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One should not go using terms like "discriminate" against people who are clearly not doing so. Assistive access to content is an afterthought for almost everyo

One should not go using terms like "discriminate" against people who are clearly not doing so. Assistive access to content is an afterthought for almost everyone in software, and that's perfectly fine. It's an extremely uncommon and unnecessary use case for nearly the entire device-using population.

jdietrich 7y ago
>Assistive access to content is an afterthought for almost everyone in software, and that's perfectly fine. It's not perfectly fine - it's illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  Show me where the ADA says that software developers must think about assistive access to content, and that not doing so is illegal. What you have cited here is an issue of compliance for certain public services and commercial products, and you are attempting to justify thought police and the private regulation of development of software standards/protocols with it. EDIT: Also, would you care to explain how the ADA has any impact on anyone's behavior outside of the United States?
  - dmoy 7y ago
    It's in title III of the ADA, if you want to read it. However because of the way US law works, you probably need context on court cases, such as the recent supreme court ruling: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/dominos-pizza-llc-v-robles/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/dominos-pizza-ll... Going back to GG(G?)P, if you're writing software outside of the commercial or government space in the US, then maybe you're fine not complying with accessibility guidelines in the ADA, e.g. screen readers or what have you. If you're outside of the US, then I don't know what protections there are. But in the US, for commercial or government purposes, then yes, it's illegal in the above sense. Edit: borski above describes context pretty well too, since it depends on the commercial context in which you're operating Edit 2: also this latest ruling is new enough that we'll have to wait to see how the dust settles w.r.t. new lawsuits
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      That case has not yet been decided. There has been no ruling. The only thing SCOTUS did by denying cert was to allow it to proceed to trial. Robles hasn't really shown that Dominoes failed to provide a _reasonable accommodation_, which is typically the key phrase in the ADA. Depending on the business, making a site accessible can be quite a costly project for quite a small number of customers. Finally, that case is only up for debate due to Dominoes' _physical presence_; Robles is arguing that he's being denied access to the physical stores, which pertains to prior rulings. Robles claims Dominoes failed to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Keep in mind that this standard has been created by private industry and _not_ by the government. Interestingly, if anything is going to get Dominoes, I bet it will be the coupons available only via the web site or app. Anything else they could probably make the case phone/physical options are fine. 9th Circuit's over-ruling of the dismissal by district; can't say I agree with all of it, but worth reading: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/17-55504.pdf https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/1...
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        To my (IANAL) nose, this is a good dissection. The risk with making business decisions around language like "reasonable accomodation" is that the criteria for "reasonable" can change. I'm not an expert in the space, but the watchdogs I read are smelling a change in the wind direction towards increased scrutiny of web accessibility (relevant interest groups are watching the web eat e-commerce and are concerned about what that looks like if the accessibility drum isn't beaten hard early on in the process). Lawsuits like this are expected to increase in 2019.
  - kbutler 7y ago
    > Show me where the ADA says that software developers must think about assistive access to content, and that not doing so is illegal. The ADA is not software specific, but specifies that you must provide access. Courts have been increasingly interpreting that to include websites. See the recent Domino's case where the circuit court ruled the website must be accessible (the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, so it is technically only binding precedent within the 9th circuit - western states, including California) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-dominos-pizza/u-s-supreme-court-rejects-dominos-bid-to-avoid-disabilities-suit-idUSKBN1WM1P1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-dominos-pizza/u... > EDIT: Also, would you care to explain how the ADA has any impact on anyone's behavior outside of the United States? It isn't the ADA, but Europe has explicitly adopted WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards: https://www.w3.org/blog/2018/09/wcag-2-1-adoption-in-europe/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2018/09/wcag-2-1-adoption-in-europe/
    - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
      > Europe has explicitly adopted WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards This is precisely how we get closer to the achievable goal of assistive accessibility becoming a non-concern in software. The WCAG is nowhere near the same thing as the ADA. In fact, as a person with one of the things that qualifies me as a person with a "disability" I consider the ADA an offensively non-viable and absurdly non-enforceable "law."
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        I'm curious in what way. Because I have friends who are very active in the local community ensuring compliance with the ADA, so if there's a blind spot they should know about, I would like to pass it on to them.
        AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
        The blind spot is in using legal violence to coerce people into being "considerate" of people with disabilities. Assistive accessibility is a god damned gold mine for whichever company solves the problem in each industry. Flash's use on the web led to far more good things than bad, and this one bad thing is really just being heightened because the media places falsely high emphasis on being worried about people with disabilities. The fact is that we have many, MANY advocates who are all a lot nicer, more helpful, and more effective than Washington, DC.
- borski 7y ago
