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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

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.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Ah, so that is why small businesses so commonly do not have a website and use Facebook instead.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Most small businesses want some solution that Just Works^TM. The less time and money spent, the better. Most small businesses will also not jerry-rig their own payment processors.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  Can we acknowledge that there’s more than 1 important competing “socially good” value that’s in conflict with your prescription? Your prescription is a large step towards the death of what portion of the free and open web still exists. Just saying “build your business website on some default storefront or walled-garden by Facebook, Amazon, Shopify, or some other mega corporation’s platform and don’t change 1 line of code or risk legal obliteration” is close to a death sentence for an independent web. Is it not valid to point out that doing our best to maintain an independent web is also an important value as well for the world, for disabled people, and future generations?
  - etchalon 5y ago
    It is not valid to say that the value of an open web trumps the value of people being able to use the open web.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Inaccessibility can prevent a person from getting a job, or cause a person to lose their job if the requirements for that job change (I've seen it happen). What is the equivalent personal cost of further centralizing the web?
cookingmyserver 5y ago
Hit the nail on the head. There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. When does a bug or bad design choice impacting screen readers constitute discrimination or failure of reasonable accommodation? The answer is nuanced and will depend on the history of the website and not just the current state. Is the site always buggy for everyone? Is the site confusing for everyone? How do the developers respond to bugs/feedback for general bugs vs bugs impacting accessibility. Of course if you completely ignore accessibility that is much more straight forward.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. I wonder if any ADA defense attorneys have tried this angle. “We aren’t discriminatory, your honor, our website is a terrible experience for all of our users.”
- filoleg 5y ago
  > There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. Your comment made me wonder if this will lead to the situation where some businesses will just opt to have 2 different versions of their website, one designed primarily to hit the accessibility requirements, and the other one made for users who do not require accessibility accommodations. Kinda similar to certain businesses which, in the past, used to have separate mobile versions of their websites (before reactive website layouts became easier to implement and more commonplace). As long as those accessible versions of websites comply with legal accessibility requirements and provide the exact same services as the non accessibility-targeted website versions (i.e., features and functions are not exclusively present in one version but not another, so you can perform the exact same functions in both), that shouldn't cause any legal issues, right? Note: I am not trying to come up with some "workaround" to "beat" the requirement. I think that, overall, accessibility is a great cause, and I am not taking a stance on this issued guidance from the Justice Department. I am just trying to see where this could lead us, based on my current understanding of this guidance.
thorum 5y ago
The standard typically referenced in legal cases is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA. WCAG guidelines are generally clear and straightforward. Showing a good faith effort to comply with those requirements, is the bar for reasonable accommodations. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/ The few areas where subjective judgment applies and two experts might reasonably disagree are unlikely to get you sued. > If a small business can't make an accessible order form for some reason, There’s no reason for any web developer to make an inaccessible order form in 2022. It’s a form. Put labels on your inputs. Use semantically appropriate HTML tags. Do validation before the user submits.
- akersten 5y ago
  > There’s no reason for any web developer to make an inaccessible order form in 2022. It’s a form. Well, that's OP's point - that's your opinion that it's easy. Maybe it's someone writing their own small business website for the first time and it's not so easy for them. They'd be more than happy to take the order over the phone for anyone unable to use their website. But it would be real shitty for their first official lesson in web development to be in the form of a court summons.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    But perhaps that's on purpose? Even on HN you will occasionally see people who think software engineering should require a license. Perhaps this is a way to set up barriers to scare people away from making their own websites?
  - TurningCanadian 5y ago
    It's pretty similar to opening a physical store and not making the entrance accessible.
    - akersten 5y ago
      Not really, because we can all agree that the entrance must be at least 36 inches wide and at an angle of no more than 10 degrees (or whatever). Those are physical properties that can be measured. Versus web accessibility guidelines are a collection of opinions and "best practices." Harder to measure and evaluate.
1MachineElf 5y ago
