Isn't this entirely the point, though?
We can make a reasonable assumption that if it were generally profitable to make services and venues accessible, then it would already be done. It's precisely because it's not cost-efficient that regulation has to exist.
That assumes, of course, that you accept the central conceit that it's a good idea to ensure that people with a variety of disabilities can access services and aren't generally shut out of mainstream society.
Quite aside from anything, WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with.
This is pretty much the argument by which all legislation is passed. It will ultimately be the weight of all legislation in the end that will leave the internet in the hands of only large corporations and leave the people without a free internet.
You will also never get what was originally intended. Laws will be passed for regulation which will be turned over to a regulatory agency which will be lobbied by the most powerful corporation which will in turn implement rules for exclusively their benefit outside of the original intent.
If this sticks, it might be a blessing to more than just disabled users. Everyone who has to suffer through the currently fashionable javascript-needed-to-do-everything web stands to benefit.
The inevitable effect of this kind of legislation is that technology gets worse for everyone, rather than better for a small group.
They're not arbitrary design policies at all. They're standards that exist for a reason. For instance, if you have some text, display it as text, not as an image of text, because a screen reader won't be able to read it.
> The inevitable effect of this kind of legislation is that technology gets worse for everyone, rather than better for a small group.
Actually, complying with accessibility standards makes the web better for everyone. Here's an example. The giant green table on this website used to just be an image[1]. That made the page useless for screen readers, but it also meant that you couldn't copy the data in the table, couldn't resize the text, etc. A common sense change to display this table as text made the page more useful for everyone.
Allowing government to fine or shutdown sites not complying with some set of standards is a very chilling path to go down.
Some standards are enforced by law - fire codes for instance, or food handling standards. Do accessibility standards merit similar treatment? I'd argue that most people now need to use the Internet for basic functions in their lives. For instance, you can't even get a job at a chain grocery store around here without filling out an online application. Given that, there's a strong social interest in making sure that everyone has access. That interest has to be balanced against other interests - costs to businesses for instance. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should treat WCAG the same way we would treat a fire code (which a government agency enforces) or as we treat ADA building compliance (where customers can sue to force compliance), but I do think that a debate on this issue should look at what these standards actually do, and try to balance the interests. I don't think the parent is doing that.
I'm not sure how you can say this when HN is full of articles about regulatory actions on some industry or other, or some bad actor in that industry.
There is not really any specific encoding of technical requirements in accessibility laws – rather more along the lines of 'reasonable effort must be made' etc.
I don't live in the US, but my understanding is that WCAG2.0 compliance is accepted as 'accessible'. WCAG doesn't say "you can't use Javascript" – it says "Here are the standards a site must meet to be accessible, and here are the methods you can use to satisfy them".
Frankly it's a ridiculous objection. The burden of complying with WCAG is basically 'have good contrast and mark your forms and element up correctly'.
The real world, being equipped with a distance metric, has this messy problem where you are sometimes forced to be close to other people. I feel like this gives us (collectively) a bit of license to make demands of how nearby people use their physical property. On the other hand, there's no distance metric on the internet, and I'm not (in any sense) forced to live next to the winn-Dixie website.
http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
If the tactic sounds familiar it’s because the same lawyer, Paul Hansmeier...
I knew this name sounds familiar :)
Would be a shame if it wasn't...
Do you feel the same way about wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking?
I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites. Leaving out the fact that this is almost certainly a bad thing for society (remember how Berkely had to take down their free online classes because some deaf people sued them for not being deaf-friendly enough?), it's also completely indefensible for the government to stick their nose into how people choose to communicate online. "Oh, hey there art website; we're going to have to shut you down because your music and films don't support subtitles and screen readers."
I think we might need more elaboration on why that's the case.
In both situations, you have a company offering services to the public. In one case, legislation says that the services should be accessible to members of the public with certain disabilities. Why should that same legislation not apply because the services are being offered online, rather than in a physical location?
