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Justice Department Issues Web Accessibility Guidance Under the ADA

202 points by greenie_beans 5y ago

brightball 5y ago
IMO the contrast is the hardest thing to get right. I’m not sure if that’s built into the minimum standards or not but it’s going to seriously mess with peoples designs.
- bladegash 5y ago
  This kind of gets me. Isn’t a design meant to be “human centered” and usable for I dunno…users? How many people do you know that have some form of color blindness or other vision impairment? Now think about how many of your users might be subject to those differences. What is the point of an appealing design if a pretty huge market is ignore because “our brand colors are white text on a light colored cyan background!”?
  - brightball 5y ago
    You’re not wrong, but honestly until I had somebody on my team who was color blind I had no clue how to build with it in mind.
    - bladegash 5y ago
      That’s definitely a fair point and I’d be lying if I said I paid attention to accessibility from day one. Took me seeing a coupon on a billion dollar retailer’s, where the alternative text did not include the coupon code, that I took it a little more seriously. Dunno why, but I imagined myself having to pay 20% more than everyone else due to something I can’t control.
yosito 5y ago
This is great, in theory. But I spent an entire day this week trying to verify my identity so I could log into the IRS website. The usability is that awful for technical people without disabilities. So I'm not optimistic.
mc4ndr3 5y ago
Most websites are completely unusable on smartphones. If it's not a stupid cookie questionnaire then it's begging and pleading to like, subscribe share, ring the notification bell, upgrade to premium, sign up for a mailing list, invite your friends, our live agents are standing by to text message... there's no room left for content. Every cooking recipe leads with 75% fluff. I miss bulletin boards.
oceanghost 5y ago
This really sounds like you should have several layouts available.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Right, that is what I've always wondered - why do we try to shoehorn what usually amounts to accessibility for low visibility users into the visual format of a webpage? Wouldn't it be easier and better to offer a completely different, tailored experience for low-vis users? Even just an alternate layout that makes it more likely for screen readers to work naturally. e.g. www.cnn.com vs lite.cnn.com
  - kalensh 5y ago
    Because very few companies will maintain that alternate site to ensure it provides the same functionality and content. And accessibility is more than just screen reader compatibility.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Isn't that the state we're already in? Very few sites actually test for accessibility before pushing production changes. It is already a second class citizen.
  - ILMostro7 5y ago
    Reminds me of pre-smartphone mobile web.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Except, that’s exactly how html originally started: “oh it’s a nice, machine-readable way of structuring a document, where users can plug in their preferred reader and use it however they like!” lite.cnn.com just starts that process all over again: “Lifehack: you can access websites by lite.<domain> and you’ll get a less hostile experience because it’s intended to be accessible.” “Lifehack: Use the extension LiteBrowse, which automatically goes to the light version of a site and then prettifies it for you.” ‘Oh my! Our analytics say most users are going to the light version! Let’s spice that up and do a UX revamp on it, help improve engagement and get ad clicks.’ ‘Oh, wow, someone make a framework to churn out these really profession lite versions of a page, and wow, they’re so eye-popping and let you incorporate JavaScript…’ Earlier thread on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961
jaywalk 5y ago
I completely understand why accessible websites are important and fully support the cause. But I cannot stand doing the work! I do some work for a Very Large Corporation that was sued over accessibility issues with their website and settled for a large sum of money, so their legal department is on high alert for this. They have a dedicated accessibility testing team, and I will often get a suggestion on how to fix an issue, fix it, and then someone else will test my fix and give me a totally different suggestion on how to fix it. It's infuriating.
- rado 5y ago
  Accessibility isn't something to patch, it is the foundation of the open web, shaken by the massive influence of div soup frameworks.
  - wyager 5y ago
    I don't think there is a coherent historical or technical basis to claim that accessibility (as the term is being used in this thread) is "the foundation of the open web".
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    That's a ridiculous statement. Of course it's something to patch.
    - tomcam 5y ago
      I wonder if GP Meant something like this. Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible. Or am I wrong about this?
      - searchableguy 5y ago
        > Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible Nope. Dialog, progress, details, many input types, etc html tags are not very accessible by default and behave differently in browsers. From the top of my head, you cannot get a proper date picker in safari using html alone. You also need to change attributes to help navigate the user. Mind you, accessibility goes beyond screen readers. You will need javascript for building gesture controls, keyboard shortcuts, etc which is very needed for people with restricted movements. Many people will need UX feedback to understand what is going on. You cannot achieve that without Javascript. Animations, focus, etc are all part of usability and comes under accessibility.
jshier 5y ago
Cool, website doesn't work in Safari.
- sigzero 5y ago
  Works fine for me.
vgel 5y ago
> Teachers Test Prep, Inc.: The Department reached an agreement with Teachers Test Prep, Inc., regarding complaints that the test prep company’s online video courses did not provide captions and were inaccessible to people who are deaf Does this imply that if you offer video content, you must have "synchronized captions that are accurate and identify any speakers in the video"? Does this apply to Youtube or Vimeo?
- dlp211 5y ago
  Youtube already supplies at a minimum auto-generated subtitles, which are imperfect, but usually serviceable.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    YouTube's autogenerated captions are highly variable in quality. They are sometimes serviceable for carefully produced videos of English speakers with a neutral accent, and degrade rapidly as videos move away from this ideal.
    - userbinator 5y ago
      It also appears to be trained on news broadcasts (not surprising) since it will often interpret unclear phrases by injecting oddly political content, often with much hilarity.
- thorum 5y ago
  Yes. WCAG (the W3C guidelines referenced as the gold standard for web accessibility) require both captions for people who are deaf and audio descriptions (an audio track with a person describing anything important that is happening in the video) for people who are blind. It’s a challenging requirement because both can be difficult/expensive to implement, especially for smaller organizations. Technology is catching up to make this easier, with automatic captioning AIs and better software for creating transcriptions. On the audio description side of things we’re seeing improved browser support for TTS description tracks on HTML video, so you don’t have to hire a narrator.
- 5y ago
PopAlongKid 5y ago
This has the possibility to be a giant step backward, as the following example shows. Back in 2019, California tax agency FTB made the following announcement[0]: State agencies’ websites are often the primary way of communicating information to the public and it is important that these sites and the information they provide are available to everyone. AB 434 (2017) required state entities to improve the accessibility of websites and certify that their site meets Web Accessibility Initiative standards by July 1, 2019. So what happened? Many tax documents, which taxpayers rely on to understand the tax law as it applies to them, stopped being available as downloadable PDF files, or else to obtain the PDF file, you have to provide an email address to FTB and then wait until they get around to sending you a copy. Previously, you could immediately download all the PDFs using self-service. While some of the docs are also available in HTML format, that is not as handy as PDF in many cases. Also, many documents are only available as PDF. I don't understand how this helped visually impaired users, but it certainly harmed everyone else. [0]State of California - Franchise Tax Board - Tax News May 2019
