10 ms·

Winn-Dixie ordered to update website for the blind

66 points by nvahalik 9y ago

sergiotapia 9y ago
>“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.
- amaranth 9y ago
  You could say the same thing about applying the ADA to a physical store.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    You really can - there's an undeniable cost to regulation. I've heard more discussion coming from the office behind mine about sections and articles than inches and feet. They've got Adobe reader open as often as AutoCAD. The people who wrote all those laws know about the Internet, now. Get ready.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Yep, now Silicon Valley gets to deal with the same thing that's been happening in a lot of small towns. http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leaves-minnesota-proprietors-baffled/285777711/ http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
  - joering2 9y ago
    +1 If the tactic sounds familiar it’s because the same lawyer, Paul Hansmeier... I knew this name sounds familiar :)
    - koolba 9y ago
      Does he have a website and if so is it ADA compatible? Would be a shame if it wasn't...
    - nowarninglabel 9y ago
      Even more familiar now that he is a criminal: http://www.startribune.com/fbi-investigating-hansmeier-s-disability-access-lawsuits/408566345/ http://www.startribune.com/fbi-investigating-hansmeier-s-dis...
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  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.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    You are missing the Scola ordered the company to comply with what Vu describes as the "de facto" standard - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA drafted by accessibility experts. I'm betting they will be able to find violations everywhere.
    - GabrielF00 9y ago
      My experience is that WCAG compliance can actually be beneficial to the company. For instance, an employer of mine saw a very significant jump in sales (as measured by A/B testing) by increasing contrast of certain important elements on a page to meet WCAG standards. I'm not saying this is always the case - the percentage of customers using screen readers is very small - but in a lot of cases, thinking carefully about font, color, or contrast choices can help more than just the disabled. [Edit] To take another example, 10% of men are colorblind. If you're using color to convey information, you may be making your website very difficult to use for 5% of your customers. If you're operating at any kind of scale, the gains in making your website easier to use for 5% of your customers are going to outweigh the costs of making a change by a wide margin.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      WCAG is not hard to comply with. If you're using HTML and CSS and JavaScript sensibly, you're probably 95% of the way there already (if not more).
      - protomyth 9y ago
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > 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.
- fattire 9y ago
  >This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers. Do you feel the same way about wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking?
  - wyager 9y ago
    There's clearly a huge difference between having a building code and requiring people to design websites in a certain way. It doesn't matter what your opinion of wheelchair ramps is; the two situations aren't comparable. I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites. Leaving out the fact that this is almost certainly a bad thing for society (remember how Berkely had to take down their free online classes because some deaf people sued them for not being deaf-friendly enough?), it's also completely indefensible for the government to stick their nose into how people choose to communicate online. "Oh, hey there art website; we're going to have to shut you down because your music and films don't support subtitles and screen readers."
    - x0x0 9y ago
      This isn't people communicating online; this is a business communicating to it's customers and offering core functionality such as refilling prescriptions. The situation is absolutely the same as wheelchair ramps: Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations. In fact, Winn-Dixie seems particularly incompetent; according to a different article The software has allowed Gil to use 500 to 600 websites, including Publix, Walgreens and government sites, but his vocalizing software could not read information on www.winndixie.com when he tried to order a prescription and look up store hours. [1] The fact the plaintiff didn't ask for damages, but merely for the website to be made accessible seems a pretty good measure of good faith on his or her part. [1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.html http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.ht...
      - wyager 9y ago
        > This isn't people communicating online; this is a business communicating to it's customers I'm confused; do you not see the very obvious contradiction here? Perhaps my use of the word "people" is confusing. The proprietors of a store or an art gallery or other business would also qualify as "people". > Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations. The internet isn't a physical location. There's no good reason we should pretend it is. Even if you completely buy the idea that physical storefronts should be forced to adopt certain (possibly socially sub-optimal) standards for the sake of some customer base, this reasoning absolutely does not carry over to private digital communication. You can't just say "a website is like a building" and call it a day. That's simply untrue.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  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.
  - wyager 9y ago