In fact, Winn-Dixie seems particularly incompetent; according to a different article
The software has allowed Gil to use 500 to 600 websites, including Publix,
Walgreens and government sites, but his vocalizing software could not read
information on www.winndixie.com when he tried to order a prescription and
look up store hours. [1]
[1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.ht...
I'm confused; do you not see the very obvious contradiction here? Perhaps my use of the word "people" is confusing. The proprietors of a store or an art gallery or other business would also qualify as "people".
> Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations.
The internet isn't a physical location. There's no good reason we should pretend it is.
Even if you completely buy the idea that physical storefronts should be forced to adopt certain (possibly socially sub-optimal) standards for the sake of some customer base, this reasoning absolutely does not carry over to private digital communication. You can't just say "a website is like a building" and call it a day. That's simply untrue.
That's a much less ridiculous way of framing the argument.
I absolutely think that if you operate a business online there should be some minimum of accessibility you need to achieve, in exactly the same way we force physical locations to install wheelchair ramps.
America has wholesale adopted in law the idea that we require so-called "sub-optimal standards".
If you want to do business in the US, you need to follow certain regulations. This includes accessibility for online stores. A personal blog or forum, for example, wouldn't need this legally.
Clearly? The huge in that sentence is an opinion. Both wheelchair ramps and web site accessibility guidelines add requirements that cost the owner money, but help give the handicapped access.
Adding a wheelchair ramp is a small fraction of the total costs of making a building, just as making a website properly is a small fraction of making a website. So it's somewhat reasonable to require the (relatively small) change to make the thing more accessible.
On the other hand, in the Berkeley online classes situation, making the lectures deaf-friendly (i.e. doing transcripts or subtitles) was much, much more expensive than making the lectures available in the first place, which amounted pretty much to setting up some simple gear to record something that was already happening. In this case, the required costs were totally out of proportion, and meant that the content became less accessible, i.e. was taken down for everyone.
So the regulations must be taken with a grain of salt - it's easy to write (or interpret) a single sentence that makes a requirement totally disproportionate and not comparable to a wheelchair ramp.
I can't see a way to define the limits of such an exemption without getting collateral damage, so maybe, this amount of collateral damage is about the best we can get?
Also, in the Berkeley case, part of the reason Berkeley deemed the costs too high was that Berkeley had a large backlog of such videos. They have been making new content accessible since spring 2015 (that content also is behind their firewall to prevent 'pirating' (http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...: "Pirates is a term used to describe websites that embed YouTube content without the permission of the original copyright holder for profit. UC Berkeley legacy Course Capture content has been discovered on for-profit websites, which use either a subscription fee or on-page advertising"; "UC Berkeley stopped posting course lecture videos publicly through webcast.berkeley.edu in 2015 as a way to reduce costs and increase adoption.")
First of all, Berkeley didn't have to take down their courses. They elected to, then threw a tantrum about it. And yes, they could have spent money making their videos accessible, but let's not forget that they spent money to get those videos made in the first place, and it isn't as if the requirements that this content be accessible are a huge shocker to a public university that should be no stranger to accommodating disabled students. This is why those of us in the accessibility profession tell clients to build in accessibility right from day one, and this continuing trope of "OMG I didn't realize we needed to make our content accessible! Woe, woe are we!" passed through the realm of disingenuous and into that of pure bullshit a long, long time ago.
"There's clearly a huge difference between having a building code and requiring people to design websites in a certain way. It doesn't matter what your opinion of wheelchair ramps is; the two situations aren't comparable." OK, so as a blind person, I'm supposed to do what? Drive my car to the store when a website won't let me access that store's services? Pay more than someone with their own car to take a Lyft or Uber, assuming either exists in my location? Arrive at said store and hope whatever I want is in stock, take extra time to find an employee to help me shop (which isn't always available...) Where is all this time supposed to come from, and who are you to deprioritize it against that of the large corporation building those accommodations? And BTW, my girlfriend is a wheelchair user, and it does feel to me that the situations are often comparable. She routinely takes extra time accessing a building or its facilities, sometimes can't at all, and let's not even discuss inaccessible bathrooms and the literal blood and tears spent trying to use them. So take it from someone who has experienced both, they are very comparable.
