7 ms·

Interesting. Is this a civil rights issue or a libertarian issue? The libertarian in me says, "let the restaurants that don't comply lose their business". Bu

Interesting. Is this a civil rights issue or a libertarian issue? The libertarian in me says, "let the restaurants that don't comply lose their business". But then I think, would I feel the same about businesses (and government agencies!) that disallowed blacks/jews/gays/etc? I lean to the latter, accepting that changing everyone will take time.

ugh 15y ago
What business is there to lose? For example: No restaurant will go bankrupt or even perceptibly lose money because blind people can’t read the menu on their website. There are too few of them. Also: Getting accessibility right would be costly and complicated for those restaurants. The vast majority of restaurant owners knows nothing about accessibility in the web, they would have to hire someone who does. Creating a successful product means more often than not picking the commonly used stuff and leaving everything else out. The same dynamic is at play here, the only difference is that the affected people have no choice. The incentives are set up in a way to favor inaccessible websites. I don’t see how the market can solve this problem.
- GiraffeNecktie 15y ago
  " Getting accessibility right would be costly and complicated" What's costly and complicated about plain old HTML?
  - ugh 15y ago
    The restaurant owners of my example usually don’t even know what HTML is. They have to hire someone to do it for them (that’s the costly part) and they also have to find out who to hire (that’s the complicated part, given that they have no idea about HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash and accessibility).
  - patio11 15y ago
    What's costly and complicated about plain old HTML? Customer: We want a menu on our website. Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: Crikey that meter goes up quickly. Just OCR it! That should be almost free! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: There are all sorts of speling mistkes! Fix them! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: Now all the text is right but it looks nothing like the menu! We're a freaking restaurant. We spent thousands of dollars to make the menu look good because it is the freaking menu. Make with that HTML and CSS... stuff! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: Finally, we're getting somewhere! But the description of Chicken Genovese overlaps with the wine list when viewed on an obsolete browser or a Kindle! Make with the fixings! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- MaysonL 15y ago
  Well, if they get a hundred complaints from potential or former customers saying they won't eat there until it's fixed, something may happen. Some of these problems are only soluble by mass, organized action. Suppose there were a blind guy standing outside your restaurant, handing patrons informative pamphlets? How long would it take for a few infuriated regulars telling him they wouldn't be back till the problem was fixed to get the owner's attention to the problem? Just sayin': squeaky wheels get greased.
  - ugh 15y ago
    Sure. PR fallout or DDoSing support offers additional leverage to mere and minimal lost business. Especially really large companies don’t want to have an attack surface called “They don’t care about disabled people!” (There are also other reasons why larger companies have more incentives to be accessible.) Evidently, however, that’s not enough. It’s hard to create public outrage. It’s hard to organize. Hard enough that being hit by outrage or being swamped by phone calls is quite unlikely. It’s a simple numbers game. People don’t want to organize shitstorms all the time. They have better things to do.
- Mz 15y ago
  For example: No restaurant will go bankrupt or even perceptibly lose money because blind people can’t read the menu on their website. There are too few of them. Old people often have money. They also tend to have eyesight issues and other physical limitations. At the moment, old people are underrepresented online. Give it a few years and that won't likely remain true. At some point, making it easier for people with eyesight issues to access your site may become a much bigger issue. Some businesses may not realize it is impacting them, but I strongly suspect it will seriously begin to impact them in the not too distant future.
  - ugh 15y ago
    A website that is accessible for (most) old people is not automatically also accessible for, say, the blind. I fear, however, that you might be overlooking the point and get lost in small details: If something is a lot of work and only brings very few more customers, market mechanisms are no solution. The stars may align every once in a while and circumstances may create a situation where the same improvement also benefits a different and much larger group of people but you can’t take that for granted.
