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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 softw

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
    That 5% is going to cost because they will find something and you are going to get sued just like physical business owners.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      You seem to have a very malicious idea of how this works. WCAG is not a 10,000-page document of arcane impossible-to-understand requirements. And there's not a horde of bloodthirsty disabled people just itching for you to mess up on the fourth footnote of 90731(a)(1)(c)(3).12 so they can sue for a trillion dollars. Accessible web sites are not difficult. Odds are if you do web stuff, you have accidentally produced WCAG-compliant websites in the past without knowing you were doing it. So please stop pushing the narrative about how "they" are out to "find something" and sue you and implying that WCAG is too complex to comply with. It's not, and frankly it's offensive -- disabled people have, morally and legally, exactly the same right to be able to use the internet you do, and WCAG is a guide to how you can make that happen.
      - problems 9y ago
        > It's not, and frankly it's offensive -- disabled people have, morally and legally, exactly the same right to be able to use the internet you do, and WCAG is a guide to how you can make that happen. I have no right to demand people bend the web to my whim, but I have ever right to use software to render it on my own computer just how I want it. It really seems like better screen reader software and removing of this archaic law is a better solution here. Also the incredibly nitpicky stuff is happening, even in the physical world - http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leaves-minnesota-proprietors-baffled/285777711/ http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
        wbl 9y ago
        Not all users who need to be considered are going to have screen readers. Red-green colorblindness is very common. Epilepsy has its own issues with animations.

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
  That 5% is going to cost because they will find something and you are going to get sued just like physical business owners.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    You seem to have a very malicious idea of how this works. WCAG is not a 10,000-page document of arcane impossible-to-understand requirements. And there's not a horde of bloodthirsty disabled people just itching for you to mess up on the fourth footnote of 90731(a)(1)(c)(3).12 so they can sue for a trillion dollars. Accessible web sites are not difficult. Odds are if you do web stuff, you have accidentally produced WCAG-compliant websites in the past without knowing you were doing it. So please stop pushing the narrative about how "they" are out to "find something" and sue you and implying that WCAG is too complex to comply with. It's not, and frankly it's offensive -- disabled people have, morally and legally, exactly the same right to be able to use the internet you do, and WCAG is a guide to how you can make that happen.
    - problems 9y ago
      > It's not, and frankly it's offensive -- disabled people have, morally and legally, exactly the same right to be able to use the internet you do, and WCAG is a guide to how you can make that happen. I have no right to demand people bend the web to my whim, but I have ever right to use software to render it on my own computer just how I want it. It really seems like better screen reader software and removing of this archaic law is a better solution here. Also the incredibly nitpicky stuff is happening, even in the physical world - http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leaves-minnesota-proprietors-baffled/285777711/ http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
      - wbl 9y ago
        Not all users who need to be considered are going to have screen readers. Red-green colorblindness is very common. Epilepsy has its own issues with animations.