And let's not forget the websites that don't have a physical location associated with them. Just last week I saw a few startups advertising their services here, thought I might use them, went to apply/sign up, then found their sites were completely inaccessible. Their huge, obscure crime? Using div elements without ARIA attributes instead of the HTML markup that would have achieved the same thing. So in the past few weeks I've been denied the ability to apply for jobs, purchase products, or even launch interesting side projects that might build my skills or improve my resume, all because web developers can't be bothered, and let's not forget that when I am hired by someone, I either can't use tools like Basecamp and Slack effectively, or they're such pains that it's easier to self-host open source tools llike Rocket.chat and Wekan, both of which I've submitted accessibility patches to. And people wonder why I don't bother looking for work anymore.
"I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites." Then on behalf of disabled folks everywhere, stay the hell away from building websites. I for one am sick and tired of fighting with people like you whose anti-regulation stance happily throws me under the bus, and I haven't even scratched the surface regarding the ways that an inaccessible web has and continues to hinder me.
If I seem furious, well, here's a challenge. Fire up Orca, NVDA or VoiceOver, all free screen readers, and try to use api.ai with your eyes closed. Fail, then imagine you spent the last few hours reading up about how you might build a Google Assistant bot to provide real-time transit information, and that you now need to find an api.ai alternative that is accessible, assuming such a thing exists (wit.ai is also inaccessible, my accessibility issues apparently made the support staff's day to read about, but they're probably not resolved and probably never will be.) Multiply that by, say, 10 for a handful of other projects I named. I could call out more recent startups, but I'd probably start stepping on the toes of some folks reading this, and if you aren't building in accessibility from day one or paying me to advise you on fixing it, then I'd basically be volunteering for a full-time job's worth of work pointing out the ways in which a given complex service isn't accessible.
So you can stop worrying that society will crumble
Captions are for the hearing impaired. There are also requirements for audio description for the vision impaired (additional audio describing important aspects of a video not conveyed through the original audio track). There's very little enforcement of this as it's often challenging to produce and non-synced text is often good enough.
Really? I don't know how big the Winn-Dixe site is, but making your site accessibly friendly isn't really that hard. HTML spec is made for this, so as long as you're not actively fucking things up, you should be fine.
How much does $37k buy you in consultancy days? About 33 days (assuming $1100/day - about how much ThoughtWorks charges in Australia).
I think the people who you perceive as "overestimating/overcomplicating" have first-hand understanding of what it truly takes to execute formal process and verification which unambiguously demonstrates compliance, given:
1.) the courts are now involved...this in itself introduces an unprecedented level of complication;
2.) product and workflow are already established;
3.) legal mandate requires compliance with qualitative guidelines[1], as opposed to hard specification;
4.) scope of applicability and impact to existing product/workflow have yet to be determined...requirements traceability based on interpretted guidelines will almost certainly be a cluster fuck;
5.) a level of uncertainty from guideline disclaimers, e.g., even content that conforms at the highest level (AAA) will not be accessible to individuals with all types, degrees, or combinations of disability.
6.) use of non-standard, 3rd-party tools (e.g. screen readers) clearly had an impact on legal decision, which suggests additional impact to compliance verification;
Keeping your quote in context, where did it come from and when did this become a requirement? As far as I can tell, this only became scope when a legal decision was made that classified Winn-Dixie's website as heavily integrated, rendering ADA compliance applicable.
I think we are, in the context of what I was responding to there. It means changing the workflow of the team, such that accessibility constraints are taken into account. Teams already operate with constraints like that; I don't see it as a remarkable change of workflow.
