I own a website development company with 180 employees and sadly the ADA has been very abused by ambulance chasing attorneys. I have had several of my customers receive scammy demand letters for missing minor alt tags and things like that.
It should not be enforced through the civil court, or at least not at first. This is actually a case where a new bureaucracy may be needed to handle reports of non compliance in a standardized way.
The civil courts should pretty much never be society's "first line tech support" for the reason you cite as well as high cost and lack of consistency.
Of course this would never happen because of regulatory capture in the US by lawyers in this case. The US is far more corrupt than most people think.
It's corrupt in ways that are different than most people think when they hear "corrupt". The us largely isn't a place where people in power (e g. Police) extort people to do their job nor does paying the right (low level) people (directly) get you something that would otherwise be held up.
The US is corrupt in its complacency. Most people are fine with most things and largely don't have the time or ability to care about the rest. It's easy for regulatory bodies to turn to the industries they regulate for expertise, and it's easy for that to turn into the turnstile we have today. It's also easy for this not to matter to most people until it becomes a problem, and at that point it's hard to fix without political will.
I agree that it would be less-ambulance-chase-y if there was a compliance agency (such as the FTC or some other bureau) where websites could be "neutrally audited" for ADA compliance and then presented with a list of priority action items to fix. I believe it would be possible to mostly automate audit-report generation as well, since there are already ADA-checker browser extensions and tools.
A "one-strike, warning-first" system is less punitive-focused than the current system, and less likely to be abused by law firms for the goal of a quick cash grab. Personally, I would prefer to be informed and given a chance to fix something before being punished and branded as someone who hates the disabled by a law firm. How many of their websites are 100% ADA-compliant?
Obviously, it's important to be considerate about providing usable online experiences for the disabled. That should be a common goal. However, I've seen ADA lawsuit letters as ridiculous as the DCMA Youtube ones. There's an entire shitty industry centered around mailing out thousands of these letters per week hoping to collect back enough bribes to not go to court. These law firms are just like other corporations looking for a revenue stream to pad their bottomline. Contrary to their ads, they are not fighting for others or pursuing justice for society, they are trying to get rich.
We tried self regulation. We saw it being ignored widely.
See for example universities not making their material accessible.
People on HN lost their minds when video material was taken down for violating accessibility standards. What people failed to realise was that the universities imposed a condition (that the videos had to be accessible); they provided advice and help to make the video accessible; they asked professors to sign off that the videos were accessible; and those professors lied and said "yep no problems" even when no work had been done on accessibility.
A bunch of people in this thread are suggesting that courts are being used as the first method of requesting accessibility, but this is untrue.
Accessibility is a basic human right, recognised by the UN. It's somewhat unfortunate that Americans don't bother to learn about these rights, but they exist and have done for some time. CRPD was adopted in 2006. https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
Disabled people have been asking web-designers to fix their websites for longer than many HN readers have been alive. The ADA law was introduced in 1990.
W3C have been banging on about accessibility for many years. They formally took on accessibility in 1996. https://www.w3.org/WAI/history
It's frustrating that web designers chose to blame people with disabilities for not being able to access web sites, rather than accepting that the blame lies with their both their low level of skill in creating accessible site and also their total indifference to disabled people.
Why don't we have government relay services for websites?
What is the functional equivalent to a picture of food?
If this opportunistic enforcement-for-profit goes unchecked, and business and the public discover that the ADA bans providing any services that rely on vision, hearing, or limbs, the ADA won't last long.
Having a disability sucks. Not all disabilities are curable. Banning the use of abilities is not a solution that will be tolerated.
> Banning the use of abilities is not a solution that will be tolerated.
I can’t think of any serious proposal ever during the fight for accessibility where this was proposed or seriously considered as an option.
Wheelchair cuts in sidewalks don’t prevent you from stepping on the curb. Elevators to spaces that are otherwise only accessible via stairs don’t remove the stairs.
Ensuring a website works well with assistive software doesn’t mean the website can’t work for users that don’t need assistive software.