- kevingadd 5y ago
  The problem here is people choosing to give up instead of comply with policy. How do you propose addressing that? What kind of policy would prevent this outcome? They clearly didn't want to do the work to make their content accessible, and up until that point they were allowed to get away with not doing the work.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    It's usually marginally funded and/or essentially private ventures that back out or go bankrupt. There's cases of restaurants having to close down because they simply don't have renovation funds. If it's truly a public good it should be publicly funded. The public likely won't want to fund it, so you're gonna have to go with something more lax like exempting old construction entirely or publishing piecemeal best practices. Like in this case, readers are to the point where a plain HTML offering should suffice. This is thankfully something that is not a ton of extra work. But for physical ADA compliance it is unfortunately expensive.
  - 5y ago
tomrod 5y ago
This seems really timely, but also a bit tide shifting. [1] How much of the web adheres to these standards? [2] If businesses or US government sites are not compliant, is that a "default" win? (Apologies if I am using the legal term incorrectly here) [3] If hosting is outside the US for businesses within domestic storefronts, are they open to the same liability?
- fredleblanc 5y ago
  1) Not nearly enough. This has become more of a hot topic as of late. 2) IANAL and can’t speak to this. 3) The US lags many places in the world on its legal accessibility requirements. Depending on the country, you’re probably at HIGHER risk outside the US. Check out this really useful collection of laws and policies from around the world: https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/
logicalmonster 5y ago
I think we can all understand and agree with wanting to help disabled people as well as possible, but there's no clear binding standard for what constitutes an accessible website. Two different experts can look at the same site and give 2 different opinions about what's accessible about the experience or not or how to best improve it. Additionally, technology changes all of the time: new screen readers and new web APIs come out and and more. Best practices don't necessarily get perfected on day 1. Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? This is complex enough for large tech companies who can write a blank check for a large team of full-time developers who can work full time on nothing but accessibility, let alone a little corner cupcake store who managed to save up enough to build a custom cupcake website or something. Do we seriously expect every small non-technical business eking out a living with a small store to be experts on every facet of accessibility? If we're going to cover websites under the ADA, I think there should a lot more leeway for "reasonable accommodations" that can be made. If a small business can't make an accessible order form for some reason, they should be able to take orders over email or the phone or something before getting sued for this.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Regarding your last point, I think that is already the case? Dominos was sued because their site/app was not accessible, and lost, partly because the court ruled that calling in an order was not an adequate alternative because the plaintiff was placed on hold for 45 minutes multiple times. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-finds-domino-s-pizza-violated-the-2182635/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-finds-domino-s-pizza...
- jscholes 5y ago
  > new screen readers and new web APIs come out and and more. New web APIs, for sure. But the screen reader market is not fast moving, in terms of new software being adopted. The line-up of the most used three screen readers (NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver) has not changed in over a decade, despite the individual software applications themselves undergoing changes, and of course the market share of each one increasing and decreasing over time. > Do we seriously expect every small non-technical business eking out a living with a small store to be experts on every facet of accessibility? No, but I also don't expect such a business to be up on the latest in security, PCI compliance, GDPR conformance and more. For that reason, they are probably either: 1. engaging a web design/development agency; and/or 2. using a pre-defined platform, like Shopify. In the former case, I do expect anyone making money from website building to at least give accessibility some thought. For the latter, Shopify is one of the businesses you describe, as a "large tech company who can write a blank check for a large team of full-time developers who can work full time on nothing but accessibility". As such, they absolutely should be setting up small business owners for success, by making their out-of-the-box themes, widgets, flows, etc. reasonably accessible to the widest possible audience.
adultSwim 5y ago
Link to the guidelines: https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/ https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/
BadCookie 5y ago
I am a wheelchair user. Something that annoys me is that a typical small hotel or restaurant website will go to tremendous lengths to tell you how accessible its website is, including having a dedicated page with paragraphs of details about how dedicated they are to serving disabled users. Usually there is a prominent icon linking to this page on every other page. But, try as I might, I cannot find a single piece of information about the physical accessibility of the property. At best, they mention that you should call them for details. So it’s pretty clear that these places do not actually care about disabled people except insofar as not caring could get them sued.
vernie 5y ago
Hell yea baby, now you don't need to find a take-out joint with sink that's mounted too high to file a lawsuit.
- tag2103 5y ago
  Just when the patent trolls were starting to be contained, yet another fine way our government makes sure to get more lawyers wealthy.
RobertMiller 5y ago
I wonder if somewhere out there on the web there's an architect forum where architects are whining about wheelchair ramps like the webdevs in these discussions always seem to.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Yes: https://archinect.com/forum/thread/150034303/has-the-ada-gone-too-far https://archinect.com/forum/thread/150034303/has-the-ada-gon...
- istjohn 5y ago
  Exactly this. I'd like to think architects take pride in building elegant structures that are inviting and accomodating to everyone. Where is our professional pride?
  - RobertMiller 5y ago
    Agreed, it's very unbecoming.
- wmeredith 5y ago
  There absolutely is. I used to work for a general contractor and they hate the Americans with disabilities act, OSHA, etc. The suits just see it as overhead, and the grunts just see it as more work they have to do before they can go to the bar.
runarberg 5y ago
Reading through the comments here I can’t believe the amount of abelism here on HN. In the web development industry accessibility is taken seriously. If you read the literature (e.g. on A list apart or Smashing Magazine) there is no shortage on articles about the importance of accessibility. If you go to a conference there will at least be 3 talks about accessibility. The web docs on MDN usually have a paragraph or two about accessibility issues and how to patch them for different elements and APIs. If you take a course in Web Development accessibility will be one of the first thing you’ll learn. The comments here act as if this is not already a part of the industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every professional web developer thinks about making their web site accessible. If they don’t, they are not acting according to industry standards, and they should probably be liable for that. No different then a bad carpenter that doesn’t build according to standards.