> there's no clear binding standard for what constitutes an accessible website >Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? The DOJ cutes under "How to Make Web Content Accessible to People with Disabilities" the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These recommendations aren't new, but if you find them lacking, then what improvements would you suggest?
bigbillheck 5y ago
> Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? My understanding of webdev is sites are getting continuously re-written anyway to keep up with the latest opinions on what framework is best.
istjohn 5y ago
As a rule, accessibility is an afterthought in our industry. I would be more sympathetic to complaints if companies were making an effort. Even large tech companies fail miserably. This just reads like FUD. The cupcake store can afford to install grab bars in its bathrooms; it can afford to hire a competent web designer. Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. should all be accessible by default. There is plenty of leeway for reasonable accomodations.
mltony 5y ago
Blind developer here. Even though web technology might move fast, things move slowly in the world of accessibility. You're saying it's too hard to catch up with the latest technology - I wouldn't agree with this in the context of accessibility. What happens in practice is that a frontend developer develops for example a fancy combobox that needs to be clicked on with a mouse without thinking twice. And that combo box stays on the website for years. Now suppose that's a website to book flights. I go there and I spend half an hour trying to click that damn combobox with a keyboard and still it wouldn't allow me to select anything. Well too bad, it turns out I cannot fly XXX airlines. Or I'd have to wait for my sighted assistant who comes once a week to deal with these websites. And what if I told you that half of websites on the internet are like this - that is not accessible or extremely ahrd to use? I have to avoid certain online stores, certain airlines, certain hotels because of that. Finally I work in faang company and so many internal web tools here are not accessible. I found my way around, but I have seen blind people being fired for not being able to perform while every other tool that is required for you to use doesn't work with your screenreader and nobody cares to fix that? And what's the price to fix it? Educate developers to use simple combobox instead of fancy one? Try to test it with keyboard? Are blind people really asking for too much? And also regarding getting sued - I have no idea what kind of lawyers can sue for this, I have never heard of actual blind people being able to sue someone because the website was not accessible. If that was the case I would be able to sue half of Internet including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so many more. I suspect certain lawyers are taking advantage of the system - e.g. there was this american life episode years ago about a lawyer who is specializing on suing hotels that claim to provide acomodations for disabled people -wheel chair users - and they don't satisfy ADA requirements or something. I suspect this Domino pizza lawsuit was initiated by similar type of ADA troll lawyer. Don't compare blind people to troll lawyers!
- 542458 5y ago
  I mostly agree… but one thing: > And what's the price to fix it? I’m currently doing accessibility work with an in-house web framework of reasonable complexity. 90% of the accessibility issues are relatively straightforwards. Things like keyboard usability are easy to explain to devs and behave fairly consistently across browsers. But the last 10%… things like “what should happen to focus when you open a modal?” get messier fast (the ARIA docs give several different behaviours for several different scenarios, which means every dev who wants to open a modal needs to understand enough to correctly select the behaviour for their circumstance), especially since different screen readers can behave in different ways when encountering the same content. The cost to investigate and properly solve these can be nontrivial. That’s not to excuse people who don’t even try for that first 80-90% of the low hanging fruit… but please forgive the designers and devs who fall short of the last 10%!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
morpheuskafka 5y ago
There are some things, such as putting text inside a bitmap image with no alt tags, that are fairly objectively going to make any sort of accessibility software much less reliable and more complicated. But what about things like "most screen readers don't support the new WebX API that came out six months ago?" Where's the line between what website developers need to do to be compatible with screen readers, and what screen reader developers need to do to work with the websites their users want to use?
- runarberg 5y ago
  If you are providing a service it should be accessible. If you are using a fancy API that is not accessible (yet) you should provide a fallback, or—better yet—use the fancy API to progressively enhance the service. If, however, you are making a fun little game which relies on Web Audio API, and there is no point in playing the game without headphones, then your good. The line is pretty obvious in most cases. Or at least you—as a web developer—should know it when you see it.
noobermin 5y ago
You make it sound like it's completely arbitrary whereas it isn't. I feel like the only conflict might be what helps neuroatypical people might be different than what helps deaf people or what helps blind people, etc. Unfortunately, "disability" is a very broad term an encompasses hosts of people. That said, the "churn" of "opinions" on what helps disabled folks is nowhere near as arbitrary as whatever new hot stuff js framework is out there and yet you people keep up with all that somehow.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
> Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? I mean let’s be honest we’re constantly doing that anyways