Where does this concern come from? What proposal are you worried about where we would ban the use of abilities, or what percent in the application of the ADA do you think warrants this concern?
>Why don't we have government relay services for websites?
This is like doing away with wheelchair ramps and replacing it with government employees who will show up and carry the wheelchair up stairs.
Firstly it shifts the burden from the business to providing websites the impaired can use to all of us and it does so in a way that multiplies the costs in a virtually unbounded fashion.
Instead of a business doing the work once we will be expected to open our wallets every time and forever when someone wants to do something on the web where a rapidly increasing share of all business is done.
>What is the functional equivalent to a picture of food?
A well crafted textual description of said food which many times is already somewhere below said food anyway?
There should be some balance for practicality. If you sell cars, you shouldn’t have to be accessible to blind people who can’t even drive them. The only thing Dominos did wrong in my opinion is not provide the same discounts to everyone.
I agree with you in theory, but I think this gets hairy pretty quick.
Should the requirement apply to a personal blog? What if that person is associated with something important and publishes interesting/useful information on their blog? What if they sell things? What if they only sell things by mail order and the site is just an ad? What if they have ads?
Level headed enforcement is one important aspect, but I feel like good legislation is really hard here.
What if I decide to put ads on my personal blog because I've noticed that I have enough readers to make that make sense? Am I now a business? What if I decide to sell a plush design I made because people kept asking about it? Let's say that it becomes so popular that I choose to make a business out of it, at which point do I need to start making my website "accessible"? Is it when I file for a business license, or when I reach some amount in sales?
Personally, I don't understand the "accessibility as a right" crowd. Yes I want the web to be accessible to people with disabilities, but I don't think it makes sense to force people to cater to any particular group. Perhaps it makes sense as a requirement for publicly listed companies, and absolutely for any government entity or entities that receive government funding, but not for the average person or small business owner, and the internet blurs the line between individual and company.
US airline websites have had to be accessible for quite a while now via a DOT directive. I agree some thought needs to be put into a rollout, but we do have some precedent.
Nobody has made me install a ramp to my front door, because I don't operate a business open to the public out of my home. So I'm not too concerned.
(That said, I would sooner make my blog accessible to the vision impaired than make my home wheelchair friendly. Web accessibility is trivial unless you go out of your way to do fancy shit with style sheets and JavaScript, or unless you do dumb shit like put important text in images with no alt-text (just... why??))
I don't know that the problem lies with modern web standards so much as modern web practices. I don't think there's anything in the HTML5 standard that makes screen readers shit the bed, but pervasive Javascript certainly can.
But the line between 'the business' and personal is often blurry. Must Elon Musk's tweets satisfy these requirements? What about a senior software engineer's blog which goes into some detail on a Google cloud outage?
But... What if they are 95% headcount and want to do 80% compliance? It just gets fuzzy fast.
And think of Amazon Prime... I love that I can order something and it comes the same day, or next day. That same level of service isn't offered in Sydney, or Rural North Dakota... would we require that of Amazon? Seems crazy.
So the extrapolated argument there is, "You can order a pizza on the phone, why do you need the app?" Likely some app-focused discount code the potential customer is trying to invoke. Seems like a lot of hassle for $2 off the pizza.
Or, again, Rural North Dakota, where you can't get a fast internet connection... is Netflix required to serve that area? I mean... can't we say, "We're only going to service people with a fast connection, modern OS, and who are willing to install our DRM plugins?"
I think it's OK for businesses not to treat everyone exactly the same is all I'm getting at. And, as a small business owner, I want to be able to deny my services to people who I don't want to be associated with -- and I'm OK with them telling their friends I wouldn't serve them. Just because I run a business shouldn't mean I have to be a slave to anyone with a dollar.
Should Ford have to make a car for people who are blind? Should NASA have to retrofit the ISS with wheelchair ramps? I mean... there is a line somewhere, and I think it's fine to leave it with the business owner -- they generally aren't going to do anything that hurts their business.