no_wizard 5y ago
This is overall a good thing for the industry as a whole, even though I'm sure it will be met with plenty of resistance initially. This will force prioritize accessibility across the industry as the lawsuits mount with big companies that don't follow best practices here, which will lift the entirety of the industry up along with it.
rossdavidh 5y ago
The very first place I worked at (as a developer) was a university. We were, for obvious reasons, very concerned with accessibility. I know this doesn't sit well with most web developers, but the primary thing that made it easier (back then, and IANAL), was to use HTML instead of javascript. Another way of saying that is, the primary problem with making websites accessible, is that they have far more javascript than they need, for functionality like "allow the user to submit a form" or "allow the user to click on a link". 99% of accessibility problems with current websites would disappear if they were made with 20th century web technology. Also, I have to add, they would work better for the rest of us in 99% of the cases. There are a few websites whose functionality actually benefits from React (or Vue or whatever), but most websites are either doing "show this static content" or "allow this form to be submitted", and the primary reason the javascript is there is that the developer wants it there, not that it does the user any real good.
- rajin444 5y ago
  It’s extreme developer specific tunnel vision to think removing JS would be good. Your comment is pretty ironic because that same sentiment (“this is how I see the world”) is what makes the web so inaccessible for disabled people.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    I disagree. They speak from experience. Removing JS from the user experience simplifies the developer's toolset to a subset which is usually also accessible. There is still room for beloved JS, such as serving ads, tracking user behavior, mining crypto on unsuspecting users' computers, centering a div, and all the other arcane utilities for which one disables JS in the browser for.
    - rajin444 5y ago
      Accessibility and JS are not mutually exclusive. It's just much easier to do accessibility without JS.
mltony 5y ago
Blind developer here. So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Accessibility of websites is a real problem for blind people. And the thing is it is relatively easy to make your website accessible: * Use simple HTML controls: all of them work great in all screenreaders. Only when custom behavior is implemented in javascript this might cause problems. * Test accessibility with keyboard. That fancy combobox that you wrote that expands with beautiful navigation cannot be opened from keyboard. This ADA guidance actually doesn't even mention this. Sure, providing alt descriptions can be useful but it's almost never preventing me from using a website. But a combobox or a button that won't click is a real problem. But I hope this is just the first step in making Internet more blind-friendly.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed They were. AM talk radio hosts would whine about that one for years.
- noobermin 5y ago
  About four months ago, I used to cycle every week to the store, but an auto-immune disorder has me now disabled and I use a wheelchair. A lot of this annoying attitude honestly is people really feel like accessibility is for "other people" and many just lack empathy in general. But really, no one lives forever, no one is 25 forever hitting the bars every night, even abled bodied people grow old and their bodies change or like me, an illness or injury can strike without warning. At the very least if you cannot be empathetic to other people who are disabled just know that one day it could be you and you'll be thankful someone somewhere thought of accessibility. Today, the ramps I used to walk my bike up to the walkway under my apartment are now a godsend for the wheelchair and the stairs that I used to haul my bike up begrudgingly are now a curse. This is a cringe analogy but may be, just may be this will help since this is hacker news: think of the "Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy" and how writing comments is for your "future self." Well, making things accessible is for your future elderly or injured self if you're able bodied today. If you can't do it for others out of mere empathy, at the very least do it for a potential version of yourself in the future! [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html
roughly 5y ago
I hear that many of you are uninterested in doing the work required here. Allow me to offer a couple arguments in favor of taking accessibility seriously: 1. Disability is a spectrum, not a condition, and a temporal, not a terminal state. Ever get your eyes dilated? Ever break your foot? Ever try using most common devices with a baby in your hands? Ever needed to watch a video in a loud room, or a place in which you cannot use headphones? Ever try using a laptop outside on a sunny day? Ever try getting old? 2. 26% of all adults in the US have some form of disability. 10% of these are sensory (hearing/sight). Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population? 3. We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public, not just a subset of it - we're making an average of 2-5x the median income, presumably based on our professionalism, knowledge of our craft, and ability to do hard things. 4. It's the right thing to do, both morally and practically. It allows every person to participate in society, allows us to leverage the full skills and abilities of every available human, and doesn't give us an "out" to start excluding people because we're too lazy to consider their needs. 5. If none of that sways you: some day you too will need this, if for no other reason than you've gotten old. It'll be nice to live in a world in which the people we are today are willing to take care of the people we'll be some day.
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels. In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image. The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.
  - roughly 5y ago
    The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...
benatkin 5y ago
Google is using canvas for Google Docs. They can also activate using HTML elements for screen readers. Nobody in open source component development should be discouraged from building the canvas side of things so web app/site developers can do the same thing. It's up to the web app/site developer to make sure there's always an alternative to canvas components. Where practical, the canvas component should provide the accessible alternative, but sometimes the is better done by external component(s). https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
- zat 5y ago
  I think this is actually a great example on the potential pit-falls of going with this approach. This isn't really accessible and shows how even a large company with a lot of resources can miss the mark. For example, if I try to have VoiceOver (control + option + w) read the word I am currently on in Google Docs, it doesn't work, Using VoiceOver's search (control + option + f in Safari) doesn't work, basically nothing actually seems to work from what I can tell. A visual user can easily scan a document and find a heading, where a VoiceOver user might search to jump to it instead. While they do provide some keyboard shortcuts to help navigate a document easier, this is not a valid substitute for supporting the screenreader the way users know how to use / are proficient with. While a user of a screenreader could technically use it, it isn't usable (or accessible) in any real sense of the word. If you were to translate this to a visual user experience, imagine you could only see one letter at a time and can go forwards/backwards one character. It seems like they are using an `aria-live` region to speak where you are rather than having a separate DOM representation of the content and syncing the state (which can be an engineering effort most companies / libraries cannot afford invest enough to get completely right). Disclaimer: I am not a primarily a screenreader user, though I do have some experience using them. Disclaimer: I used to work at Google, though not on Docs.