    - Mz 15y ago
      No, I'm well aware of that point. I'm also aware that what is easily accessibly for people with limitations is frequently more easy to use for "normal" people. As someone with a real serious handicap who finally was able to get a normal job (after many years of basically being unemployable), I am keenly aware of a) the ways in which my differences set me apart from others and b) the ways in which so many "normal" people are also handicapped but don't frame it that way. I'm strongly convinced that "personal preferences" are typically rooted in ease of use in the face of some issue or other which may not be fully acknowledged as a handicap. But that's a rather complicated discussion that perhaps would not be appreciated here: People who view themselves as "not handicapped" tend to get rather defensive if someone suggests they really aren't that different from someone like me. Peace.
      - ugh 15y ago
- lizzard 15y ago
  Therefore, it would be a good thing to educate more web developers and the public in general about what it takes to make sites more accessible.
Mz 15y ago
I'm handicapped (different issue). I spend a LOT of time online and do a lot via internet. For someone who has physical limitations, being able to do things online is a godsend. My life would basically not be manageable without it. So I think if you have a physical limitation of a sort where the web is basically saying "fuck you and the horse you road in on", I imagine that's a real serious problem. I imagine it's about like being invisibly restricted to the Dark Ages while everyone around you enjoys modern life. I would probably be postal rather quickly.
- jt2190 15y ago
  Having done A LOT of accessibility work I've come to the conclusion that it's extremely difficult to achieve universal accessibility. At first it seems like a it's all about alt tags, but those don't help users with poor reading comprehension, for example. (Dyslexics, some deaf.) Lately I've been wondering if a better approach would be to provide an API to functionality, and let the disabled or their advocates build interfaces for themselves. That way they'd get exactly what they need. Mouse-free versions, high-contrast versions, simplified text versions... All could be built ane everyone would be happy. Companies could even support these efforts with open source or donations or training. What do you think? Could this work in practice?
  - Mz 15y ago
    I honestly am not technically skilled/knowledgeable enough to know how to answer that. I did homeschool my special needs sons and have concluded that supporting "diversity" in some manner tends to widen your audience without specifically bringing up the issue of whether or not someone is handicapped. Many people who would qualify for some label or other have never been formally diagnosed and in many cases they do not want a formal diagnosis (because it is stigmatizing, could hurt their career and so on). Allowing for and supporting a wide variety of personal preferences can make things more accessible and convenient for a great many people in a way which does not make handicapped people feel singled out. Blending is often very psychologically important for people with handicaps and has significant social/practical benefits.
  - jhancock 15y ago
tzs 15y ago
The problem with the libertarian view that businesses that purposefully exclude some customers will lose business, and so eventually disappear from the market, is that it only actually works that way if the businesses exclude a large customer base, and there aren't compensating factors to make up for the loss. That's why economic forces didn't do much to open up things for blacks in the south between the Civil War and the era of Federal civil rights law. If you have a "No Coloreds" policy, and the store down the road does not then yes, they'll get the black business you are giving up--but they are giving up to you the business of people who do not want to shop around black people. The latter is worth more to the bottom line than the former, so you'll actually likely come out ahead economically with a "No Coloreds" sign hanging out in front of your shop. Then that business down the road decides they'd rather have half of the whites-who-don't-want-to-shop-around-blacks business rather than all of the black business, and out comes the "Whites Only" sign on their store. Yes, they have less total customers after the change, but the white customers are wealthier than the black customers and that makes up for the difference in quantity. Now it gets interesting. The