I agree as long as it can be done without degrading the experience for everyone. Most importantly, it needs to be implemented by people with the knowledge of what is possible instead of a being designed by the bureau of wishful thinking.
I'd argue that ada compliance in the real world is a boon for everyone. Especially for people with temporary disabilities, chronic pain, joint or muscle issues, the elderly, people with children, people will strollers, people with luggage, &c. Accessibility, in my experiences, is rarely at odds with aesthetics or degrades a person without disabilities experience. I cannot think of an example of the later, but I won't go as far as saying it never happens.
Accessibility is great! As long as it doesn't end up with situations like MIT taking down a ton of old lecture videos because they didn't have the funds to add captions.
There's a lot of real-world situations where mandating accessibility would result in closure. There's no way to make Angel's Landing [0] wheelchair accessible, for instance. (this is very common in the US's national parks, to the point that I'd bet that 3/4ths of them have at least one such trail/location) With situations like that, your choices are to keep it open for some people, or for no people.
"So, like, if someone is brain dead, the website needs to pay for a new brain for them? What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense, online or offline."
Genuine question- we have a well established disability law field with decades of law and examples of the limitations and coverage of ADA. Why are you coming up with a random example?
How the fuck am I supposed to provide an equivalent experience for someone with a severe mental disability? Or for someone with Completely Locked In Syndrome? [0] Some accommodations just aren't possible.
That's not to say that efforts shouldn't be made. Just that requiring perfection will eliminate everything if perfection is impossible.
If the “award” went to charity instead of lawyers and “victims” it would eliminate a lot of the lawsuits. The incentives are entirely wrong in these lawsuits.
People who aren't rich care about things but can't afford to litigate them in real actual courts which have the power to effect meaningful change without access to an expensive legal system.
This means that there has to be a relatively large sum of money available to inspire a lawyer to work without being paid up front on the expectation of future reward or the case wont happen no matter how warranted.
Expecting society to thrive on the largess of the rich is a recipe for disaster.
Yes, making it so only the rich could hope to afford winning a court case (let alone losing one) is a great way to reduce the number of people using the legal system; excellent insight...
This is literally about a case before (OK, strictly a request to) the supreme court of the united states, having been through multiple previous courts already. How do you propose elevating such a case from... a small claims court?
Blind people who can’t access a web site don’t suffer from a large damage that deserves a large payout. Period. End of story.
Yes web sites should be accessible. But there should be a better way to incentivize this than civil lawsuits. This has been going on for decades and needs to be stopped. Even Clint Eastwood was sued in Carmel.
What a fucked up train of thought. It's like saying "this person can't sit in the front of the bus- it's not a large damage. We shouldn't worry about it."
Fuck you.
It's that kind of thought that makes people think cashless stores are a good idea. It's exclusionary and normalizes us forgetting about the outliers of society.
There is a better way to do it. It's called a law. People are required to follow it, and if they don't there are two ways we solve it. Criminal or Civil Law Suits.
That would incentive charities and their supporters to push for these lawsuits. If we really want to remove the economic incentives, the punitive fines collected should be destroyed. This would contract to overall money supply by that amount, giving everyone a trivially small increase in the value of their money. Even for the largest punitive awards it would be too small for anyone benefiting from it to measure.
Although I sympathize with the blind person, going as far as suing the company is, to me, an asshole move.
To be fair, no one has stopped the man from ordering from a store. This is akin to a person with no smartphone suing a company for not making an app for his "dumb" phone.
The settlement will likely be a rounding error on profit and is absolutely the only way to establish precedent that this is required for companies that do business here.
Lawsuits or lost profits due to bad PR are the only way corporate America changes policies. It's not an asshole move its just the way business is done. Those who don't understand how business is done are simply trampled.
It'd be smart for Dominoes, or anyone, to just use Lighthouse as part of the build process. Any new code that's written, or old code that's modified, has to score an 80 or better on Lighthouse's accessibility audit in order to pass code review.