  - hoten 5y ago
    Did you enable the screen reader features? apparently they are behind a kb shortcut: https://imgur.com/pSLYLcd https://imgur.com/pSLYLcd (btw: I got this a11y tree view by enabling a new experiment in the devtools)
lstamour 5y ago
Here’s background on standard HTML controls, their history, and their future development: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-select-native-html-form-controls/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-selec... The future of accessible web controls is likely Open UI - building standard, agreed upon controls that codify how “modern” widgets behave, though each browser might integrate the standard control with their underlying OS platform and/or screen reader conventions. If you’re familiar with how JavaScript has stages of approvals for proposals, they have those as well: https://open-ui.org/working-mode https://open-ui.org/working-mode Like adopting new JS functions that make our lives easier, there will come a day when we need a particular new control and it’s up to us as web devs to help standardize and push the web forward. There are a number of proposals already, but it’s arguable that some controls, especially existing ones, need much more flexibility in their specification to make them easier to style and override to match a theme. https://open-ui.org/ https://open-ui.org/ has what they’re working on, a long list in the menu (hidden away on mobile). As I write this I recognize there is a lot more to web accessibility and usability than simply using custom controls, but browser makers ultimately want to innovate and solve these challenges within the HTML spec as it will help their own efforts in building for the web. Back in the day we thought it was meaningful semantic HTML when we picked an em (emphasis) tag over an italic tag, or strong over bold. Now, we should try to use dialog instead of divs and who knows, in the future, we might use an infscroll tag instead of an ordered or unordered list. Innovation always happens faster than standardization, but just because we’re upset with the lack of functionality in a textarea does not mean we should be satisfied with our progress reinventing the wheel. We should finish the job and contribute back to HTML the custom controls we value most as standards for the benefit of future web developers and designers, including ourselves.
mchusma 5y ago
The problem is not the law, but rather the class action lawsuits around these cases. I have no problem working with blind users to improve the accessibility of the website, but I have been sued by plaintiffs counsel in a state where we had no customers, no business of any kind, the claim was bogus, and we had to spend money on legal counsel to get that thrown out. Class action lawsuits are a plague on businesses and I'm confident that it would be a large "net positive" for society if they were eliminated. The answer to "punishing" people should not be allowing lawyers to blackmail companies to settle class-action suits. Rather, it should be to make it easier to actually resolve smaller issues. I explicitly require the use of fairclaims.com for smaller disputes on my site. I recommend them as they are genuinely a fast, easy form of binding arbitration. Maybe I could be on board with class-action lawsuits if the defendant has lost 5 or more individual suits for the same reason, or something like that if someone was truly a repeat offender.
satokema 5y ago
the problem isn't the accessibility standards, that is reasonable. the problem are the insane hacks and shoddy coding that devs were forced to do because the money wanted pretty interfaces instead of reasonable ones that could handle screen readers and the like.
k__ 5y ago
I don't have a disability, but I love everything that makes my life easier. High contrast, bigger fonts, and what not. Accessibility isn't just for people with disabilities, but for everyone that can't focus while using your app for whatever reason.
pabs3 5y ago
They should recommend people use progressive enhancement, that helps a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhancement-to-build-gov-uk/ https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progres... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538144
_HMCB_ 5y ago
The site fails to load content with as content blockers turned on.
jrd79 5y ago
From what I can tell, Title III (public accommodations) only applies to businesses with physical locations that serve the public. So are purely digital Saas businesses not subject to this lawsuit risk? If that is not the case, can someone more knowledgeable on the subject post a link to the relevant section of law or official regulation?
- lolinder 5y ago
  There's a whole section in the new guidance dedicated to that question: https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/#when-the-ada-requires-web-content-to-be-accessible https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/#when-the-ada-requires-web... The tl;dr: > For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.
  - jrd79 5y ago
    That sounds like it applies to websites of businesses with physical locations, no?
charcircuit 5y ago
The real issue is that screenreaders suck. It's not my problem that your screen reader can't read your screen.
avazhi 5y ago
Non-American law student here - can any US lawyers explain how this would work in practice? Are you telling me that a small business could actually be sued in the US for not having a website accessible by, for example, a blind person? How is this not considered prohibitively expensive and an unreasonable burden?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  A former colleague now owns a website development shop in my city, they are as busy as can be updating school websites because a local woman went around every school website and found ADA violations. She’s making a ton, and has no disability. She got her lawyer involved, frilessless or not all of the school settled with agreements that they would fix the “issues”. What’s the answer to the technicality and legality of lawsuits? I’m not a lawyer, but at the very minimum the threat is enough.
- nfw2 5y ago
  There is a safe harbor for business with under 15 employees, but otherwise, yes
  - lg 5y ago
    Not for title III. As another poster here asked this remains unclear whether a web-only SaaS business needs to comply.
nfw2 5y ago
The DOJ site has some accessibility problems: - links don't meet WCAG AAA contract guidelines - focus is not communicated with a reasonable amount of distinction in many cases. Ex: https://imgur.com/a/bcrScWg https://imgur.com/a/bcrScWg Maybe someone should sue them.
- darekkay 5y ago
  > links don't meet WCAG AAA contract guidelines WCAG AA is fully sufficient from legal perspective.
watersb 5y ago
If I can't understand my writing when using a screen reader, it's probably not worth your time. I know that audio navigation tools are far more sophisticated than simple text to speech, but I just try to keep it simple.
hispanic 5y ago
In my 20+ years of professional web-based software development, mostly in the commercial space, accessibility was never made a requirement. This spanned more than a half dozen clients/companies and more than a dozen projects/teams. Fast forward to last year when I re-platformed my personal blog [1]. During that effort, I decided to make it accessible. It was my first time every really delving into the a11y space. Despite the time warranted, I found that effort to be interesting, challenging, and worthwhile. And I think it was/is the right thing to do. This despite my blog getting a low amount of traffic and nobody ever requesting that I make it accessible. As an online creator, I have the ability and privilege to make my (small) online corner of the world a better place. For me to simply ignore the needs of those who are less able seems wrong. [1] - https://michaelscepaniak.com/ https://michaelscepaniak.com/
JohnTHaller 5y ago
If you'd like to test your current sites with a screen reader, give NVDA a try. It's open source and free. I package a portable version with PortableApps.com and have used it for testing software for quite a few years now. Also worth testing out your apps with high contrast themes enabled at the user level on various devices. And through color blindness filters.