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.

Aerroon 5y ago
Ah, so that is why small businesses so commonly do not have a website and use Facebook instead.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Most small businesses want some solution that Just Works^TM. The less time and money spent, the better. Most small businesses will also not jerry-rig their own payment processors.
logicalmonster 5y ago
Can we acknowledge that there’s more than 1 important competing “socially good” value that’s in conflict with your prescription? Your prescription is a large step towards the death of what portion of the free and open web still exists. Just saying “build your business website on some default storefront or walled-garden by Facebook, Amazon, Shopify, or some other mega corporation’s platform and don’t change 1 line of code or risk legal obliteration” is close to a death sentence for an independent web. Is it not valid to point out that doing our best to maintain an independent web is also an important value as well for the world, for disabled people, and future generations?
- etchalon 5y ago
  It is not valid to say that the value of an open web trumps the value of people being able to use the open web.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Inaccessibility can prevent a person from getting a job, or cause a person to lose their job if the requirements for that job change (I've seen it happen). What is the equivalent personal cost of further centralizing the web?

cookingmyserver 5y ago

Hit the nail on the head. There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. When does a bug or bad design choice impacting screen readers constitute discrimination or failure of reasonable accommodation? The answer is nuanced and will depend on the history of the website and not just the current state. Is the site always buggy for everyone? Is the site confusing for everyone? How do the developers respond to bugs/feedback for general bugs vs bugs impacting accessibility. Of course if you completely ignore accessibility that is much more straight forward.

elliekelly 5y ago
> There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. I wonder if any ADA defense attorneys have tried this angle. “We aren’t discriminatory, your honor, our website is a terrible experience for all of our users.”
filoleg 5y ago
> There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. Your comment made me wonder if this will lead to the situation where some businesses will just opt to have 2 different versions of their website, one designed primarily to hit the accessibility requirements, and the other one made for users who do not require accessibility accommodations. Kinda similar to certain businesses which, in the past, used to have separate mobile versions of their websites (before reactive website layouts became easier to implement and more commonplace). As long as those accessible versions of websites comply with legal accessibility requirements and provide the exact same services as the non accessibility-targeted website versions (i.e., features and functions are not exclusively present in one version but not another, so you can perform the exact same functions in both), that shouldn't cause any legal issues, right? Note: I am not trying to come up with some "workaround" to "beat" the requirement. I think that, overall, accessibility is a great cause, and I am not taking a stance on this issued guidance from the Justice Department. I am just trying to see where this could lead us, based on my current understanding of this guidance.

thorum 5y ago

The standard typically referenced in legal cases is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA. WCAG guidelines are generally clear and straightforward. Showing a good faith effort to comply with those requirements, is the bar for reasonable accommodations. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/ The few areas where subjective judgment applies and two experts might reasonably disagree are unlikely to get you sued. > If a small business can't make an accessible order form for some reason, There’s no reason for any web developer to make an inaccessible order form in 2022. It’s a form. Put labels on your inputs. Use semantically appropriate HTML tags. Do validation before the user submits.

akersten 5y ago
> There’s no reason for any web developer to make an inaccessible order form in 2022. It’s a form. Well, that's OP's point - that's your opinion that it's easy. Maybe it's someone writing their own small business website for the first time and it's not so easy for them. They'd be more than happy to take the order over the phone for anyone unable to use their website. But it would be real shitty for their first official lesson in web development to be in the form of a court summons.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  But perhaps that's on purpose? Even on HN you will occasionally see people who think software engineering should require a license. Perhaps this is a way to set up barriers to scare people away from making their own websites?
- TurningCanadian 5y ago
  It's pretty similar to opening a physical store and not making the entrance accessible.
  - akersten 5y ago
    Not really, because we can all agree that the entrance must be at least 36 inches wide and at an angle of no more than 10 degrees (or whatever). Those are physical properties that can be measured. Versus web accessibility guidelines are a collection of opinions and "best practices." Harder to measure and evaluate.