Often if comes down to just building with the right front-end framework, and doing minuscule things that lead to a better end product... but those things have to be done from the start. Retrofitting a site after it has been built (poorly) is crazy expensive.
Once you add Lighthouse, increase the target score every 6 months, until you're at 95s across the board. And build in WCAG audits as well. Accessibility tends to help with cross-browser / cross-screen issues, helps with SEO, and gets people out of the dated mindset that designs have to be pixel-perfect.
Don't expect an agency vendor to come in and win the work at the lowest bid and actually care about doing it right. The number of clients who have any idea about accessibility is painfully low. That's what's so nice about Lighthouse; it gives non-technical staff a way to verify the work is done right.
Edit: op edited their post to remove these sections.
> Private businesses... let the business decide if it wants to support those customers.
Should businesses also decide if they want to serve black, Latino, Asian, or mixed race folk? These arguments have been had and settled: it's no ok to have a business that is open to the public and to also discriminate against anyone.
> Also... and let me just harp a bit here. ADA standards went a bit overboard. I think they should apply to government, and likely businesses, but not my own house. Building code that says all the thermostats have to be waist-high... ugh, come on. I don't want to have to stoop over to reach the damn things. (= But that's our building code now. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Can't we have them taller and just mandate that they all have to connect to a smart phone?
I'm very confused as to what you're saying. The ada doesn't apply to residential buildings, even new construction. I'm not very familiar with residential building codes, but I've been in a lot of new construction since the passing of the ada and have never encountered what you're describing.
While I do believe that access should be granted when possible, to demonstrate that this is not as simple a question as it appears on the the surface, we can ask a couple related questions.
Are there online activities that an able body can do that should be prohibited because it is difficult or impossible to implement an equivalent functionality or experience for a disabled person ?
If there are activities that exist, where is the line drawn?
This would be an excellent project for the United States Digital Service. Define what accessible means, in reasonably achievable terms, then provide code and specs for government agencies that can also be used, freely, by businesses.
Oh, wait: https://www.section508.gov/create/web-content
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadThe civil courts should pretty much never be society's "first line tech support" for the reason you cite as well as high cost and lack of consistency.
Of course this would never happen because of regulatory capture in the US by lawyers in this case. The US is far more corrupt than most people think.
The US is corrupt in its complacency. Most people are fine with most things and largely don't have the time or ability to care about the rest. It's easy for regulatory bodies to turn to the industries they regulate for expertise, and it's easy for that to turn into the turnstile we have today. It's also easy for this not to matter to most people until it becomes a problem, and at that point it's hard to fix without political will.
A "one-strike, warning-first" system is less punitive-focused than the current system, and less likely to be abused by law firms for the goal of a quick cash grab. Personally, I would prefer to be informed and given a chance to fix something before being punished and branded as someone who hates the disabled by a law firm. How many of their websites are 100% ADA-compliant?
Obviously, it's important to be considerate about providing usable online experiences for the disabled. That should be a common goal. However, I've seen ADA lawsuit letters as ridiculous as the DCMA Youtube ones. There's an entire shitty industry centered around mailing out thousands of these letters per week hoping to collect back enough bribes to not go to court. These law firms are just like other corporations looking for a revenue stream to pad their bottomline. Contrary to their ads, they are not fighting for others or pursuing justice for society, they are trying to get rich.
See for example universities not making their material accessible.
People on HN lost their minds when video material was taken down for violating accessibility standards. What people failed to realise was that the universities imposed a condition (that the videos had to be accessible); they provided advice and help to make the video accessible; they asked professors to sign off that the videos were accessible; and those professors lied and said "yep no problems" even when no work had been done on accessibility.
The courts are the only way to drive change.
Accessibility is a basic human right, recognised by the UN. It's somewhat unfortunate that Americans don't bother to learn about these rights, but they exist and have done for some time. CRPD was adopted in 2006. https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
Disabled people have been asking web-designers to fix their websites for longer than many HN readers have been alive. The ADA law was introduced in 1990.