202 points by greenie_beans 5y ago

IMO the contrast is the hardest thing to get right. I’m not sure if that’s built into the minimum standards or not but it’s going to seriously mess with peoples designs.

bladegash 5y ago
This kind of gets me. Isn’t a design meant to be “human centered” and usable for I dunno…users? How many people do you know that have some form of color blindness or other vision impairment? Now think about how many of your users might be subject to those differences. What is the point of an appealing design if a pretty huge market is ignore because “our brand colors are white text on a light colored cyan background!”?
- brightball 5y ago
  You’re not wrong, but honestly until I had somebody on my team who was color blind I had no clue how to build with it in mind.
  - bladegash 5y ago
    That’s definitely a fair point and I’d be lying if I said I paid attention to accessibility from day one. Took me seeing a coupon on a billion dollar retailer’s, where the alternative text did not include the coupon code, that I took it a little more seriously. Dunno why, but I imagined myself having to pay 20% more than everyone else due to something I can’t control.

yosito 5y ago

This is great, in theory. But I spent an entire day this week trying to verify my identity so I could log into the IRS website. The usability is that awful for technical people without disabilities. So I'm not optimistic.

mc4ndr3 5y ago

Most websites are completely unusable on smartphones. If it's not a stupid cookie questionnaire then it's begging and pleading to like, subscribe share, ring the notification bell, upgrade to premium, sign up for a mailing list, invite your friends, our live agents are standing by to text message... there's no room left for content. Every cooking recipe leads with 75% fluff. I miss bulletin boards.

oceanghost 5y ago

This really sounds like you should have several layouts available.

oh_sigh 5y ago
Right, that is what I've always wondered - why do we try to shoehorn what usually amounts to accessibility for low visibility users into the visual format of a webpage? Wouldn't it be easier and better to offer a completely different, tailored experience for low-vis users? Even just an alternate layout that makes it more likely for screen readers to work naturally. e.g. www.cnn.com vs lite.cnn.com
- kalensh 5y ago
  Because very few companies will maintain that alternate site to ensure it provides the same functionality and content. And accessibility is more than just screen reader compatibility.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Isn't that the state we're already in? Very few sites actually test for accessibility before pushing production changes. It is already a second class citizen.
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  Reminds me of pre-smartphone mobile web.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Except, that’s exactly how html originally started: “oh it’s a nice, machine-readable way of structuring a document, where users can plug in their preferred reader and use it however they like!” lite.cnn.com just starts that process all over again: “Lifehack: you can access websites by lite.<domain> and you’ll get a less hostile experience because it’s intended to be accessible.” “Lifehack: Use the extension LiteBrowse, which automatically goes to the light version of a site and then prettifies it for you.” ‘Oh my! Our analytics say most users are going to the light version! Let’s spice that up and do a UX revamp on it, help improve engagement and get ad clicks.’ ‘Oh, wow, someone make a framework to churn out these really profession lite versions of a page, and wow, they’re so eye-popping and let you incorporate JavaScript…’ Earlier thread on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961

jaywalk 5y ago

I completely understand why accessible websites are important and fully support the cause. But I cannot stand doing the work! I do some work for a Very Large Corporation that was sued over accessibility issues with their website and settled for a large sum of money, so their legal department is on high alert for this. They have a dedicated accessibility testing team, and I will often get a suggestion on how to fix an issue, fix it, and then someone else will test my fix and give me a totally different suggestion on how to fix it. It's infuriating.

rado 5y ago
Accessibility isn't something to patch, it is the foundation of the open web, shaken by the massive influence of div soup frameworks.
- wyager 5y ago
  I don't think there is a coherent historical or technical basis to claim that accessibility (as the term is being used in this thread) is "the foundation of the open web".
- jaywalk 5y ago
  That's a ridiculous statement. Of course it's something to patch.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    I wonder if GP Meant something like this. Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible. Or am I wrong about this?
    - searchableguy 5y ago
      > Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible Nope. Dialog, progress, details, many input types, etc html tags are not very accessible by default and behave differently in browsers. From the top of my head, you cannot get a proper date picker in safari using html alone. You also need to change attributes to help navigate the user. Mind you, accessibility goes beyond screen readers. You will need javascript for building gesture controls, keyboard shortcuts, etc which is very needed for people with restricted movements. Many people will need UX feedback to understand what is going on. You cannot achieve that without Javascript. Animations, focus, etc are all part of usability and comes under accessibility.

jshier 5y ago

Cool, website doesn't work in Safari.

sigzero 5y ago
Works fine for me.

vgel 5y ago

> Teachers Test Prep, Inc.: The Department reached an agreement with Teachers Test Prep, Inc., regarding complaints that the test prep company’s online video courses did not provide captions and were inaccessible to people who are deaf Does this imply that if you offer video content, you must have "synchronized captions that are accurate and identify any speakers in the video"? Does this apply to Youtube or Vimeo?

dlp211 5y ago
Youtube already supplies at a minimum auto-generated subtitles, which are imperfect, but usually serviceable.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  YouTube's autogenerated captions are highly variable in quality. They are sometimes serviceable for carefully produced videos of English speakers with a neutral accent, and degrade rapidly as videos move away from this ideal.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    It also appears to be trained on news broadcasts (not surprising) since it will often interpret unclear phrases by injecting oddly political content, often with much hilarity.
thorum 5y ago
Yes. WCAG (the W3C guidelines referenced as the gold standard for web accessibility) require both captions for people who are deaf and audio descriptions (an audio track with a person describing anything important that is happening in the video) for people who are blind. It’s a challenging requirement because both can be difficult/expensive to implement, especially for smaller organizations. Technology is catching up to make this easier, with automatic captioning AIs and better software for creating transcriptions. On the audio description side of things we’re seeing improved browser support for TTS description tracks on HTML video, so you don’t have to hire a narrator.
5y ago

