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That's a fairly bizarre and Byzantine approach to legalizing screen scraping. If we want to make screen scraping affirmatively legal, we can simply do that. We
by jlmorton 5y ago
That's a fairly bizarre and Byzantine approach to legalizing screen scraping. If we want to make screen scraping affirmatively legal, we can simply do that.
We don't need to anthropomorphize HTML/JSON parsing as equivalent to human vision, and then declare any efforts to restrict that vision to be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lol.
- vineyardmike 5y agoWe should just make it legal, but this seems like a convenient "backdoor" way to do it - either the company site is fully screen-reader enabled 100% or scraping is allowed of any kind.
- dheera 5y agoIt isn't bizarre; screen scraping and re-presenting information to the user in a way that is convenient for them is absolutely essential to many assistive technologies.
- jlmorton 5y agoPerhaps I misunderstood. The airlines are already legally required to make their websites accessible in the United States, including to screen readers, by virtue of the Air Carrier Access Act. They already all comply with this. Unrelated to screen readers, American Airlines and Red Ventures are involved in a dispute about the _legality_ of screen scraping. The dispute involves lawsuits, but does not involve technological measures to obfuscate or otherwise obstruct screen readers, or even screen scraping. Your comment seemed to suggest that we should make _screen scraping_ legal by considering it the same as vision, and that any efforts -- including legal efforts -- to prevent screen scraping should run afoul of the ADA. That was my understanding, and that's indeed a bizarre view. If your point was limited simply to making screen readers accessible, then I think your point is perfectly fine, but kind of a non sequitur, because this dispute is not about technological measures to control screen scraping, it's about legal measures.