W3C have been banging on about accessibility for many years. They formally took on accessibility in 1996. https://www.w3.org/WAI/history
It's frustrating that web designers chose to blame people with disabilities for not being able to access web sites, rather than accepting that the blame lies with their both their low level of skill in creating accessible site and also their total indifference to disabled people.
The disabled should be able to access online resources in a way that is functionally equivalent to an able-bodied person’s experience.
And yes, such accessibility should be protected by law.
What is the functional equivalent to a picture of food?
If this opportunistic enforcement-for-profit goes unchecked, and business and the public discover that the ADA bans providing any services that rely on vision, hearing, or limbs, the ADA won't last long.
Having a disability sucks. Not all disabilities are curable. Banning the use of abilities is not a solution that will be tolerated.
I can’t think of any serious proposal ever during the fight for accessibility where this was proposed or seriously considered as an option.
Wheelchair cuts in sidewalks don’t prevent you from stepping on the curb. Elevators to spaces that are otherwise only accessible via stairs don’t remove the stairs.
Ensuring a website works well with assistive software doesn’t mean the website can’t work for users that don’t need assistive software.
Where does this concern come from? What proposal are you worried about where we would ban the use of abilities, or what percent in the application of the ADA do you think warrants this concern?
This is like doing away with wheelchair ramps and replacing it with government employees who will show up and carry the wheelchair up stairs.
Firstly it shifts the burden from the business to providing websites the impaired can use to all of us and it does so in a way that multiplies the costs in a virtually unbounded fashion.
Instead of a business doing the work once we will be expected to open our wallets every time and forever when someone wants to do something on the web where a rapidly increasing share of all business is done.
>What is the functional equivalent to a picture of food?
A well crafted textual description of said food which many times is already somewhere below said food anyway?
Should the requirement apply to a personal blog? What if that person is associated with something important and publishes interesting/useful information on their blog? What if they sell things? What if they only sell things by mail order and the site is just an ad? What if they have ads?
Level headed enforcement is one important aspect, but I feel like good legislation is really hard here.
What if I decide to put ads on my personal blog because I've noticed that I have enough readers to make that make sense? Am I now a business? What if I decide to sell a plush design I made because people kept asking about it? Let's say that it becomes so popular that I choose to make a business out of it, at which point do I need to start making my website "accessible"? Is it when I file for a business license, or when I reach some amount in sales?
Personally, I don't understand the "accessibility as a right" crowd. Yes I want the web to be accessible to people with disabilities, but I don't think it makes sense to force people to cater to any particular group. Perhaps it makes sense as a requirement for publicly listed companies, and absolutely for any government entity or entities that receive government funding, but not for the average person or small business owner, and the internet blurs the line between individual and company.
(That said, I would sooner make my blog accessible to the vision impaired than make my home wheelchair friendly. Web accessibility is trivial unless you go out of your way to do fancy shit with style sheets and JavaScript, or unless you do dumb shit like put important text in images with no alt-text (just... why??))
On top of most web designers being unable to test with them just to high cost.
But... What if they are 95% headcount and want to do 80% compliance? It just gets fuzzy fast.
And think of Amazon Prime... I love that I can order something and it comes the same day, or next day. That same level of service isn't offered in Sydney, or Rural North Dakota... would we require that of Amazon? Seems crazy.
So the extrapolated argument there is, "You can order a pizza on the phone, why do you need the app?" Likely some app-focused discount code the potential customer is trying to invoke. Seems like a lot of hassle for $2 off the pizza.
Or, again, Rural North Dakota, where you can't get a fast internet connection... is Netflix required to serve that area? I mean... can't we say, "We're only going to service people with a fast connection, modern OS, and who are willing to install our DRM plugins?"
I think it's OK for businesses not to treat everyone exactly the same is all I'm getting at. And, as a small business owner, I want to be able to deny my services to people who I don't want to be associated with -- and I'm OK with them telling their friends I wouldn't serve them. Just because I run a business shouldn't mean I have to be a slave to anyone with a dollar.