mathematics of this kind of discrimination turn out to be the same as the mathematics of a boycott of a small country by the rest of the world. (I don't remember where I saw this--it might have been in Posner's "Economic Analysis of Law"). Unless the small country is completely self-sufficient, it loses badly. The net result is the discrimination keeps the blacks poor, and so they don't as a group rise to the point where the stores gain by integrating. Humans in small groups of approximately equal status and means where everyone knows everyone else simply do not behave the same as humans in very large groups of widely varying status and means where people only know a small part of the group. Libertarianism probably works great in the former case, but not in the latter.
- nirvana 15y ago
  Actually, the economics didn't work out to favor discrimination. The change was not as slow as many people liked, of course, but the change was there. Where discrimination was really entrenched and difficult to change was in government. It was racist government policies that really kept segments of the population down, and in fact, many of those racist policies still exist today. For instance, the primary motivators of the anti-drug and anti-gun laws were racist. "Saturday night specials" were regulated because they were popular among poor blacks for self defense. The sawed off shotgun, which is actually safer (because the shorter barrel means wider shot spread and makes the firearm less lethal) ware popular among italians who wanted protection from the mob, so the mob leaned on white politicians and got them banned, good for the mob, and served white political ambitions, etc. Where there has been no supply (the small country example) blacks, for instance, often would band together and form businesses that served their community. This was inhibited by government regulations that would often deny them the "license" needed to operate that business... but it was not economics that kept those businesses from forming, it was regulation. (And where there wasn't regulation, the businesses would form.)
sliverstorm 15y ago
blacks/jews/gays/etc is a different issue entirely. You don't need to do anything special to make your service accessible to them, except perhaps in the case of gay people trying to use your dating site with a 100% straight userbase.
- ars 15y ago
  That's not actually completely true. Hotels with electronic locks are a major problem for Jews on the Sabbath. Luckily most can also be used with a mechanical key. Electric automatic doors are also a problem for hotels and hospitals (most other places would not be visited on the Sabbath anyway).
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Can you explain a little more about this
    - ars 15y ago
      What do you want to know?
      - protomyth 15y ago
        The relation of electric locks / doors and the Sabbath
        ars 15y ago
        Jewish law does not allow the manipulation of electricity on the Sabbath, so a Jew would not be allowed to operate an electric lock, or make an electric door open (on purpose). A Jew can leave lights on, or set things on timers before the Sabbath, but can not do anything with electricity on the Sabbath.
        protomyth 15y ago
        Interesting, thanks, never heard that one before. I wonder what part of the religious texts lead to that one.
jquery 15y ago
The software engineer in me says this can be solved by more intelligent screen-reading technology.
mikeash 15y ago
I strongly doubt that the handicapped are a large enough group for most businesses to notice the loss of their custom from not being accessible, or the gain from embracing accessibility. If that's true, then the question is whether one wants the handicapped to have access to these places, and what measures are worth doing.
vacri 15y ago
The difference in your example is effort - it costs to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, whether it's spending more time on web development or installing a ramp at a building. It's less cost not to do that. Not allowing blacks/jews/gays is about admittance policies that don't cost, unless they require some sort of infrastructure to be created for them. It would be good to hear from a UK web designer as to opportunity cost, as accessibility is a legal requirement for .uk sites, if I recall correctly. I imagine if everyone's doing it, it's cheaper from the outset as the pool of web talent is trained in the issue.
sern 15y ago
This is a civil rights issue, as evidenced by existing case law in Australia: in 2000, the Sydney Olympics organisers were fined $20,000 for discrimination on the basis that their website was not accessible to the visually impaired. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html