    As much as I hate the current script-heavy web, is it really so hard to see why using the law to enforce aesthetic choices is a terrible idea?
    - Idontagree 9y ago
      It worked once in medievalish Italy (not sure how you classify the period going from ~0-1800 A.D.). All houses had to be a certain color, for instance. I think it looked kinda cool, but obviously choice is often considered the greatest of all goods.
      - wyager 9y ago
        Good point. Of course, again, we run into the practical difference between physical zoning restrictions and internet "zoning" restrictions. The real world, being equipped with a distance metric, has this messy problem where you are sometimes forced to be close to other people. I feel like this gives us (collectively) a bit of license to make demands of how nearby people use their physical property. On the other hand, there's no distance metric on the internet, and I'm not (in any sense) forced to live next to the winn-Dixie website.
        matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Specifically the decision in this case was that Winn-Dixie's website is heavily-integrated enough into their physical store locations enough that it's covered by the ADA.
    - XorNot 9y ago
- cooper12 9y ago
  > 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] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579029
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  >full and equal enjoyment "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.
  - johncolanduoni 9y ago
    I suspect the same way shooting down separate but equal hasn't led to courts requiring hospitals to not offer obstetric care to women because men can't use it. Judges aren't overly literal robots.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  > 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).
  - metaphor 9y ago
    You're not just changing the website as it stands today...you're changing the entire workflow of their dev team.
    - madeofpalk 9y ago
      im not too sure - I think people are vastly overestimating/overcomplicating what it takes to make a site WCAG-friendly.
      - metaphor 9y ago
        Herein lies the fundamental problem: you're not too sure...except in a certain unwaivering resolve to trivialize the significance of impact to an existing product/workflow. Gratuitous handwaving is no longer the name of the game. I think the people who you perceive as "overestimating/overcomplicating" have first-hand understanding of what it truly takes to execute formal process and verification which unambiguously demonstrates compliance, given: 1.) the courts are now involved...this in itself introduces an unprecedented level of complication; 2.) product and workflow are already established; 3.) legal mandate requires compliance with qualitative guidelines[1], as opposed to hard specification; 4.) scope of applicability and impact to existing product/workflow have yet to be determined...requirements traceability based on interpretted guidelines will almost certainly be a cluster fuck; 5.) a level of uncertainty from guideline disclaimers, e.g., even content that conforms at the highest level (AAA) will not be accessible to individuals with all types, degrees, or combinations of disability. 6.) use of non-standard, 3rd-party tools (e.g. screen readers) clearly had an impact on legal decision, which suggests additional impact to compliance verification; [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
- zer00eyz 9y ago
  I have never read a comment on HN that I found so rage inducing, stupid and disconnected from reality. With the attitude you have, you should think about applying for a job at Uber, because you would fit right in there. Accessibility isn't hard, go spend some time with a screen reader and your going to start to grasp how dead easy these things are. If you think the extent of the issues is "tags" then your mistaken. Lets take your color pallet.... have you cut out a rather hefty segment of the population because you chose to do something that made your site impossible to use for the color blind? Were not talking about a small portion of the population either, and the last time checked their money was as good as everyone else's. "Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low." Uhhh, it depends on how bad your programers fucked things up. I can name a major financial institution that went through this same process years ago (including the lawsuit). The end result was that the engineering costs were far lower than the costs for lawyers to try to weasel out of it. They literally hired some one to babysit the process, and that was total overkill. "This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers." As you age, your eyes start to go, your hearing starts to fade, these "precedents" are likely to apply to you as well. The assistive technology that makes access possible might be something that you want, or even need. You better hope that what every product your hoping to sell only works for or is consumed by the young and healthy.
  - Keverw 9y ago
    Really good points. I fully believe in treating others the same way you'd want to be treated. I really hate websites that stack similar colors text on top of each other, low contrast. I never been tested professionally, but one of those quiz things online say I'm colored blind "mild protan". I went to their website and ran Wave. It looks like from a few pages I sampled most of it is just adding alt-tags. So seems like a single or two developers with the right tools and testing could fix their website page by page over a couple of months probably. A huge store chain shouldn't be a problem to afford unlike a small tiny startup.
  - sctb 9y ago
    No matter what you're responding to, it's not OK on Hacker News to include personal attacks like this.
- Rusky 9y ago
  > Can't you argue this for literally any company of any kind? Isn't that the point of the ADA?
- wbl 9y ago
