3 ms·

I hate to defend a big corporation, but they do seem to have a point: where exactly are the standards for being able to determine whether a website is or is not

by magduf 7y ago

I hate to defend a big corporation, but they do seem to have a point: where exactly are the standards for being able to determine whether a website is or is not accessible? Even for sighted people, there's no real standards for anything at all. How do you determine whether a website is "standards compliant"? You don't. These days, you just make sure it looks OK in Chrome, and years ago you made sure it looked OK in IE. There's supposedly standards from the W3C, but no one actually follows them.

perl4ever 7y ago
Why can't they make a good faith effort? Everyone complains about bad regulations, and yet again and again, companies say "just give us something meaningless and arbitrary, so we can say we're compliant". I think the question of how to comply is a diversion - the real issue is that if a website is compatible with a screen reader, anyone can leverage that to avoid ads and tracking. Accessibility in a general sense is fundamentally at odds with the modern internet.
- magduf 7y ago
  >and yet again and again, companies say "just give us something meaningless and arbitrary, so we can say we're compliant". Because something meaningless and arbitrary is something companies can point to and say "we're compliant", and absolutely no one can question them or say differently, that's why. As long as they're compliant with the arbitrary standard, you can't just sue them for being non-compliant, even if the standard is crap. Whereas if they make a good-faith effort but there's no standard in place, then someone can argue that in front of a jury of 12 morons that it isn't good enough, that they didn't really do it, etc. The crappy standard removes the element of differences of opinion.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    You can always sue no matter what. And any big company that is complaining about litigation has a hundred lawsuits going at any given time. It's not like an individual where a lawsuit could ruin them. If a good faith effort only eliminates 99% of the lawsuits, so what?

by magduf 7y ago

perl4ever 7y ago

Why can't they make a good faith effort? Everyone complains about bad regulations, and yet again and again, companies say "just give us something meaningless and arbitrary, so we can say we're compliant". I think the question of how to comply is a diversion - the real issue is that if a website is compatible with a screen reader, anyone can leverage that to avoid ads and tracking. Accessibility in a general sense is fundamentally at odds with the modern internet.

magduf 7y ago
>and yet again and again, companies say "just give us something meaningless and arbitrary, so we can say we're compliant". Because something meaningless and arbitrary is something companies can point to and say "we're compliant", and absolutely no one can question them or say differently, that's why. As long as they're compliant with the arbitrary standard, you can't just sue them for being non-compliant, even if the standard is crap. Whereas if they make a good-faith effort but there's no standard in place, then someone can argue that in front of a jury of 12 morons that it isn't good enough, that they didn't really do it, etc. The crappy standard removes the element of differences of opinion.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  You can always sue no matter what. And any big company that is complaining about litigation has a hundred lawsuits going at any given time. It's not like an individual where a lawsuit could ruin them. If a good faith effort only eliminates 99% of the lawsuits, so what?