as a vehicle for raking in attorneys fees would be SOL. In the meantime, there's some progress at the state level with the courts starting to hit back against lawyers committing the most egregious ethical violations.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  That would fix a lot of it, but the root of the problem is that a lot of the laws are just broken. For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned, but paying to caption them just to give them away for free isn't viable. The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor is a pretty serious defect.
  - edraferi 10y ago
    > UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned, but paying to caption them just to give them away for free isn't viable. That is super dumb. Hopefully that specific problem (video captioning) will go away in the next year or two as automatic speech recognition becomes less expensive and more widely available. Basic captioning for compliance should be a single API call. Quality won't be perfect, but good enough for a deaf viewer to get the gist of it.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor Literally the entire point of the ADA is to force businesses to make themselves accessible when they have no inherent profit incentive to do so. > For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned That's a misleading way of phrasing it. As a public university, Berkley was never permitted to post unaccessible content online on the first place - that's a pretty unambiguous part of the ADA and is not anywhere close to new. The DOJ has been enforcing that for two decades. Berkeley did so anyway, and then was told they would have to caption them in order to keep them online. At that point, they chose to take them down.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      I consider myself to be pretty liberal on things like this, but denying access to all because it's not accessible to some seems way overkill. That's like saying a library can't have any books that aren't also printed in braille. It's an absolutely ridiculous concept and if that's actually a real component of the ADA I cannot believe public libraries haven't been sued out of business yet.
      - koenigdavidmj 10y ago
        Although I tend to agree with you, there are some legal measures to increase accessibility. For example, transcribing a book you own into a Braille book is not a copyright violation.
arjie 10y ago
Could you clarify how these shakedowns are performed? Are the victims non compliant with some law?
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Typically the victims are low-margin businesses operating in old buildings that were designed long before ADA existed. These businesses may never have served a wheelchair-bound customer before, or if they did it was an ad hoc process. In other words, physically lifting a wheelchair over some stairs or just bringing the customer's purchases outside. That's fine for reasonable customers, but the wheelchair people involved in these lawsuits do not behave in reasonable fashion.
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    They also exploit extremely subtle parts of ADA like specific requirements for signage. Those things are very easily remedied without the need for a suit.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Typically the victims are low-margin businesses operating in old buildings that were designed long before ADA exited That's not really true. Under the ADA, buildings built before 1992 are generally not required to perform renovations for compliance unless they are already performing renovations, at which point they are required to adherence to the requirements. And the amount that they are required to spend on compliance is a function of the amount that they are spending on the other renovations. It's actually more complicated than that, because there are two sets of requirements (1993 and 2010), with different safe harbor provisions for each, and renovations to old buildings may or may not invalidate the 1993 safe harbor, but that's the general idea.
  - al2o3cr 10y ago
    There are plenty of "reasonable gentlemen" running "family businesses" who'd be interested in your "if you've been breaking the law for 25 years you can keep doing it" plan.
- 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago

* its future

vermontdevil 10y ago
d'oh

bbarn 10y ago

Is, not was. We're starting to see patent trolls migrating to the much greener government agency sue-able territory of section 508 law suits instead. Only this time, there's practically a for the children argument behind it.

Bluestrike2 10y ago

It's actually a relatively straight-forward fix to kill the "drive by" ADA lawsuit industry simply by allowing written notice of a violation to business owners and giving them time to fix it prior to allowing suit to be filed. Activist groups could still get violations fixed, but lawyers using it as a vehicle for raking in attorneys fees would be SOL. In the meantime, there's some progress at the state level with the courts starting to hit back against lawyers committing the most egregious ethical violations.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
That would fix a lot of it, but the root of the problem is that a lot of the laws are just broken. For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned, but paying to caption them just to give them away for free isn't viable. The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor is a pretty serious defect.
- edraferi 10y ago
  > UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned, but paying to caption them just to give them away for free isn't viable. That is super dumb. Hopefully that specific problem (video captioning) will go away in the next year or two as automatic speech recognition becomes less expensive and more widely available. Basic captioning for compliance should be a single API call. Quality won't be perfect, but good enough for a deaf viewer to get the gist of it.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > The fact that the law doesn't have an exception for compliance measures whose cost would exceed all profit from the relevant endeavor Literally the entire point of the ADA is to force businesses to make themselves accessible when they have no inherent profit incentive to do so. > For example, UC Berkeley was forced to remove free public access to their course lecture videos because they weren't captioned That's a misleading way of phrasing it. As a public university, Berkley was never permitted to post unaccessible content online on the first place - that's a pretty unambiguous part of the ADA and is not anywhere close to new. The DOJ has been enforcing that for two decades. Berkeley did so anyway, and then was told they would have to caption them in order to keep them online. At that point, they chose to take them down.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I consider myself to be pretty liberal on things like this, but denying access to all because it's not accessible to some seems way overkill. That's like saying a library can't have any books that aren't also printed in braille. It's an absolutely ridiculous concept and if that's actually a real component of the ADA I cannot believe public libraries haven't been sued out of business yet.
    - koenigdavidmj 10y ago
      Although I tend to agree with you, there are some legal measures to increase accessibility. For example, transcribing a book you own into a Braille book is not a copyright violation.

arjie 10y ago

Could you clarify how these shakedowns are performed? Are the victims non compliant with some law?

jessaustin 10y ago
Typically the victims are low-margin businesses operating in old buildings that were designed long before ADA existed. These businesses may never have served a wheelchair-bound customer before, or if they did it was an ad hoc process. In other words, physically lifting a wheelchair over some stairs or just bringing the customer's purchases outside. That's fine for reasonable customers, but the wheelchair people involved in these lawsuits do not behave in reasonable fashion.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  They also exploit extremely subtle parts of ADA like specific requirements for signage. Those things are very easily remedied without the need for a suit.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > Typically the victims are low-margin businesses operating in old buildings that were designed long before ADA exited That's not really true. Under the ADA, buildings built before 1992 are generally not required to perform renovations for compliance unless they are already performing renovations, at which point they are required to adherence to the requirements. And the amount that they are required to spend on compliance is a function of the amount that they are spending on the other renovations. It's actually more complicated than that, because there are two sets of requirements (1993 and 2010), with different safe harbor provisions for each, and renovations to old buildings may or may not invalidate the 1993 safe harbor, but that's the general idea.
- al2o3cr 10y ago
  There are plenty of "reasonable gentlemen" running "family businesses" who'd be interested in your "if you've been breaking the law for 25 years you can keep doing it" plan.
10y ago