PopAlongKid 5y ago

This has the possibility to be a giant step backward, as the following example shows. Back in 2019, California tax agency FTB made the following announcement[0]: State agencies’ websites are often the primary way of communicating information to the public and it is important that these sites and the information they provide are available to everyone. AB 434 (2017) required state entities to improve the accessibility of websites and certify that their site meets Web Accessibility Initiative standards by July 1, 2019. So what happened? Many tax documents, which taxpayers rely on to understand the tax law as it applies to them, stopped being available as downloadable PDF files, or else to obtain the PDF file, you have to provide an email address to FTB and then wait until they get around to sending you a copy. Previously, you could immediately download all the PDFs using self-service. While some of the docs are also available in HTML format, that is not as handy as PDF in many cases. Also, many documents are only available as PDF. I don't understand how this helped visually impaired users, but it certainly harmed everyone else. [0]State of California - Franchise Tax Board - Tax News May 2019

kevingadd 5y ago
The problem here is people choosing to give up instead of comply with policy. How do you propose addressing that? What kind of policy would prevent this outcome? They clearly didn't want to do the work to make their content accessible, and up until that point they were allowed to get away with not doing the work.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  It's usually marginally funded and/or essentially private ventures that back out or go bankrupt. There's cases of restaurants having to close down because they simply don't have renovation funds. If it's truly a public good it should be publicly funded. The public likely won't want to fund it, so you're gonna have to go with something more lax like exempting old construction entirely or publishing piecemeal best practices. Like in this case, readers are to the point where a plain HTML offering should suffice. This is thankfully something that is not a ton of extra work. But for physical ADA compliance it is unfortunately expensive.
- 5y ago

tomrod 5y ago

This seems really timely, but also a bit tide shifting. [1] How much of the web adheres to these standards? [2] If businesses or US government sites are not compliant, is that a "default" win? (Apologies if I am using the legal term incorrectly here) [3] If hosting is outside the US for businesses within domestic storefronts, are they open to the same liability?

fredleblanc 5y ago
1) Not nearly enough. This has become more of a hot topic as of late. 2) IANAL and can’t speak to this. 3) The US lags many places in the world on its legal accessibility requirements. Depending on the country, you’re probably at HIGHER risk outside the US. Check out this really useful collection of laws and policies from around the world: https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/

logicalmonster 5y ago

I think we can all understand and agree with wanting to help disabled people as well as possible, but there's no clear binding standard for what constitutes an accessible website. Two different experts can look at the same site and give 2 different opinions about what's accessible about the experience or not or how to best improve it. Additionally, technology changes all of the time: new screen readers and new web APIs come out and and more. Best practices don't necessarily get perfected on day 1. Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? This is complex enough for large tech companies who can write a blank check for a large team of full-time developers who can work full time on nothing but accessibility, let alone a little corner cupcake store who managed to save up enough to build a custom cupcake website or something. Do we seriously expect every small non-technical business eking out a living with a small store to be experts on every facet of accessibility? If we're going to cover websites under the ADA, I think there should a lot more leeway for "reasonable accommodations" that can be made. If a small business can't make an accessible order form for some reason, they should be able to take orders over email or the phone or something before getting sued for this.

oh_sigh 5y ago
Regarding your last point, I think that is already the case? Dominos was sued because their site/app was not accessible, and lost, partly because the court ruled that calling in an order was not an adequate alternative because the plaintiff was placed on hold for 45 minutes multiple times. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-finds-domino-s-pizza-violated-the-2182635/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-finds-domino-s-pizza...
jscholes 5y ago
> new screen readers and new web APIs come out and and more. New web APIs, for sure. But the screen reader market is not fast moving, in terms of new software being adopted. The line-up of the most used three screen readers (NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver) has not changed in over a decade, despite the individual software applications themselves undergoing changes, and of course the market share of each one increasing and decreasing over time. > Do we seriously expect every small non-technical business eking out a living with a small store to be experts on every facet of accessibility? No, but I also don't expect such a business to be up on the latest in security, PCI compliance, GDPR conformance and more. For that reason, they are probably either: 1. engaging a web design/development agency; and/or 2. using a pre-defined platform, like Shopify. In the former case, I do expect anyone making money from website building to at least give accessibility some thought. For the latter, Shopify is one of the businesses you describe, as a "large tech company who can write a blank check for a large team of full-time developers who can work full time on nothing but accessibility". As such, they absolutely should be setting up small business owners for success, by making their out-of-the-box themes, widgets, flows, etc. reasonably accessible to the widest possible audience.

adultSwim 5y ago

Link to the guidelines: https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/ https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/

BadCookie 5y ago

I am a wheelchair user. Something that annoys me is that a typical small hotel or restaurant website will go to tremendous lengths to tell you how accessible its website is, including having a dedicated page with paragraphs of details about how dedicated they are to serving disabled users. Usually there is a prominent icon linking to this page on every other page. But, try as I might, I cannot find a single piece of information about the physical accessibility of the property. At best, they mention that you should call them for details. So it’s pretty clear that these places do not actually care about disabled people except insofar as not caring could get them sued.

vernie 5y ago

Hell yea baby, now you don't need to find a take-out joint with sink that's mounted too high to file a lawsuit.

tag2103 5y ago
Just when the patent trolls were starting to be contained, yet another fine way our government makes sure to get more lawyers wealthy.

RobertMiller 5y ago

I wonder if somewhere out there on the web there's an architect forum where architects are whining about wheelchair ramps like the webdevs in these discussions always seem to.

Aerroon 5y ago
Yes: https://archinect.com/forum/thread/150034303/has-the-ada-gone-too-far https://archinect.com/forum/thread/150034303/has-the-ada-gon...
istjohn 5y ago
Exactly this. I'd like to think architects take pride in building elegant structures that are inviting and accomodating to everyone. Where is our professional pride?
- RobertMiller 5y ago
  Agreed, it's very unbecoming.
wmeredith 5y ago
There absolutely is. I used to work for a general contractor and they hate the Americans with disabilities act, OSHA, etc. The suits just see it as overhead, and the grunts just see it as more work they have to do before they can go to the bar.

runarberg 5y ago

Reading through the comments here I can’t believe the amount of abelism here on HN. In the web development industry accessibility is taken seriously. If you read the literature (e.g. on A list apart or Smashing Magazine) there is no shortage on articles about the importance of accessibility. If you go to a conference there will at least be 3 talks about accessibility. The web docs on MDN usually have a paragraph or two about accessibility issues and how to patch them for different elements and APIs. If you take a course in Web Development accessibility will be one of the first thing you’ll learn. The comments here act as if this is not already a part of the industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every professional web developer thinks about making their web site accessible. If they don’t, they are not acting according to industry standards, and they should probably be liable for that. No different then a bad carpenter that doesn’t build according to standards.