ugh 15y ago

What business is there to lose? For example: No restaurant will go bankrupt or even perceptibly lose money because blind people can’t read the menu on their website. There are too few of them. Also: Getting accessibility right would be costly and complicated for those restaurants. The vast majority of restaurant owners knows nothing about accessibility in the web, they would have to hire someone who does. Creating a successful product means more often than not picking the commonly used stuff and leaving everything else out. The same dynamic is at play here, the only difference is that the affected people have no choice. The incentives are set up in a way to favor inaccessible websites. I don’t see how the market can solve this problem.

GiraffeNecktie 15y ago
" Getting accessibility right would be costly and complicated" What's costly and complicated about plain old HTML?
- ugh 15y ago
  The restaurant owners of my example usually don’t even know what HTML is. They have to hire someone to do it for them (that’s the costly part) and they also have to find out who to hire (that’s the complicated part, given that they have no idea about HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash and accessibility).
- patio11 15y ago
  What's costly and complicated about plain old HTML? Customer: We want a menu on our website. Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: Crikey that meter goes up quickly. Just OCR it! That should be almost free! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: There are all sorts of speling mistkes! Fix them! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: Now all the text is right but it looks nothing like the menu! We're a freaking restaurant. We spent thousands of dollars to make the menu look good because it is the freaking menu. Make with that HTML and CSS... stuff! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running. Customer: Finally, we're getting somewhere! But the description of Chicken Genovese overlaps with the wine list when viewed on an obsolete browser or a Kindle! Make with the fixings! Developer: We can do that. The meter is running.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
MaysonL 15y ago
Well, if they get a hundred complaints from potential or former customers saying they won't eat there until it's fixed, something may happen. Some of these problems are only soluble by mass, organized action. Suppose there were a blind guy standing outside your restaurant, handing patrons informative pamphlets? How long would it take for a few infuriated regulars telling him they wouldn't be back till the problem was fixed to get the owner's attention to the problem? Just sayin': squeaky wheels get greased.
- ugh 15y ago
  Sure. PR fallout or DDoSing support offers additional leverage to mere and minimal lost business. Especially really large companies don’t want to have an attack surface called “They don’t care about disabled people!” (There are also other reasons why larger companies have more incentives to be accessible.) Evidently, however, that’s not enough. It’s hard to create public outrage. It’s hard to organize. Hard enough that being hit by outrage or being swamped by phone calls is quite unlikely. It’s a simple numbers game. People don’t want to organize shitstorms all the time. They have better things to do.
Mz 15y ago
For example: No restaurant will go bankrupt or even perceptibly lose money because blind people can’t read the menu on their website. There are too few of them. Old people often have money. They also tend to have eyesight issues and other physical limitations. At the moment, old people are underrepresented online. Give it a few years and that won't likely remain true. At some point, making it easier for people with eyesight issues to access your site may become a much bigger issue. Some businesses may not realize it is impacting them, but I strongly suspect it will seriously begin to impact them in the not too distant future.
- ugh 15y ago
  A website that is accessible for (most) old people is not automatically also accessible for, say, the blind. I fear, however, that you might be overlooking the point and get lost in small details: If something is a lot of work and only brings very few more customers, market mechanisms are no solution. The stars may align every once in a while and circumstances may create a situation where the same improvement also benefits a different and much larger group of people but you can’t take that for granted.
  - Mz 15y ago
    No, I'm well aware of that point. I'm also aware that what is easily accessibly for people with limitations is frequently more easy to use for "normal" people. As someone with a real serious handicap who finally was able to get a normal job (after many years of basically being unemployable), I am keenly aware of a) the ways in which my differences set me apart from others and b) the ways in which so many "normal" people are also handicapped but don't frame it that way. I'm strongly convinced that "personal preferences" are typically rooted in ease of use in the face of some issue or other which may not be fully acknowledged as a handicap. But that's a rather complicated discussion that perhaps would not be appreciated here: People who view themselves as "not handicapped" tend to get rather defensive if someone suggests they really aren't that different from someone like me. Peace.
    - ugh 15y ago
lizzard 15y ago
Therefore, it would be a good thing to educate more web developers and the public in general about what it takes to make sites more accessible.

Mz 15y ago

I'm handicapped (different issue). I spend a LOT of time online and do a lot via internet. For someone who has physical limitations, being able to do things online is a godsend. My life would basically not be manageable without it. So I think if you have a physical limitation of a sort where the web is basically saying "fuck you and the horse you road in on", I imagine that's a real serious problem. I imagine it's about like being invisibly restricted to the Dark Ages while everyone around you enjoys modern life. I would probably be postal rather quickly.

jt2190 15y ago
Having done A LOT of accessibility work I've come to the conclusion that it's extremely difficult to achieve universal accessibility. At first it seems like a it's all about alt tags, but those don't help users with poor reading comprehension, for example. (Dyslexics, some deaf.) Lately I've been wondering if a better approach would be to provide an API to functionality, and let the disabled or their advocates build interfaces for themselves. That way they'd get exactly what they need. Mouse-free versions, high-contrast versions, simplified text versions... All could be built ane everyone would be happy. Companies could even support these efforts with open source or donations or training. What do you think? Could this work in practice?
- Mz 15y ago
  I honestly am not technically skilled/knowledgeable enough to know how to answer that. I did homeschool my special needs sons and have concluded that supporting "diversity" in some manner tends to widen your audience without specifically bringing up the issue of whether or not someone is handicapped. Many people who would qualify for some label or other have never been formally diagnosed and in many cases they do not want a formal diagnosis (because it is stigmatizing, could hurt their career and so on). Allowing for and supporting a wide variety of personal preferences can make things more accessible and convenient for a great many people in a way which does not make handicapped people feel singled out. Blending is often very psychologically important for people with handicaps and has significant social/practical benefits.
- jhancock 15y ago

