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The standard typically referenced in legal cases is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA. WCAG guidelines are generally clear and straightforward.

• 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.
      • ezfe 5y ago
        Not really - it's painfully obvious when a web developer takes no regard for accessibility or usability and instead wanted to create something that looked fancy. Look no further than people who replace `alert()` with a half-assed replacement that accomplishes 10% of what `alert()` does in 7 characters.
        • akersten 5y ago
          All I can say is that I'm glad physical accessibility isn't codified by "I'll know it when I see it" standards. You kind of make my point though - sure, it's obvious when it's wrong. But it's not obvious if it's right, which is the actual fear. It's not even clear if it's possible to conclusively determine that it's right.
          • thorum 5y ago
            Can you give an example of what you mean - a scenario where WCAG guidelines are too ambiguous? https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/
            • akersten 5y ago
              Sure, any time: > text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality. What does "without loss of content or functionality" mean? If the resized text flys off the side of the screen (but there's a scrollbar now), is that a loss of functionality? I sure can't read it as quickly anymore, because I have to scroll to it. So that's less functional to me, but that's my opinion. And there isn't a layout solution to that, because by definition making text larger will mean less text on the page, assuming full-page content. Does "without assistive technology" mean my website needs to manually implement a Size Up/Size Down control, or can I assume your browser has it built in? You might consider that pedantic. But I can take almost any of these guidelines and ask the same questions. And the answer is always something like "what a reasonable person would think." But we're developers, and highly disturbed by ambiguity. So saying "the law is to follow these guidelines" doesn't fit right when the guidelines are not empirically defined. > For the visual presentation of blocks of text, a mechanism is available to achieve the following: Foreground and background colors can be selected by the user. Does "use an extension for your user-agent to swap out the CSS" count? I can't think of a single mainstream website that lets me choose the color of my text. > Web pages do not contain anything that flashes more than three times in any one second period. What is a flash? What is an anything? Can I embed a flashing YouTube video in my user-generated content that I post to make your website in violation of the WCAG? Do you have to implement technical countermeasures to prevent me from doing that? Does YouTube have to prevent users from uploading such content? These are the kind of questions that have to be answered before we could seriously consider this as practical law.
  • WesternWind 5y ago
    It's interesting that you are mainly considering the experience of a hypothetical small business owner and what they would be happy to do, and not the experiences of disabled people, and what's easy for them. It's a lot easier to fix the issues the Justice Department mentions, and it's really a pretty short list, than it is to live with a disability. If your business is open to the public then it has certain responsibilities under the law. Anyway phone calls don't necessarily work well for deaf blind folks, people with disorders like ALS (Stephen Hawking etc), and some folks on the autism spectrum.
    • Aerroon 5y ago
      >It's interesting that you are mainly considering the experience of a hypothetical small business owner and what they would be happy to do, and not the experiences of disabled people, and what's easy for them. The reason you think about this from the perspective of the small business owner is because if it's too overwhelming/difficult for the business then they just won't have a website at all. Then accessibility of the website doesn't matter, but everyone is worse off in this outcome. They might put up a page for the business on Facebook, but if you're not on Facebook then tough luck. Or maybe there's no page at all and you have to go there in person to find out basic information like when the business is actually open. In these cases nobody wins. Even a broken website that's only partly usable would've been better, but that would be a liability for the business.
      • WesternWind 5y ago
        I mean those are possible outcomes. It's also possible they may make simple changes and have a more accessible webpage. Given they already have a site and pay for hosting and a domain name, that seems like they might see having the site might be seen as a sunk cost.
  • thorum 5y ago
    Agreed, but keep in mind that person is already technically required to follow standards for things like PII, sales tax, security etc. in addition to accessibility. Small businesses can outsource these requirements to a service like Shopify that knows how to handle them. If you build your own site, then not taking the time to learn and address these issues will always expose you to some legal risk.
    • Aerroon 5y ago
      This just means that you're asking for all businesses to end up using <the service> that will inevitably turn into a Facebook level service. But everyone will be forced to use it, so there's no choice. Every business should have a website. But with the ever-mounting requirements it's probably safer for them not to have a website at all. There's no guarantee Shopify will fulfill all the obligations after all. You're also right about having to comply with taxes. Those are already burdens that will stop some people in their tracks regardless whether their business idea is viable or not.