  You can get sued if your stored has steps and no wheelchair ramp. Online is no different.
- microtherion 9y ago
  > 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.
- IanCal 9y ago
  > adding zero value to most existing paying customers. 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".
- swiley 9y ago
  The bright side is that maybe people will stick to the older HTML features that already work well with screen readers. 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 9y ago
  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.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    That's nonsense. Building a website that meets WCAG guidelines is ridiculously easy – it basically boils down, in most cases, to having good contrast and proper markup to identify various elements and their purposes. It's a fantasy to complain that these requirements are onerous.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  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.
  - 13years 9y ago
    >WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with This is pretty much the argument by which all legislation is passed. It will ultimately be the weight of all legislation in the end that will leave the internet in the hands of only large corporations and leave the people without a free internet. You will also never get what was originally intended. Laws will be passed for regulation which will be turned over to a regulatory agency which will be lobbied by the most powerful corporation which will in turn implement rules for exclusively their benefit outside of the original intent.
- DanBC 9y ago
  It's not setting a precedent, the law is 30 years old and is well established and tested in courts. The precedents have already been set.
protomyth 9y ago
Chris Keroack, an employee of software testing company Equal Entry, estimated it would cost less than $37,000 for the company to update its site. Great, now instead of a manger that has no clue on estimates, we get to deal with and outside testing firm.
- metaphor 9y ago
  I'm sure Keroack is jumping at the opportunity to sign a $37k firm-fixed contract which assumes all legal liability. /s
  - protomyth 9y ago
    I'm sure that given the name of Keroack's firm, it's all about the expert testimony and not testing services.
analog31 9y ago
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.
- tyingq 9y ago
  WCAG 2.0 AA would be difficult to comply with accidentally. A fair amount is just common sense, but some parts require deliberate changes. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
  - analog31 9y ago
    Thanks for that. It's a big read, but I'll try to work my way through it. I actually care about this stuff -- supporting the blind is something that I should be trying to take care of.
jnordwick 9y ago
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.
- bryanrasmussen 9y ago
  sure, if the newspaper had ways for you to purchase stuff directly from the newspaper and maybe deals available only if you can read the newspaper.
  - fiblye 9y ago
    Plenty of newspapers offer various coupons and discounts to readers. Many grocery stores also have flyers near the entrance offering small discounts to people who happen to grab one when they walk in.
metaphor 9y ago
> ...Winn-Dixie’s website is heavily integrated with the company’s physical store locations, making it subject to the ADA. Heavily integrated?? GTFO. 10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie...until today, number of instances I've visited their website: precisely zero
- cooper12 9y ago
  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".
  - mod 9y ago
    Did you miss the part where he's suing? Apparently it's not a better interface.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Maybe it is a better interface, but still not good enough?
- tchaffee 9y ago
  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.
  - metaphor 9y ago
    Perhaps you should actually visit their website and observe that it's nothing like your typical ecommerce front. The applicability of bathrooms, handicap stalls, parking ramps, etc. are predicated by the existence of B&M store fronts, which is their primary mode of consumer-facing business and drives the requirement of ADA compliance. To the point of integration, I challenge you to point out any mechanism that would prohibit me from completing an in-store transaction to the non-compliant disadvantage of the disabled without requiring a visit to their website. Since proof is the exclusive domain of mathematics, I can merely demonstrate with high certainty that 10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie--slightly biased as a tech-oriented customer with a professional engineering background--has yet to compel me otherwise.
technojunkie 9y ago
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.
Keverw 9y ago
60 mins did a segment about this a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xjq9xWnwT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xjq9xWnwT0 ABC15 Arizona also did a story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D60we_4VZGY 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 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.
sbarre 9y ago
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.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >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.
  - sbarre 9y ago
    Sounds like you've got it all figured out! Let me know when your unicorn comes out of stealth mode.. /s FYI we do have lots of tools and frameworks that make developing for accessibility relatively straightforward.. But you have to want to do it, and you have to know how to do it. This takes education and learning, but most worthwhile things do. Sayings things like "businesses are going to push it down on their existing developers" is looking at this all wrong. Developers should be building accessible websites in the first place.