tzs 15y ago

The problem with the libertarian view that businesses that purposefully exclude some customers will lose business, and so eventually disappear from the market, is that it only actually works that way if the businesses exclude a large customer base, and there aren't compensating factors to make up for the loss. That's why economic forces didn't do much to open up things for blacks in the south between the Civil War and the era of Federal civil rights law. If you have a "No Coloreds" policy, and the store down the road does not then yes, they'll get the black business you are giving up--but they are giving up to you the business of people who do not want to shop around black people. The latter is worth more to the bottom line than the former, so you'll actually likely come out ahead economically with a "No Coloreds" sign hanging out in front of your shop. Then that business down the road decides they'd rather have half of the whites-who-don't-want-to-shop-around-blacks business rather than all of the black business, and out comes the "Whites Only" sign on their store. Yes, they have less total customers after the change, but the white customers are wealthier than the black customers and that makes up for the difference in quantity. Now it gets interesting. The mathematics of this kind of discrimination turn out to be the same as the mathematics of a boycott of a small country by the rest of the world. (I don't remember where I saw this--it might have been in Posner's "Economic Analysis of Law"). Unless the small country is completely self-sufficient, it loses badly. The net result is the discrimination keeps the blacks poor, and so they don't as a group rise to the point where the stores gain by integrating. Humans in small groups of approximately equal status and means where everyone knows everyone else simply do not behave the same as humans in very large groups of widely varying status and means where people only know a small part of the group. Libertarianism probably works great in the former case, but not in the latter.

nirvana 15y ago
Actually, the economics didn't work out to favor discrimination. The change was not as slow as many people liked, of course, but the change was there. Where discrimination was really entrenched and difficult to change was in government. It was racist government policies that really kept segments of the population down, and in fact, many of those racist policies still exist today. For instance, the primary motivators of the anti-drug and anti-gun laws were racist. "Saturday night specials" were regulated because they were popular among poor blacks for self defense. The sawed off shotgun, which is actually safer (because the shorter barrel means wider shot spread and makes the firearm less lethal) ware popular among italians who wanted protection from the mob, so the mob leaned on white politicians and got them banned, good for the mob, and served white political ambitions, etc. Where there has been no supply (the small country example) blacks, for instance, often would band together and form businesses that served their community. This was inhibited by government regulations that would often deny them the "license" needed to operate that business... but it was not economics that kept those businesses from forming, it was regulation. (And where there wasn't regulation, the businesses would form.)

sliverstorm 15y ago

blacks/jews/gays/etc is a different issue entirely. You don't need to do anything special to make your service accessible to them, except perhaps in the case of gay people trying to use your dating site with a 100% straight userbase.

ars 15y ago
That's not actually completely true. Hotels with electronic locks are a major problem for Jews on the Sabbath. Luckily most can also be used with a mechanical key. Electric automatic doors are also a problem for hotels and hospitals (most other places would not be visited on the Sabbath anyway).
- protomyth 15y ago
  Can you explain a little more about this
  - ars 15y ago
    What do you want to know?
    - protomyth 15y ago
      The relation of electric locks / doors and the Sabbath
      - ars 15y ago
        Jewish law does not allow the manipulation of electricity on the Sabbath, so a Jew would not be allowed to operate an electric lock, or make an electric door open (on purpose). A Jew can leave lights on, or set things on timers before the Sabbath, but can not do anything with electricity on the Sabbath.
        protomyth 15y ago
        Interesting, thanks, never heard that one before. I wonder what part of the religious texts lead to that one.

jquery 15y ago

The software engineer in me says this can be solved by more intelligent screen-reading technology.

mikeash 15y ago

I strongly doubt that the handicapped are a large enough group for most businesses to notice the loss of their custom from not being accessible, or the gain from embracing accessibility. If that's true, then the question is whether one wants the handicapped to have access to these places, and what measures are worth doing.

vacri 15y ago

The difference in your example is effort - it costs to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, whether it's spending more time on web development or installing a ramp at a building. It's less cost not to do that. Not allowing blacks/jews/gays is about admittance policies that don't cost, unless they require some sort of infrastructure to be created for them. It would be good to hear from a UK web designer as to opportunity cost, as accessibility is a legal requirement for .uk sites, if I recall correctly. I imagine if everyone's doing it, it's cheaper from the outset as the pool of web talent is trained in the issue.

sern 15y ago

This is a civil rights issue, as evidenced by existing case law in Australia: in 2000, the Sydney Olympics organisers were fined $20,000 for discrimination on the basis that their website was not accessible to the visually impaired. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html