4 ms·

My impression is that there are (possibly underenforced) US laws that mandate a certain amount of accessibility - the ADA and possibly others. (I'm 100% not a l

by wging 2y ago

My impression is that there are (possibly underenforced) US laws that mandate a certain amount of accessibility - the ADA and possibly others. (I'm 100% not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.) At a previous job, that was the justification for a mandate to make sure our website and mobile app was accessible prior to its general availability. (It's also the right thing, as we knew, but the existence of a legal requirement tends to give doing the right thing a lot more priority in a team's backlog. So there's at least one case of the law working as designed.) See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990#Web_Content_Accessibility_Guidelines,_2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac... -- the experience I'm talking about was prior to the mentioned 9th Circuit ruling or the Supreme Court's 2019 declining of the appeal, but the laws were on the books already. I don't remember exactly whether the Target case is what was mentioned as a motivating factor to us, but it might have been: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Blind_v._Target_Corp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Bli...> (I say 'possibly underenforced' because I don't really know enough about the accessibility landscape, but I somehow doubt that every customer unlawfully prevented from accessing services that the ADA covers actually sues...)

dylan604 2y ago
Part of ADA compliance comes with applying for a Certificate of Occupancy for your space. If things do not meet minimum satisfaction, they will not issue the CO. If your space is part of a larger building, it'll probably be something to work out with the building itself if there are issues. So comparing it to ramps/rails/parking spaces for ADA is harder as most construction has had that built into it for a long time now, and existing spaces have most likely been retrofitted. Websites just don't have that level of red tape to launch. People do not need a government issued certificate of minimum level of compliance to launch. There are way too many sites for pretty much any government to monitor for ADA compliance. There's probably a way to report issues, but who has the time to look up where to do that? Some part of my foggy memory also thinks there's a caveat for the size of the company running a website about how strict compliance needs to be, but that might getting confused with cookie banners???

by wging 2y ago

dylan604 2y ago

Part of ADA compliance comes with applying for a Certificate of Occupancy for your space. If things do not meet minimum satisfaction, they will not issue the CO. If your space is part of a larger building, it'll probably be something to work out with the building itself if there are issues. So comparing it to ramps/rails/parking spaces for ADA is harder as most construction has had that built into it for a long time now, and existing spaces have most likely been retrofitted. Websites just don't have that level of red tape to launch. People do not need a government issued certificate of minimum level of compliance to launch. There are way too many sites for pretty much any government to monitor for ADA compliance. There's probably a way to report issues, but who has the time to look up where to do that? Some part of my foggy memory also thinks there's a caveat for the size of the company running a website about how strict compliance needs to be, but that might getting confused with cookie banners???