  • glitcher 5y ago
    I just skimmed over the WCAG quick reference with a focus on just the level A and level AA items. I have to agree with thorum on this one - the guidelines are specific and straightforward. For a basic order form with no audio or video on the screen, seems pretty easy to me. Yes that is an opinion, but an opinion based upon this very specific set of testable guidelines. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/
  • lhorie 5y ago
    "It's hard" doesn't generally fly as an excuse; it certainly won't in court. If you're a web developer, accessibility is part of the job. If you're not, you can buy that expertise either by using a SaaS or hiring a professional. And if you bother to read the guidelines, they are relatively simple. There are regulatory bodies that are legal minefields and whose certification process depends partially on the whims of individual auditors (e.g. HIPAA), but WCAG is not one of those.
    • toast0 5y ago
      > "It's hard" doesn't generally fly as an excuse; it certainly won't in court. ADA requires reasonable accomidations, so it's hard is a reasonable excuse. If the accomidation is too expensive or too time consuming, it might not be reasonable.
      • lhorie 5y ago
        Sure, but what you're saying can be be interpreted both charitably and not. The charitable interpretation is for scenarios like focus wrap-around in modals. It's possible to navigate by tabbing over focusable elements hidden behind the modal until you're in the modal again and it's sufficiently difficult to make focus work 100% correctly without extensive testing. But if you're trying to argue in court that your submit button can't be activated without a mouse because doing so is too hard, that's likely not going to pass muster, since virtually every other website on earth can easily figure out how to do it.
  • noobermin 5y ago
    Is it easy for someone running their own small business website to have a working feedback/contact page? Working encryption? Freaking readable type for seeing people? And yet if a business website didn't have these and they lost sales over it, would people blame users or say that the owner should find fixing certain things about their website as being their responsibility?
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      A lot of people would conclude that the owner should be able to decide whether to do anything about it.
  • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >Maybe it's someone writing their own small business website for the first time and it's not so easy for them. Ok, well some points though: 1. maybe someone shouldn't write their own small business website in the same way they shouldn't build their own entrance to the store. 2. someone first starting out should probably just make a simple html form. If so they are probably more likely to be accessible than many solutions made by big companies. 3. someone first starting out will even more probably choose some WordPress solution and that will probably be accessible enough to also meet the needs of their small site. 4. It is unlikely anyone is getting sued if they have made an effort to make things accessible, in your imagined scenario the novice making their own website for their cupcake business or whatever (and who does this, it's not 2002 anymore, it's 2022) don't know enough to think hmm, I better run this bit here through a screen reader just to see it works as i think, which is why my point 1 stands, the internet is now such a busy place that they should no longer build the entrance to their store wild west style even if they have the ability, but at least hire someone to do it who should be able to think of I better run this bit through a screen reader for them.
    • mwint 5y ago
      > maybe someone shouldn't write their own small business website Youch, there goes a lot of literally world-changing startups, had this rule been in place in the past.
      • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        well in the context of the discussion it sounds like the idea is that the mom and pop cupcake store owner decides she needs a website and does it by getting out a your first website for dummies from the library written some years ago. I mean in the case of Zuckerberg I guess he should have written his first website, although I don't think he considered accessibility at the time. In the case of me and a lot of other people on HN, yes we should probably just write our own website, and I know in my case I will run it through Voiceover and make things work well enough that I doubt I would be sued under any EU or US legislation. finally though my example of the wild west and the modern day, at some point things become so settled that it no longer makes sense for people to build their own thing unless that is what they do professionally, the analogy does not hold perfectly of course because websites are not physical buildings and someone can make a perfectly good and serviceable website for people if they use no JS, and no CSS that moves things into the order they should be in naturally or that makes elements of one sort resemble elements of another - for example no CSS that makes divs work as headings. But in a lot of cases nowadays things need to be done by a professional, the adoption of accessibility codes just increases the requirement for professionalism slightly more.