5 ms·

TBH personally I find this comment exceptionally strange given the rigors of acceptable limits among software uptimes and reliability outside of accessibility c

TBH personally I find this comment exceptionally strange given the rigors of acceptable limits among software uptimes and reliability outside of accessibility concerns. Netflix would probably not tolerate an entire country's access being revoked from their service for a technical reason they could fix. If AWS had a 0.77% downtime rate for all of their services, it would be a lot of services and a ton of bad press from businesspeople that are losing money due to AWS being down. If the Bloomberg terminal went down 0.77% of the time, it'd probably be considered completely unacceptable as a service to its userbase. 0.77% is something that would be protested ordinarily, except when it comes to accessibility concerns. Why?

esyir 7y ago
That's an apples to oranges argument here. So first a market argument: AWS downtime results (or the lack thereof) are what's desired by the market. Blind people are a small market, and prioritizing them equally or disproportionately is an inefficient use of resources. This can be countered by "we can't just abandon the disabled". And we haven't; In this case, the disabled guy can call in and order a pizza. The core service is still available to him. However, I don't see why forcing all features for every disability should be mandated. It's a small proportion of the populace, and while steps should be taken to enable usability, I don't believe that their desires warrant as much resources as the mainline, nor do I think we should force design to cater to them. This is particularly so as, from what I get from the ADA, there is no size requirement for such. If you classify websites as "public accommodations", then all websites big or small now have yet another thing that they can be sued for.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  I think this is kind of an odd proposition to have though, because market sizes aren't always reasonably correct to judge. For example, beauty products previously thought that black women are a small market. In reality, black skintones have unique qualities in shade that aren't appropriately captured. The day a line of PoC oriented foundations were widely available they were so heavily demanded that stores nationwide were constantly sold out for months. We've already learned this via curb cutouts. An argument like yours was proposed (eg. we don't need cutouts in curbs for wheelchairs, so few people have wheelchairs) but it turns out that everyone benefits from the thing installed (child strollers, luggage pulling, movers, anything on wheels suddenly benefited). The position here is that this is similar. Having something that is readable to the blind could suddenly benefit a wide, diverse range of people- colorblind folk, people who just underwent eye surgery, cataract sufferers, even photosensitive or light-induced migraine sufferers suddenly benefit! You could even argue that it would help reduce blue light exposure at night if you could browse without turning on your screen and suddenly theres an opportunity for literally everyone using a screen to benefit from ADA compliant websites for the blind.
  - esyir 7y ago
    Sure, but then that's an opportunity waiting to be taken, especially in your beauty product case. Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that. For the latter, how sure are you that the benefit outweighs the cost here. Given the current state of the law as I understand it, if websites would be classified as "public accomodations", they'd all have to provide accessibility options regardless of size. Moreover, I've taken a look at the WCAG guidelines to educate myself on what providing accessibility would be like. It's not exactly small, and while experienced, large organizations might be able to comply, smaller restaurants might have issues there, especially if they're skimping on the webdev side of things. If I wanted to abuse this, I could crawl restaurant listings, hit them with a scary templated legal document threatening a lawsuit for compliance to some law they've probably never heard of. From an outsider viewpoint, I don't really trust American regulation that much to improve the situation, especially looking at the bay area housing situation and the state of your public transport. The former is a precise case of regulation causing issues, and attempts to remove that highlight how hard it is to remove poor regulation.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      " Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that." Except for ADA related things, we really did need regulation to install cutouts in curbs, and now it's a major wonderful thing everyone is advantaged by.

esyir 7y ago

That's an apples to oranges argument here. So first a market argument: AWS downtime results (or the lack thereof) are what's desired by the market. Blind people are a small market, and prioritizing them equally or disproportionately is an inefficient use of resources. This can be countered by "we can't just abandon the disabled". And we haven't; In this case, the disabled guy can call in and order a pizza. The core service is still available to him. However, I don't see why forcing all features for every disability should be mandated. It's a small proportion of the populace, and while steps should be taken to enable usability, I don't believe that their desires warrant as much resources as the mainline, nor do I think we should force design to cater to them. This is particularly so as, from what I get from the ADA, there is no size requirement for such. If you classify websites as "public accommodations", then all websites big or small now have yet another thing that they can be sued for.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I think this is kind of an odd proposition to have though, because market sizes aren't always reasonably correct to judge. For example, beauty products previously thought that black women are a small market. In reality, black skintones have unique qualities in shade that aren't appropriately captured. The day a line of PoC oriented foundations were widely available they were so heavily demanded that stores nationwide were constantly sold out for months. We've already learned this via curb cutouts. An argument like yours was proposed (eg. we don't need cutouts in curbs for wheelchairs, so few people have wheelchairs) but it turns out that everyone benefits from the thing installed (child strollers, luggage pulling, movers, anything on wheels suddenly benefited). The position here is that this is similar. Having something that is readable to the blind could suddenly benefit a wide, diverse range of people- colorblind folk, people who just underwent eye surgery, cataract sufferers, even photosensitive or light-induced migraine sufferers suddenly benefit! You could even argue that it would help reduce blue light exposure at night if you could browse without turning on your screen and suddenly theres an opportunity for literally everyone using a screen to benefit from ADA compliant websites for the blind.
- esyir 7y ago
  Sure, but then that's an opportunity waiting to be taken, especially in your beauty product case. Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that. For the latter, how sure are you that the benefit outweighs the cost here. Given the current state of the law as I understand it, if websites would be classified as "public accomodations", they'd all have to provide accessibility options regardless of size. Moreover, I've taken a look at the WCAG guidelines to educate myself on what providing accessibility would be like. It's not exactly small, and while experienced, large organizations might be able to comply, smaller restaurants might have issues there, especially if they're skimping on the webdev side of things. If I wanted to abuse this, I could crawl restaurant listings, hit them with a scary templated legal document threatening a lawsuit for compliance to some law they've probably never heard of. From an outsider viewpoint, I don't really trust American regulation that much to improve the situation, especially looking at the bay area housing situation and the state of your public transport. The former is a precise case of regulation causing issues, and attempts to remove that highlight how hard it is to remove poor regulation.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    " Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that." Except for ADA related things, we really did need regulation to install cutouts in curbs, and now it's a major wonderful thing everyone is advantaged by.