We're talking about wholesale refactoring of an existing product/workflow, if not a complete redesign depending on scope of impact.
No, you're not. Unless you have produced an already catastrophically ill-designed product, your accessibility adaptations will not involve substantial redesigns.
I respectfully beg to differ. At best, you've made quite gratuitous assumptions on impact to workflow realignment, which assumes requirements traceability and formal verification was even a thing this team was already familiar with. Sure, some teams may already operate with constraints like that, but we're talking about this team, which may or may not conform to your standards definition; all other teams are irrelevant.
> No, you're not. Unless you have produced an already catastrophically ill-designed product...
The phrase ill-designed product is objectively meaningful in the context of hard requirements. Until this legal judgement, ADA compliance simply wasn't a requirement...hindsight is 20/20.
Suffice it to say we know nothing of their team's competency, existing architecture, scale of product, workflow complexity, verification process, level of impact, funding availability, etc. In other words, we know absolutely nothing, so it's unsurprising that you're struggling to see where the cost is. From a risk management perspective, you've taken an optimistic hand-waving stance in the face of so many uncertainties. With the courts involved and legal mandate on the table, do you really think the game being played hasn't changed? For the sake of this web dev team, I hope you're correct.
Getting on the wrong side of simple guidelines like WCAG really does require actively user-hostile processes from the dev team, and if that can be shut down via lawsuit, then hooray.
How you've twisted the facts...judgement was based on the determination that Winn-Dixie’s website is heavily integrated with the company’s physical store locations, making it subject to the ADA...key phrase: heavily integrated...which was the point of contention. Judgement was based on the applicability of ADA to a company's website, not the scope of how badly inaccessible the website was.
> ...requires you to be expending effort and time and money to screw up. It's not something that you just accidentally do out of ignorance.
Because web design is a static practice that never changes, right? With as much dynamic crap associated with the latest UX trend these days, it's surprising that anything modern conforms to a generalized definition of accessible.
And yes, you really do have to go out of your way to build something a modern screen reader can't handle.
Only from this determination does everything else follow.
Citing the list of issues remaining to be determined from opinion, verdict and order[2]: (2) and (3) are contextually relevant questions iff (1) was judged in the affirmative.
> And yes, you really do have to go out of your way to build something a modern screen reader can't handle.
On this note, I suppose we simply agree to disagree.
[1] http://www.adatitleiii.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/121/2016...
[2] https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3067htvmz/florida-southern...
And the only way there's a violation for the court to deal with is if the site is inaccessible.
The same could be (and was) said of mandatory wheelchair ramps.
I've had to half-ass software accessibility requirements before--the company had government contracts, so they did the absolute minimum necessary to avoid violating the letter of the ADA, without any effort to actually make it usable. It made me feel sick. Just like wheelchair ramps, accessible site design is easy if you plan for it from the beginning, like you should. It's only hard if you've been half-assing it for years and then have to go back and fix it, the same as any other technical debt.
Isn't that the point of the ADA?
The people who wrote all those laws know about the Internet, now. Get ready.
Not sure how realistic this estimate is, but I wonder how much Winn-Dixie has spent on their lawyers on this case to AVOID making their site ADA compatible.
In fact, sites that are accessible to people with disabilities tend to be pretty nice for everyone to use because most of accessibility comes from not spewing a bunch of slow, unusable crap into all your pages.
I'm betting they will be able to find violations everywhere.
[Edit] To take another example, 10% of men are colorblind. If you're using color to convey information, you may be making your website very difficult to use for 5% of your customers. If you're operating at any kind of scale, the gains in making your website easier to use for 5% of your customers are going to outweigh the costs of making a change by a wide margin.
Accessible web sites are not difficult. Odds are if you do web stuff, you have accidentally produced WCAG-compliant websites in the past without knowing you were doing it.
So please stop pushing the narrative about how "they" are out to "find something" and sue you and implying that WCAG is too complex to comply with. It's not, and frankly it's offensive -- disabled people have, morally and legally, exactly the same right to be able to use the internet you do, and WCAG is a guide to how you can make that happen.