1MachineElf 5y ago

> there's no clear binding standard for what constitutes an accessible website >Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? The DOJ cutes under "How to Make Web Content Accessible to People with Disabilities" the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These recommendations aren't new, but if you find them lacking, then what improvements would you suggest?

bigbillheck 5y ago

> Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? My understanding of webdev is sites are getting continuously re-written anyway to keep up with the latest opinions on what framework is best.

istjohn 5y ago

As a rule, accessibility is an afterthought in our industry. I would be more sympathetic to complaints if companies were making an effort. Even large tech companies fail miserably. This just reads like FUD. The cupcake store can afford to install grab bars in its bathrooms; it can afford to hire a competent web designer. Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. should all be accessible by default. There is plenty of leeway for reasonable accomodations.

mltony 5y ago

Blind developer here. Even though web technology might move fast, things move slowly in the world of accessibility. You're saying it's too hard to catch up with the latest technology - I wouldn't agree with this in the context of accessibility. What happens in practice is that a frontend developer develops for example a fancy combobox that needs to be clicked on with a mouse without thinking twice. And that combo box stays on the website for years. Now suppose that's a website to book flights. I go there and I spend half an hour trying to click that damn combobox with a keyboard and still it wouldn't allow me to select anything. Well too bad, it turns out I cannot fly XXX airlines. Or I'd have to wait for my sighted assistant who comes once a week to deal with these websites. And what if I told you that half of websites on the internet are like this - that is not accessible or extremely ahrd to use? I have to avoid certain online stores, certain airlines, certain hotels because of that. Finally I work in faang company and so many internal web tools here are not accessible. I found my way around, but I have seen blind people being fired for not being able to perform while every other tool that is required for you to use doesn't work with your screenreader and nobody cares to fix that? And what's the price to fix it? Educate developers to use simple combobox instead of fancy one? Try to test it with keyboard? Are blind people really asking for too much? And also regarding getting sued - I have no idea what kind of lawyers can sue for this, I have never heard of actual blind people being able to sue someone because the website was not accessible. If that was the case I would be able to sue half of Internet including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so many more. I suspect certain lawyers are taking advantage of the system - e.g. there was this american life episode years ago about a lawyer who is specializing on suing hotels that claim to provide acomodations for disabled people -wheel chair users - and they don't satisfy ADA requirements or something. I suspect this Domino pizza lawsuit was initiated by similar type of ADA troll lawyer. Don't compare blind people to troll lawyers!

542458 5y ago
I mostly agree… but one thing: > And what's the price to fix it? I’m currently doing accessibility work with an in-house web framework of reasonable complexity. 90% of the accessibility issues are relatively straightforwards. Things like keyboard usability are easy to explain to devs and behave fairly consistently across browsers. But the last 10%… things like “what should happen to focus when you open a modal?” get messier fast (the ARIA docs give several different behaviours for several different scenarios, which means every dev who wants to open a modal needs to understand enough to correctly select the behaviour for their circumstance), especially since different screen readers can behave in different ways when encountering the same content. The cost to investigate and properly solve these can be nontrivial. That’s not to excuse people who don’t even try for that first 80-90% of the low hanging fruit… but please forgive the designers and devs who fall short of the last 10%!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

morpheuskafka 5y ago

There are some things, such as putting text inside a bitmap image with no alt tags, that are fairly objectively going to make any sort of accessibility software much less reliable and more complicated. But what about things like "most screen readers don't support the new WebX API that came out six months ago?" Where's the line between what website developers need to do to be compatible with screen readers, and what screen reader developers need to do to work with the websites their users want to use?

runarberg 5y ago
If you are providing a service it should be accessible. If you are using a fancy API that is not accessible (yet) you should provide a fallback, or—better yet—use the fancy API to progressively enhance the service. If, however, you are making a fun little game which relies on Web Audio API, and there is no point in playing the game without headphones, then your good. The line is pretty obvious in most cases. Or at least you—as a web developer—should know it when you see it.

noobermin 5y ago

You make it sound like it's completely arbitrary whereas it isn't. I feel like the only conflict might be what helps neuroatypical people might be different than what helps deaf people or what helps blind people, etc. Unfortunately, "disability" is a very broad term an encompasses hosts of people. That said, the "churn" of "opinions" on what helps disabled folks is nowhere near as arbitrary as whatever new hot stuff js framework is out there and yet you people keep up with all that somehow.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago

> Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? I mean let’s be honest we’re constantly doing that anyways