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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

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.
      - gech 10y ago
        Now you've got me thinking. I need the right to stream sports events to my deaf friends as I can provide a more sufficient accessibility to them.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > 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. There is a difference between an expense that doesn't recover its own cost and the thing shutting down your service because the cost exceeds your total profit. > That's a misleading way of phrasing it. It's literally what happened. Even if the consequence was that they never posted the videos to begin with, how is that better? It's the same outcome, the only difference is that we can specifically identify this case because it actually happened, as opposed to the untold other things we lost because they were deterred by the cost without people ever knowing that they would have existed. > At that point, they chose to take them down. And then everyone lost access to the videos -- including the hearing impaired, who might otherwise have built a support community to caption videos like these, or come together to pay someone to do it, or spurred faster development of automated captioning software etc. Are you defending the outcome?
- Bluestrike2 10y ago
  I don't disagree in general; it's far from uncommon for legislation to have unintended consequences the drafters didn't envision (fully or otherwise), to say nothing of accidental drafting errors. Technical corrections after a bill has been signed are hard enough to make, but correcting unintended consequences in the current partisan environment is even harder.[1] In many cases, those who were opposed to a given bill are more than willing to let those consequences stand for political reasons or are just unwilling to risk blowback from their base. Even when that's not the case, there's a common mindset that once a bill has been signed the issue is resolved. It can take a lot to get past that. UC Berkeley's actions were definitely an unintended consequence. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it suggests the ADA is broken. Reading over the DOJ letter[0] to UC Berkeley, it seems like the decision was the result of a few years of laxity on the school's part despite the knowledge that the content had to be made accessible, as noted in school guidelines and policy quoted by the DOJ. Berkeley had the resources to help faculty with making their online content accessible, but it was up to the faculty members to avail themselves of it. Had the school done more to monitor compliance (and it would probably be a simple enough thing to automate) from the beginning, they'd have avoided the entire mess. As it is, they have years of content and thousands of videos, PDFs/slideshows/supplementals, and more that needs to be sorted and reworked to meet WCAG standards. What might have been manageable as it was produced is now a massive project that would strain their resources to the breaking point. Deleting them absolutely sucks, but I can see the business logic behind the decision even if the idea of just deleting such a wealth of knowledge offends me on an intellectual level. Could they have found a way to orphan most of the content online, no longer under UC Berkeley's control? I don't know. That said, the situation seems to have been a rather unique largely the result of the school's approach to compliance monitoring. 0. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/dealing-with-drafting-errors-in-the-health-care-law/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/dealing-with-d... 1. https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

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.
    - gech 10y ago
      Now you've got me thinking. I need the right to stream sports events to my deaf friends as I can provide a more sufficient accessibility to them.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > 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. There is a difference between an expense that doesn't recover its own cost and the thing shutting down your service because the cost exceeds your total profit. > That's a misleading way of phrasing it. It's literally what happened. Even if the consequence was that they never posted the videos to begin with, how is that better? It's the same outcome, the only difference is that we can specifically identify this case because it actually happened, as opposed to the untold other things we lost because they were deterred by the cost without people ever knowing that they would have existed. > At that point, they chose to take them down. And then everyone lost access to the videos -- including the hearing impaired, who might otherwise have built a support community to caption videos like these, or come together to pay someone to do it, or spurred faster development of automated captioning software etc. Are you defending the outcome?
Bluestrike2 10y ago
I don't disagree in general; it's far from uncommon for legislation to have unintended consequences the drafters didn't envision (fully or otherwise), to say nothing of accidental drafting errors. Technical corrections after a bill has been signed are hard enough to make, but correcting unintended consequences in the current partisan environment is even harder.[1] In many cases, those who were opposed to a given bill are more than willing to let those consequences stand for political reasons or are just unwilling to risk blowback from their base. Even when that's not the case, there's a common mindset that once a bill has been signed the issue is resolved. It can take a lot to get past that. UC Berkeley's actions were definitely an unintended consequence. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it suggests the ADA is broken. Reading over the DOJ letter[0] to UC Berkeley, it seems like the decision was the result of a few years of laxity on the school's part despite the knowledge that the content had to be made accessible, as noted in school guidelines and policy quoted by the DOJ. Berkeley had the resources to help faculty with making their online content accessible, but it was up to the faculty members to avail themselves of it. Had the school done more to monitor compliance (and it would probably be a simple enough thing to automate) from the beginning, they'd have avoided the entire mess. As it is, they have years of content and thousands of videos, PDFs/slideshows/supplementals, and more that needs to be sorted and reworked to meet WCAG standards. What might have been manageable as it was produced is now a massive project that would strain their resources to the breaking point. Deleting them absolutely sucks, but I can see the business logic behind the decision even if the idea of just deleting such a wealth of knowledge offends me on an intellectual level. Could they have found a way to orphan most of the content online, no longer under UC Berkeley's control? I don't know. That said, the situation seems to have been a rather unique largely the result of the school's approach to compliance monitoring. 0. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/dealing-with-drafting-errors-in-the-health-care-law/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/dealing-with-d... 1. https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...