66 points by nvahalik 9y ago

>“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.

amaranth 9y ago
You could say the same thing about applying the ADA to a physical store.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  You really can - there's an undeniable cost to regulation. I've heard more discussion coming from the office behind mine about sections and articles than inches and feet. They've got Adobe reader open as often as AutoCAD. The people who wrote all those laws know about the Internet, now. Get ready.
protomyth 9y ago
Yep, now Silicon Valley gets to deal with the same thing that's been happening in a lot of small towns. http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leaves-minnesota-proprietors-baffled/285777711/ http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
- joering2 9y ago
  +1 If the tactic sounds familiar it’s because the same lawyer, Paul Hansmeier... I knew this name sounds familiar :)
  - koolba 9y ago
    Does he have a website and if so is it ADA compatible? Would be a shame if it wasn't...
  - nowarninglabel 9y ago
    Even more familiar now that he is a criminal: http://www.startribune.com/fbi-investigating-hansmeier-s-disability-access-lawsuits/408566345/ http://www.startribune.com/fbi-investigating-hansmeier-s-dis...
ubernostrum 9y ago
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.
- protomyth 9y ago
  You are missing the Scola ordered the company to comply with what Vu describes as the "de facto" standard - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA drafted by accessibility experts. I'm betting they will be able to find violations everywhere.
  - GabrielF00 9y ago
    My experience is that WCAG compliance can actually be beneficial to the company. For instance, an employer of mine saw a very significant jump in sales (as measured by A/B testing) by increasing contrast of certain important elements on a page to meet WCAG standards. I'm not saying this is always the case - the percentage of customers using screen readers is very small - but in a lot of cases, thinking carefully about font, color, or contrast choices can help more than just the disabled. [Edit] To take another example, 10% of men are colorblind. If you're using color to convey information, you may be making your website very difficult to use for 5% of your customers. If you're operating at any kind of scale, the gains in making your website easier to use for 5% of your customers are going to outweigh the costs of making a change by a wide margin.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    WCAG is not hard to comply with. If you're using HTML and CSS and JavaScript sensibly, you're probably 95% of the way there already (if not more).
    - protomyth 9y ago
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> 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.
fattire 9y ago
>This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers. Do you feel the same way about wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking?
- wyager 9y ago
  There's clearly a huge difference between having a building code and requiring people to design websites in a certain way. It doesn't matter what your opinion of wheelchair ramps is; the two situations aren't comparable. I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites. Leaving out the fact that this is almost certainly a bad thing for society (remember how Berkely had to take down their free online classes because some deaf people sued them for not being deaf-friendly enough?), it's also completely indefensible for the government to stick their nose into how people choose to communicate online. "Oh, hey there art website; we're going to have to shut you down because your music and films don't support subtitles and screen readers."
  - x0x0 9y ago
    This isn't people communicating online; this is a business communicating to it's customers and offering core functionality such as refilling prescriptions. The situation is absolutely the same as wheelchair ramps: Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations. In fact, Winn-Dixie seems particularly incompetent; according to a different article The software has allowed Gil to use 500 to 600 websites, including Publix, Walgreens and government sites, but his vocalizing software could not read information on www.winndixie.com when he tried to order a prescription and look up store hours. [1] The fact the plaintiff didn't ask for damages, but merely for the website to be made accessible seems a pretty good measure of good faith on his or her part. [1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.html http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.ht...
    - wyager 9y ago
      > This isn't people communicating online; this is a business communicating to it's customers I'm confused; do you not see the very obvious contradiction here? Perhaps my use of the word "people" is confusing. The proprietors of a store or an art gallery or other business would also qualify as "people". > Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations. The internet isn't a physical location. There's no good reason we should pretend it is. Even if you completely buy the idea that physical storefronts should be forced to adopt certain (possibly socially sub-optimal) standards for the sake of some customer base, this reasoning absolutely does not carry over to private digital communication. You can't just say "a website is like a building" and call it a day. That's simply untrue.
ryandrake 9y ago
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.
- wyager 9y ago
  As much as I hate the current script-heavy web, is it really so hard to see why using the law to enforce aesthetic choices is a terrible idea?
  - Idontagree 9y ago
    It worked once in medievalish Italy (not sure how you classify the period going from ~0-1800 A.D.). All houses had to be a certain color, for instance. I think it looked kinda cool, but obviously choice is often considered the greatest of all goods.
    - wyager 9y ago
      Good point. Of course, again, we run into the practical difference between physical zoning restrictions and internet "zoning" restrictions. The real world, being equipped with a distance metric, has this messy problem where you are sometimes forced to be close to other people. I feel like this gives us (collectively) a bit of license to make demands of how nearby people use their physical property. On the other hand, there's no distance metric on the internet, and I'm not (in any sense) forced to live next to the winn-Dixie website.
      - matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Specifically the decision in this case was that Winn-Dixie's website is heavily-integrated enough into their physical store locations enough that it's covered by the ADA.
  - XorNot 9y ago
cooper12 9y ago
> 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] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579029
oh_sigh 9y ago
>full and equal enjoyment "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.
- johncolanduoni 9y ago
  I suspect the same way shooting down separate but equal hasn't led to courts requiring hospitals to not offer obstetric care to women because men can't use it. Judges aren't overly literal robots.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> 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).
- metaphor 9y ago
  You're not just changing the website as it stands today...you're changing the entire workflow of their dev team.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    im not too sure - I think people are vastly overestimating/overcomplicating what it takes to make a site WCAG-friendly.
    - metaphor 9y ago
      Herein lies the fundamental problem: you're not too sure...except in a certain unwaivering resolve to trivialize the significance of impact to an existing product/workflow. Gratuitous handwaving is no longer the name of the game. I think the people who you perceive as "overestimating/overcomplicating" have first-hand understanding of what it truly takes to execute formal process and verification which unambiguously demonstrates compliance, given: 1.) the courts are now involved...this in itself introduces an unprecedented level of complication; 2.) product and workflow are already established; 3.) legal mandate requires compliance with qualitative guidelines[1], as opposed to hard specification; 4.) scope of applicability and impact to existing product/workflow have yet to be determined...requirements traceability based on interpretted guidelines will almost certainly be a cluster fuck; 5.) a level of uncertainty from guideline disclaimers, e.g., even content that conforms at the highest level (AAA) will not be accessible to individuals with all types, degrees, or combinations of disability. 6.) use of non-standard, 3rd-party tools (e.g. screen readers) clearly had an impact on legal decision, which suggests additional impact to compliance verification; [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
zer00eyz 9y ago
I have never read a comment on HN that I found so rage inducing, stupid and disconnected from reality. With the attitude you have, you should think about applying for a job at Uber, because you would fit right in there. Accessibility isn't hard, go spend some time with a screen reader and your going to start to grasp how dead easy these things are. If you think the extent of the issues is "tags" then your mistaken. Lets take your color pallet.... have you cut out a rather hefty segment of the population because you chose to do something that made your site impossible to use for the color blind? Were not talking about a small portion of the population either, and the last time checked their money was as good as everyone else's. "Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low." Uhhh, it depends on how bad your programers fucked things up. I can name a major financial institution that went through this same process years ago (including the lawsuit). The end result was that the engineering costs were far lower than the costs for lawyers to try to weasel out of it. They literally hired some one to babysit the process, and that was total overkill. "This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers." As you age, your eyes start to go, your hearing starts to fade, these "precedents" are likely to apply to you as well. The assistive technology that makes access possible might be something that you want, or even need. You better hope that what every product your hoping to sell only works for or is consumed by the young and healthy.
- Keverw 9y ago
  Really good points. I fully believe in treating others the same way you'd want to be treated. I really hate websites that stack similar colors text on top of each other, low contrast. I never been tested professionally, but one of those quiz things online say I'm colored blind "mild protan". I went to their website and ran Wave. It looks like from a few pages I sampled most of it is just adding alt-tags. So seems like a single or two developers with the right tools and testing could fix their website page by page over a couple of months probably. A huge store chain shouldn't be a problem to afford unlike a small tiny startup.
- sctb 9y ago
  No matter what you're responding to, it's not OK on Hacker News to include personal attacks like this.
Rusky 9y ago
> Can't you argue this for literally any company of any kind? Isn't that the point of the ADA?
wbl 9y ago
You can get sued if your stored has steps and no wheelchair ramp. Online is no different.
microtherion 9y ago
> 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.
IanCal 9y ago
> adding zero value to most existing paying customers. 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".
swiley 9y ago
The bright side is that maybe people will stick to the older HTML features that already work well with screen readers. 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 9y ago
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.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  That's nonsense. Building a website that meets WCAG guidelines is ridiculously easy – it basically boils down, in most cases, to having good contrast and proper markup to identify various elements and their purposes. It's a fantasy to complain that these requirements are onerous.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
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.
- 13years 9y ago
  >WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with This is pretty much the argument by which all legislation is passed. It will ultimately be the weight of all legislation in the end that will leave the internet in the hands of only large corporations and leave the people without a free internet. You will also never get what was originally intended. Laws will be passed for regulation which will be turned over to a regulatory agency which will be lobbied by the most powerful corporation which will in turn implement rules for exclusively their benefit outside of the original intent.
DanBC 9y ago
It's not setting a precedent, the law is 30 years old and is well established and tested in courts. The precedents have already been set.