  That’s actually just straight-up not true, and there is case law that shows it. [1] [2] In addition, the ADA wouldn’t apply to non-US entities, either way. Not saying I disagree with the idea in general; in fact, I think we should make our websites accessible because there is a large population of disabled folks who use the internet and should have access. But it’s absolutely not illegal, unless your online presence very closely mirrors a physical store. [3] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_v._Facebook,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_v._Facebook,_Inc. [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouellette_v._Viacom_International_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouellette_v._Viacom_Internat.... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Blind_v._Target_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_B....
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
yellowapple 7y ago
So by that logic we shouldn't bother with wheelchair ramps because nearly the entire population has working legs. Nor should we bother with Braille on signs, since nearly the entire population can see just fine.
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  Why the hell would you jump to this conclusion? Any software professional knows just as well as I that these concerns are specialized and people with a particular interest in complying with these special use cases are paid for their particular interest and capability in worrying about, and complying with, regulations within the realm of assistive access. Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly, not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised groups of people. EDIT: Even if we were just to stick to the US, only 2.7 million people use a wheelchair here. That's 0.9 percent of the US population. That's really, REALLY freakin' specialized. Don't stoop to heaving virtue my way when the facts hurt. EDIT#2: Perhaps you can quantify your ridiculous statement by telling me how the developer of this [0] application should be punished for not building assistive access into his GPLv2 project, and how he should have & could have actually done so. [0] https://github.com/falkTX/Carla https://github.com/falkTX/Carla
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly, not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised groups of people. The whole point of the ADA (and its counterparts in some other developed nations), is that building solutions that are also usable by people with disabilities should no longer be an edge case, but the default.
    - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
      I agree, that > building solutions that are also usable by people with disabilities should no longer be an edge case, but the default. should be the thing we pursue. This will happen when people who care about assistive access technologies finally make solutions that are easy to implement into normal contemporary software development workflow. Online video had the same challenges but due to corporate and commercial interests we solved that problem already, arguably a much harder problem to solve than assistive access. I know because for many years I worked on precisely these kinds of assistive access concerns in the audiobooks industry. I am certain that we are not there yet, but we will get there one day. BUT... > The whole point of the ADA None of this is the point of the ADA. The only "whole point" of the ADA is to regulate particular aspects to certain commercial and government services/products.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Passive discrimination is still discrimination. Changing the terminology doesn't change the reality. Which is why it's not a bad idea to stick close to the base HTML spec unless you have a real good reason to deviate from it or use advanced features, JavaScript based animation, etc. Because HTML is a document format not a render format, staying close to home on the spec gives you a lot of accessibility for free. Not all of it, images of course are still just binary blobs without more metadata, but you cover a lot of ground. A website in flash got approximately zero of that for free, and it was a known issue in that era. Accessibility suffered.
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  Changing the reality should absolutely change the terminology, though. Almost nobody writes software where assistive accessibility is both legally required and discriminatory when it is not provided. That's an outrageous statement to make that you should back up with evidence, not just platitudes. The software developers who write the systems that stabilize airplanes in the sky, track radio emissions from space, monitor the nuclear reactor cores in power plants, and encode raw YUV video into tightly-compressed packets that can be transmitted over the web, all lack access assistance code. Why don't we go ahead and take these horrible people to task for discriminating against people who need to have their damned screens read to them aloud by software? Seriously, I and almost everyone else on Hacker News have never THOUGHT ONCE about assistive access in our code, and you are a shitty person if you want to call us all discriminators.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Two things: a) the context of the entire conversation is Flash and the web. If you can point me to developers that are writing airplane autopilots, astronomy signal processors, reactor core monitors (oh God), or video compressors in Flash, you are welcome to bring those categories into the conversation. b) you're applying moral judgement to a statement of fact. I'm not. Everyone discriminates. There is no such thing as universally-accessible software (if nothing else, it fails the first test "Not everyone has hardware to run it"). The reasons we discriminate and the consequences of that discrimination are what matter. I'm personally against the casual, thoughtless discrimination that can result from declaring the HTML render model "too hard" and throwing up one's hands without considering how all relevant user agents that can consume the model do, but if one has considered those user agents (and the users behind them), it can be a valid decision a company can make. ... all of that having been said, for at least the set of developers whose primary target is "the web," not having thought once about assistive access is a mark of an amateur. You can cover a lot of ground in this industry as an amateur, but you'll be held to a higher standard by huge swaths of potential jobs (banks care, universities care, government websites care, consumer websites that do enough business to notice if they lose ~2% of users care). And the nice thing about HTML as a technology is that more often than not, if you do almost nothing, you'll cover 90% of use cases for assistive access.
qtplatypus 7y ago
Treating people with disabilities as an afterthought is very much a form of discrimination.

jdietrich 7y ago

>Assistive access to content is an afterthought for almost everyone in software, and that's perfectly fine. It's not perfectly fine - it's illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...

AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
Show me where the ADA says that software developers must think about assistive access to content, and that not doing so is illegal. What you have cited here is an issue of compliance for certain public services and commercial products, and you are attempting to justify thought police and the private regulation of development of software standards/protocols with it. EDIT: Also, would you care to explain how the ADA has any impact on anyone's behavior outside of the United States?
- dmoy 7y ago
  It's in title III of the ADA, if you want to read it. However because of the way US law works, you probably need context on court cases, such as the recent supreme court ruling: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/dominos-pizza-llc-v-robles/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/dominos-pizza-ll... Going back to GG(G?)P, if you're writing software outside of the commercial or government space in the US, then maybe you're fine not complying with accessibility guidelines in the ADA, e.g. screen readers or what have you. If you're outside of the US, then I don't know what protections there are. But in the US, for commercial or government purposes, then yes, it's illegal in the above sense. Edit: borski above describes context pretty well too, since it depends on the commercial context in which you're operating Edit 2: also this latest ruling is new enough that we'll have to wait to see how the dust settles w.r.t. new lawsuits
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    That case has not yet been decided. There has been no ruling. The only thing SCOTUS did by denying cert was to allow it to proceed to trial. Robles hasn't really shown that Dominoes failed to provide a _reasonable accommodation_, which is typically the key phrase in the ADA. Depending on the business, making a site accessible can be quite a costly project for quite a small number of customers. Finally, that case is only up for debate due to Dominoes' _physical presence_; Robles is arguing that he's being denied access to the physical stores, which pertains to prior rulings. Robles claims Dominoes failed to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Keep in mind that this standard has been created by private industry and _not_ by the government. Interestingly, if anything is going to get Dominoes, I bet it will be the coupons available only via the web site or app. Anything else they could probably make the case phone/physical options are fine. 9th Circuit's over-ruling of the dismissal by district; can't say I agree with all of it, but worth reading: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/17-55504.pdf https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/1...
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      To my (IANAL) nose, this is a good dissection. The risk with making business decisions around language like "reasonable accomodation" is that the criteria for "reasonable" can change. I'm not an expert in the space, but the watchdogs I read are smelling a change in the wind direction towards increased scrutiny of web accessibility (relevant interest groups are watching the web eat e-commerce and are concerned about what that looks like if the accessibility drum isn't beaten hard early on in the process). Lawsuits like this are expected to increase in 2019.
- kbutler 7y ago
  > Show me where the ADA says that software developers must think about assistive access to content, and that not doing so is illegal. The ADA is not software specific, but specifies that you must provide access. Courts have been increasingly interpreting that to include websites. See the recent Domino's case where the circuit court ruled the website must be accessible (the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, so it is technically only binding precedent within the 9th circuit - western states, including California) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-dominos-pizza/u-s-supreme-court-rejects-dominos-bid-to-avoid-disabilities-suit-idUSKBN1WM1P1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-dominos-pizza/u... > EDIT: Also, would you care to explain how the ADA has any impact on anyone's behavior outside of the United States? It isn't the ADA, but Europe has explicitly adopted WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards: https://www.w3.org/blog/2018/09/wcag-2-1-adoption-in-europe/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2018/09/wcag-2-1-adoption-in-europe/
  - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
    > Europe has explicitly adopted WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards This is precisely how we get closer to the achievable goal of assistive accessibility becoming a non-concern in software. The WCAG is nowhere near the same thing as the ADA. In fact, as a person with one of the things that qualifies me as a person with a "disability" I consider the ADA an offensively non-viable and absurdly non-enforceable "law."
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      I'm curious in what way. Because I have friends who are very active in the local community ensuring compliance with the ADA, so if there's a blind spot they should know about, I would like to pass it on to them.
      - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
        The blind spot is in using legal violence to coerce people into being "considerate" of people with disabilities. Assistive accessibility is a god damned gold mine for whichever company solves the problem in each industry. Flash's use on the web led to far more good things than bad, and this one bad thing is really just being heightened because the media places falsely high emphasis on being worried about people with disabilities. The fact is that we have many, MANY advocates who are all a lot nicer, more helpful, and more effective than Washington, DC.
borski 7y ago
That’s actually just straight-up not true, and there is case law that shows it. [1] [2] In addition, the ADA wouldn’t apply to non-US entities, either way. Not saying I disagree with the idea in general; in fact, I think we should make our websites accessible because there is a large population of disabled folks who use the internet and should have access. But it’s absolutely not illegal, unless your online presence very closely mirrors a physical store. [3] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_v._Facebook,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_v._Facebook,_Inc. [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouellette_v._Viacom_International_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouellette_v._Viacom_Internat.... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Blind_v._Target_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_B....
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

yellowapple 7y ago

So by that logic we shouldn't bother with wheelchair ramps because nearly the entire population has working legs. Nor should we bother with Braille on signs, since nearly the entire population can see just fine.

AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
Why the hell would you jump to this conclusion? Any software professional knows just as well as I that these concerns are specialized and people with a particular interest in complying with these special use cases are paid for their particular interest and capability in worrying about, and complying with, regulations within the realm of assistive access. Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly, not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised groups of people. EDIT: Even if we were just to stick to the US, only 2.7 million people use a wheelchair here. That's 0.9 percent of the US population. That's really, REALLY freakin' specialized. Don't stoop to heaving virtue my way when the facts hurt. EDIT#2: Perhaps you can quantify your ridiculous statement by telling me how the developer of this [0] application should be punished for not building assistive access into his GPLv2 project, and how he should have & could have actually done so. [0] https://github.com/falkTX/Carla https://github.com/falkTX/Carla
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly, not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised groups of people. The whole point of the ADA (and its counterparts in some other developed nations), is that building solutions that are also usable by people with disabilities should no longer be an edge case, but the default.
  - AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
    I agree, that > building solutions that are also usable by people with disabilities should no longer be an edge case, but the default. should be the thing we pursue. This will happen when people who care about assistive access technologies finally make solutions that are easy to implement into normal contemporary software development workflow. Online video had the same challenges but due to corporate and commercial interests we solved that problem already, arguably a much harder problem to solve than assistive access. I know because for many years I worked on precisely these kinds of assistive access concerns in the audiobooks industry. I am certain that we are not there yet, but we will get there one day. BUT... > The whole point of the ADA None of this is the point of the ADA. The only "whole point" of the ADA is to regulate particular aspects to certain commercial and government services/products.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Passive discrimination is still discrimination. Changing the terminology doesn't change the reality. Which is why it's not a bad idea to stick close to the base HTML spec unless you have a real good reason to deviate from it or use advanced features, JavaScript based animation, etc. Because HTML is a document format not a render format, staying close to home on the spec gives you a lot of accessibility for free. Not all of it, images of course are still just binary blobs without more metadata, but you cover a lot of ground. A website in flash got approximately zero of that for free, and it was a known issue in that era. Accessibility suffered.

AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
Changing the reality should absolutely change the terminology, though. Almost nobody writes software where assistive accessibility is both legally required and discriminatory when it is not provided. That's an outrageous statement to make that you should back up with evidence, not just platitudes. The software developers who write the systems that stabilize airplanes in the sky, track radio emissions from space, monitor the nuclear reactor cores in power plants, and encode raw YUV video into tightly-compressed packets that can be transmitted over the web, all lack access assistance code. Why don't we go ahead and take these horrible people to task for discriminating against people who need to have their damned screens read to them aloud by software? Seriously, I and almost everyone else on Hacker News have never THOUGHT ONCE about assistive access in our code, and you are a shitty person if you want to call us all discriminators.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Two things: a) the context of the entire conversation is Flash and the web. If you can point me to developers that are writing airplane autopilots, astronomy signal processors, reactor core monitors (oh God), or video compressors in Flash, you are welcome to bring those categories into the conversation. b) you're applying moral judgement to a statement of fact. I'm not. Everyone discriminates. There is no such thing as universally-accessible software (if nothing else, it fails the first test "Not everyone has hardware to run it"). The reasons we discriminate and the consequences of that discrimination are what matter. I'm personally against the casual, thoughtless discrimination that can result from declaring the HTML render model "too hard" and throwing up one's hands without considering how all relevant user agents that can consume the model do, but if one has considered those user agents (and the users behind them), it can be a valid decision a company can make. ... all of that having been said, for at least the set of developers whose primary target is "the web," not having thought once about assistive access is a mark of an amateur. You can cover a lot of ground in this industry as an amateur, but you'll be held to a higher standard by huge swaths of potential jobs (banks care, universities care, government websites care, consumer websites that do enough business to notice if they lose ~2% of users care). And the nice thing about HTML as a technology is that more often than not, if you do almost nothing, you'll cover 90% of use cases for assistive access.

qtplatypus 7y ago

Treating people with disabilities as an afterthought is very much a form of discrimination.