Should Ford have to make a car for people who are blind? Should NASA have to retrofit the ISS with wheelchair ramps? I mean... there is a line somewhere, and I think it's fine to leave it with the business owner -- they generally aren't going to do anything that hurts their business.
eg It's not just visually impaired people who hate fucking tiny fonts in light grey on a bright white background.
There's a lot of real-world situations where mandating accessibility would result in closure. There's no way to make Angel's Landing [0] wheelchair accessible, for instance. (this is very common in the US's national parks, to the point that I'd bet that 3/4ths of them have at least one such trail/location) With situations like that, your choices are to keep it open for some people, or for no people.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_Landing
So, like, if someone is brain dead, the website needs to pay for a new brain for them? What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense, online or offline.
Genuine question- we have a well established disability law field with decades of law and examples of the limitations and coverage of ADA. Why are you coming up with a random example?
What you mean we, kemosabe?
That's not to say that efforts shouldn't be made. Just that requiring perfection will eliminate everything if perfection is impossible.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome
This means that there has to be a relatively large sum of money available to inspire a lawyer to work without being paid up front on the expectation of future reward or the case wont happen no matter how warranted.
Expecting society to thrive on the largess of the rich is a recipe for disaster.
It is not free in my jurisdiction. I would think it’s not free in most jurisdictions.
Yes web sites should be accessible. But there should be a better way to incentivize this than civil lawsuits. This has been going on for decades and needs to be stopped. Even Clint Eastwood was sued in Carmel.
Fuck you.
It's that kind of thought that makes people think cashless stores are a good idea. It's exclusionary and normalizes us forgetting about the outliers of society.
There is a better way to do it. It's called a law. People are required to follow it, and if they don't there are two ways we solve it. Criminal or Civil Law Suits.
To be fair, no one has stopped the man from ordering from a store. This is akin to a person with no smartphone suing a company for not making an app for his "dumb" phone.
We tried asking nicely. We got told to fuck off.
Now we're using the courts, and we will win, because the law is on our side.
Lawsuits or lost profits due to bad PR are the only way corporate America changes policies. It's not an asshole move its just the way business is done. Those who don't understand how business is done are simply trampled.
Often if comes down to just building with the right front-end framework, and doing minuscule things that lead to a better end product... but those things have to be done from the start. Retrofitting a site after it has been built (poorly) is crazy expensive.
Once you add Lighthouse, increase the target score every 6 months, until you're at 95s across the board. And build in WCAG audits as well. Accessibility tends to help with cross-browser / cross-screen issues, helps with SEO, and gets people out of the dated mindset that designs have to be pixel-perfect.
Don't expect an agency vendor to come in and win the work at the lowest bid and actually care about doing it right. The number of clients who have any idea about accessibility is painfully low. That's what's so nice about Lighthouse; it gives non-technical staff a way to verify the work is done right.
> Private businesses... let the business decide if it wants to support those customers.
Should businesses also decide if they want to serve black, Latino, Asian, or mixed race folk? These arguments have been had and settled: it's no ok to have a business that is open to the public and to also discriminate against anyone.
> Also... and let me just harp a bit here. ADA standards went a bit overboard. I think they should apply to government, and likely businesses, but not my own house. Building code that says all the thermostats have to be waist-high... ugh, come on. I don't want to have to stoop over to reach the damn things. (= But that's our building code now. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Can't we have them taller and just mandate that they all have to connect to a smart phone?
I'm very confused as to what you're saying. The ada doesn't apply to residential buildings, even new construction. I'm not very familiar with residential building codes, but I've been in a lot of new construction since the passing of the ada and have never encountered what you're describing.
Like, when Netflix got sued for not providing closed-captioning on some of their content?
https://www.3playmedia.com/2015/07/23/nad-v-netflix-ada-laws...
Are there online activities that an able body can do that should be prohibited because it is difficult or impossible to implement an equivalent functionality or experience for a disabled person ?
If there are activities that exist, where is the line drawn?