no_wizard 5y ago

This is overall a good thing for the industry as a whole, even though I'm sure it will be met with plenty of resistance initially. This will force prioritize accessibility across the industry as the lawsuits mount with big companies that don't follow best practices here, which will lift the entirety of the industry up along with it.

rossdavidh 5y ago

The very first place I worked at (as a developer) was a university. We were, for obvious reasons, very concerned with accessibility. I know this doesn't sit well with most web developers, but the primary thing that made it easier (back then, and IANAL), was to use HTML instead of javascript. Another way of saying that is, the primary problem with making websites accessible, is that they have far more javascript than they need, for functionality like "allow the user to submit a form" or "allow the user to click on a link". 99% of accessibility problems with current websites would disappear if they were made with 20th century web technology. Also, I have to add, they would work better for the rest of us in 99% of the cases. There are a few websites whose functionality actually benefits from React (or Vue or whatever), but most websites are either doing "show this static content" or "allow this form to be submitted", and the primary reason the javascript is there is that the developer wants it there, not that it does the user any real good.

rajin444 5y ago
It’s extreme developer specific tunnel vision to think removing JS would be good. Your comment is pretty ironic because that same sentiment (“this is how I see the world”) is what makes the web so inaccessible for disabled people.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I disagree. They speak from experience. Removing JS from the user experience simplifies the developer's toolset to a subset which is usually also accessible. There is still room for beloved JS, such as serving ads, tracking user behavior, mining crypto on unsuspecting users' computers, centering a div, and all the other arcane utilities for which one disables JS in the browser for.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    Accessibility and JS are not mutually exclusive. It's just much easier to do accessibility without JS.

mltony 5y ago

Blind developer here. So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Accessibility of websites is a real problem for blind people. And the thing is it is relatively easy to make your website accessible: * Use simple HTML controls: all of them work great in all screenreaders. Only when custom behavior is implemented in javascript this might cause problems. * Test accessibility with keyboard. That fancy combobox that you wrote that expands with beautiful navigation cannot be opened from keyboard. This ADA guidance actually doesn't even mention this. Sure, providing alt descriptions can be useful but it's almost never preventing me from using a website. But a combobox or a button that won't click is a real problem. But I hope this is just the first step in making Internet more blind-friendly.

heavyset_go 5y ago
> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed They were. AM talk radio hosts would whine about that one for years.
noobermin 5y ago
About four months ago, I used to cycle every week to the store, but an auto-immune disorder has me now disabled and I use a wheelchair. A lot of this annoying attitude honestly is people really feel like accessibility is for "other people" and many just lack empathy in general. But really, no one lives forever, no one is 25 forever hitting the bars every night, even abled bodied people grow old and their bodies change or like me, an illness or injury can strike without warning. At the very least if you cannot be empathetic to other people who are disabled just know that one day it could be you and you'll be thankful someone somewhere thought of accessibility. Today, the ramps I used to walk my bike up to the walkway under my apartment are now a godsend for the wheelchair and the stairs that I used to haul my bike up begrudgingly are now a curse. This is a cringe analogy but may be, just may be this will help since this is hacker news: think of the "Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy" and how writing comments is for your "future self." Well, making things accessible is for your future elderly or injured self if you're able bodied today. If you can't do it for others out of mere empathy, at the very least do it for a potential version of yourself in the future! [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html

roughly 5y ago

I hear that many of you are uninterested in doing the work required here. Allow me to offer a couple arguments in favor of taking accessibility seriously: 1. Disability is a spectrum, not a condition, and a temporal, not a terminal state. Ever get your eyes dilated? Ever break your foot? Ever try using most common devices with a baby in your hands? Ever needed to watch a video in a loud room, or a place in which you cannot use headphones? Ever try using a laptop outside on a sunny day? Ever try getting old? 2. 26% of all adults in the US have some form of disability. 10% of these are sensory (hearing/sight). Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population? 3. We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public, not just a subset of it - we're making an average of 2-5x the median income, presumably based on our professionalism, knowledge of our craft, and ability to do hard things. 4. It's the right thing to do, both morally and practically. It allows every person to participate in society, allows us to leverage the full skills and abilities of every available human, and doesn't give us an "out" to start excluding people because we're too lazy to consider their needs. 5. If none of that sways you: some day you too will need this, if for no other reason than you've gotten old. It'll be nice to live in a world in which the people we are today are willing to take care of the people we'll be some day.

NelsonMinar 5y ago
Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels. In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image. The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.
- roughly 5y ago
  The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...

benatkin 5y ago

Google is using canvas for Google Docs. They can also activate using HTML elements for screen readers. Nobody in open source component development should be discouraged from building the canvas side of things so web app/site developers can do the same thing. It's up to the web app/site developer to make sure there's always an alternative to canvas components. Where practical, the canvas component should provide the accessible alternative, but sometimes the is better done by external component(s). https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

zat 5y ago
I think this is actually a great example on the potential pit-falls of going with this approach. This isn't really accessible and shows how even a large company with a lot of resources can miss the mark. For example, if I try to have VoiceOver (control + option + w) read the word I am currently on in Google Docs, it doesn't work, Using VoiceOver's search (control + option + f in Safari) doesn't work, basically nothing actually seems to work from what I can tell. A visual user can easily scan a document and find a heading, where a VoiceOver user might search to jump to it instead. While they do provide some keyboard shortcuts to help navigate a document easier, this is not a valid substitute for supporting the screenreader the way users know how to use / are proficient with. While a user of a screenreader could technically use it, it isn't usable (or accessible) in any real sense of the word. If you were to translate this to a visual user experience, imagine you could only see one letter at a time and can go forwards/backwards one character. It seems like they are using an `aria-live` region to speak where you are rather than having a separate DOM representation of the content and syncing the state (which can be an engineering effort most companies / libraries cannot afford invest enough to get completely right). Disclaimer: I am not a primarily a screenreader user, though I do have some experience using them. Disclaimer: I used to work at Google, though not on Docs.
- hoten 5y ago
  Did you enable the screen reader features? apparently they are behind a kb shortcut: https://imgur.com/pSLYLcd https://imgur.com/pSLYLcd (btw: I got this a11y tree view by enabling a new experiment in the devtools)