protomyth 9y ago

Chris Keroack, an employee of software testing company Equal Entry, estimated it would cost less than $37,000 for the company to update its site. Great, now instead of a manger that has no clue on estimates, we get to deal with and outside testing firm.

metaphor 9y ago
I'm sure Keroack is jumping at the opportunity to sign a $37k firm-fixed contract which assumes all legal liability. /s
- protomyth 9y ago
  I'm sure that given the name of Keroack's firm, it's all about the expert testimony and not testing services.

analog31 9y ago

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.

tyingq 9y ago
WCAG 2.0 AA would be difficult to comply with accidentally. A fair amount is just common sense, but some parts require deliberate changes. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
- analog31 9y ago
  Thanks for that. It's a big read, but I'll try to work my way through it. I actually care about this stuff -- supporting the blind is something that I should be trying to take care of.

jnordwick 9y ago

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.

bryanrasmussen 9y ago
sure, if the newspaper had ways for you to purchase stuff directly from the newspaper and maybe deals available only if you can read the newspaper.
- fiblye 9y ago
  Plenty of newspapers offer various coupons and discounts to readers. Many grocery stores also have flyers near the entrance offering small discounts to people who happen to grab one when they walk in.

metaphor 9y ago

> ...Winn-Dixie’s website is heavily integrated with the company’s physical store locations, making it subject to the ADA. Heavily integrated?? GTFO. 10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie...until today, number of instances I've visited their website: precisely zero

cooper12 9y ago
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".
- mod 9y ago
  Did you miss the part where he's suing? Apparently it's not a better interface.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Maybe it is a better interface, but still not good enough?
tchaffee 9y ago
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.
- metaphor 9y ago
  Perhaps you should actually visit their website and observe that it's nothing like your typical ecommerce front. The applicability of bathrooms, handicap stalls, parking ramps, etc. are predicated by the existence of B&M store fronts, which is their primary mode of consumer-facing business and drives the requirement of ADA compliance. To the point of integration, I challenge you to point out any mechanism that would prohibit me from completing an in-store transaction to the non-compliant disadvantage of the disabled without requiring a visit to their website. Since proof is the exclusive domain of mathematics, I can merely demonstrate with high certainty that 10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie--slightly biased as a tech-oriented customer with a professional engineering background--has yet to compel me otherwise.

technojunkie 9y ago

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.

Keverw 9y ago

60 mins did a segment about this a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xjq9xWnwT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xjq9xWnwT0 ABC15 Arizona also did a story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D60we_4VZGY 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 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.

sbarre 9y ago

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.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>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.
- sbarre 9y ago
  Sounds like you've got it all figured out! Let me know when your unicorn comes out of stealth mode.. /s FYI we do have lots of tools and frameworks that make developing for accessibility relatively straightforward.. But you have to want to do it, and you have to know how to do it. This takes education and learning, but most worthwhile things do. Sayings things like "businesses are going to push it down on their existing developers" is looking at this all wrong. Developers should be building accessible websites in the first place.