lstamour 5y ago

Here’s background on standard HTML controls, their history, and their future development: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-select-native-html-form-controls/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-selec... The future of accessible web controls is likely Open UI - building standard, agreed upon controls that codify how “modern” widgets behave, though each browser might integrate the standard control with their underlying OS platform and/or screen reader conventions. If you’re familiar with how JavaScript has stages of approvals for proposals, they have those as well: https://open-ui.org/working-mode https://open-ui.org/working-mode Like adopting new JS functions that make our lives easier, there will come a day when we need a particular new control and it’s up to us as web devs to help standardize and push the web forward. There are a number of proposals already, but it’s arguable that some controls, especially existing ones, need much more flexibility in their specification to make them easier to style and override to match a theme. https://open-ui.org/ https://open-ui.org/ has what they’re working on, a long list in the menu (hidden away on mobile). As I write this I recognize there is a lot more to web accessibility and usability than simply using custom controls, but browser makers ultimately want to innovate and solve these challenges within the HTML spec as it will help their own efforts in building for the web. Back in the day we thought it was meaningful semantic HTML when we picked an em (emphasis) tag over an italic tag, or strong over bold. Now, we should try to use dialog instead of divs and who knows, in the future, we might use an infscroll tag instead of an ordered or unordered list. Innovation always happens faster than standardization, but just because we’re upset with the lack of functionality in a textarea does not mean we should be satisfied with our progress reinventing the wheel. We should finish the job and contribute back to HTML the custom controls we value most as standards for the benefit of future web developers and designers, including ourselves.

mchusma 5y ago

The problem is not the law, but rather the class action lawsuits around these cases. I have no problem working with blind users to improve the accessibility of the website, but I have been sued by plaintiffs counsel in a state where we had no customers, no business of any kind, the claim was bogus, and we had to spend money on legal counsel to get that thrown out. Class action lawsuits are a plague on businesses and I'm confident that it would be a large "net positive" for society if they were eliminated. The answer to "punishing" people should not be allowing lawyers to blackmail companies to settle class-action suits. Rather, it should be to make it easier to actually resolve smaller issues. I explicitly require the use of fairclaims.com for smaller disputes on my site. I recommend them as they are genuinely a fast, easy form of binding arbitration. Maybe I could be on board with class-action lawsuits if the defendant has lost 5 or more individual suits for the same reason, or something like that if someone was truly a repeat offender.

satokema 5y ago

the problem isn't the accessibility standards, that is reasonable. the problem are the insane hacks and shoddy coding that devs were forced to do because the money wanted pretty interfaces instead of reasonable ones that could handle screen readers and the like.

k__ 5y ago

I don't have a disability, but I love everything that makes my life easier. High contrast, bigger fonts, and what not. Accessibility isn't just for people with disabilities, but for everyone that can't focus while using your app for whatever reason.

pabs3 5y ago

They should recommend people use progressive enhancement, that helps a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhancement-to-build-gov-uk/ https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progres... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538144

_HMCB_ 5y ago

The site fails to load content with as content blockers turned on.

jrd79 5y ago

From what I can tell, Title III (public accommodations) only applies to businesses with physical locations that serve the public. So are purely digital Saas businesses not subject to this lawsuit risk? If that is not the case, can someone more knowledgeable on the subject post a link to the relevant section of law or official regulation?

lolinder 5y ago
There's a whole section in the new guidance dedicated to that question: https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/#when-the-ada-requires-web-content-to-be-accessible https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/#when-the-ada-requires-web... The tl;dr: > For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.
- jrd79 5y ago
  That sounds like it applies to websites of businesses with physical locations, no?

charcircuit 5y ago

The real issue is that screenreaders suck. It's not my problem that your screen reader can't read your screen.

avazhi 5y ago

Non-American law student here - can any US lawyers explain how this would work in practice? Are you telling me that a small business could actually be sued in the US for not having a website accessible by, for example, a blind person? How is this not considered prohibitively expensive and an unreasonable burden?

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
A former colleague now owns a website development shop in my city, they are as busy as can be updating school websites because a local woman went around every school website and found ADA violations. She’s making a ton, and has no disability. She got her lawyer involved, frilessless or not all of the school settled with agreements that they would fix the “issues”. What’s the answer to the technicality and legality of lawsuits? I’m not a lawyer, but at the very minimum the threat is enough.
nfw2 5y ago
There is a safe harbor for business with under 15 employees, but otherwise, yes
- lg 5y ago
  Not for title III. As another poster here asked this remains unclear whether a web-only SaaS business needs to comply.

nfw2 5y ago

The DOJ site has some accessibility problems: - links don't meet WCAG AAA contract guidelines - focus is not communicated with a reasonable amount of distinction in many cases. Ex: https://imgur.com/a/bcrScWg https://imgur.com/a/bcrScWg Maybe someone should sue them.

darekkay 5y ago
> links don't meet WCAG AAA contract guidelines WCAG AA is fully sufficient from legal perspective.

watersb 5y ago

If I can't understand my writing when using a screen reader, it's probably not worth your time. I know that audio navigation tools are far more sophisticated than simple text to speech, but I just try to keep it simple.

hispanic 5y ago

In my 20+ years of professional web-based software development, mostly in the commercial space, accessibility was never made a requirement. This spanned more than a half dozen clients/companies and more than a dozen projects/teams. Fast forward to last year when I re-platformed my personal blog [1]. During that effort, I decided to make it accessible. It was my first time every really delving into the a11y space. Despite the time warranted, I found that effort to be interesting, challenging, and worthwhile. And I think it was/is the right thing to do. This despite my blog getting a low amount of traffic and nobody ever requesting that I make it accessible. As an online creator, I have the ability and privilege to make my (small) online corner of the world a better place. For me to simply ignore the needs of those who are less able seems wrong. [1] - https://michaelscepaniak.com/ https://michaelscepaniak.com/

JohnTHaller 5y ago

If you'd like to test your current sites with a screen reader, give NVDA a try. It's open source and free. I package a portable version with PortableApps.com and have used it for testing software for quite a few years now. Also worth testing out your apps with high contrast themes enabled at the user level on various devices. And through color blindness filters.