I have no right to demand people bend the web to my whim, but I have ever right to use software to render it on my own computer just how I want it. It really seems like better screen reader software and removing of this archaic law is a better solution here.
Also the incredibly nitpicky stuff is happening, even in the physical world - http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
The ADA is the law of the land: if you're a business open to the public, you have to be open to all of the public, not just the members of the public who you think are most convenient to serve.
And history has shown that the horrible, terrible, awful no-good frivolous demands of the ADA have positive effects for everybody. Read up on things like how people with children in strollers have a much easier time getting around cities now because street-corner curbs have to have areas accessible to people in wheelchairs.
http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
Also, notice how in the Winn-Dixie website suit the plaintiff didn't ask for damages: he just wanted the site to be accessible. The amount of viciousness being deployed in the thread toward someone whose only goal was for something to work is unbelievable, and I think if you look into it you'll find that on the whole, ADA complaints are someone's last resort after trying to amicably resolve a problem through other channels.
No, its pointing out the law still has problems and has been used as a money making scheme. It, like code, has bugs that need to be remedied. Arguing the code does it job expect for some bad actors is just as problematic when talking about laws. I am also troubled by the picking of something not voted on being given the force of law (WCAG 2.0 Level AA).
I'm actually really sick of people using phrases like "completely invalidate" when that is not what I wrote. Hyperbole and beating people over the head who disagree with you is not a constructive way to proceed.
I cannot understand how people who code cannot get that the law needs tweaks and fixes just like code. I would prefer a formal notice to a law suit. We are about to unleash a whole new category of violation and even a suit that asks for no damages is going to be expensive.
Oh yes, in this case they didn't ask for damages, but that won't be the case next time when more bad actors appear.
This is how the infamous McDonald's coffee lawsuit got started, for example; the plaintiff (who, for those unfamiliar with the story, had suffered second and third degree burns from the spilled coffee -- not exactly a case of "duh, it's hot" and more a case of "demonstrably not fit for human consumption") originally just wrote to them to complain. And they were, predictably, assholes to her, which led to research into how many people had suffered severe burns, which in turn led to the lawsuit.
So either you want to make a change that won't change anything (require some number of "notices" or non-lawsuit "complaints" before going to court), or you want to make a change that will literally undo the ADA (disallow going to court, period). Since neither of those is viable, the right of everyone to have equal access to businesses which are open to the public -- and to have that enforced by courts -- is going to outweigh your fevered nightmares of a lawsuit apocalypse.
Once again with the hyperbole.
> .. McDonald's ..
I don't see any equivalence to what I am talking about to that case. Writing them is not mentioned in any current law as a procedural way to remedy the situation. Its a nice courtesy that was ignored.
> It's always going to end up in a lawsuit. To a company that's running an actively user-hostile web presence, no amount of non-lawsuit complaints will get them to change, which means it's going to end up in court no matter what.
No, its not always going to end up in a lawsuit. A regulatory notice is a fair first start with a defined period for response and fix. Love it or hate it, the DMCA notice is not a bad starting point that saves quite a bit of court time. Dealing with a notice from a government agency (e.g. health inspector) is not something that can be ignored.
http://m.startribune.com/flurry-of-disability-lawsuits-leave...
Unluckily for you, we as a society decided that we will accommodate those with disabilities rather than just look at their business value. If we only made choices based on utility, we'd already be implementing widespread eugenics and killing off anyone who gets sick or old. And it wasn't a case of not using the right accessibility tags, check out the quote in another comment, his software couldn't read any text. [0]
The web as it is now is unreadable for sited and blind people so I really have a hard time feeling bad for site designers.
It is the same path we have seen many industry go down. At some point, large corporation will begin to lobby for regulations in order to remove smaller competition.
It's a fantasy to complain that these requirements are onerous.
But a huge amount of difference to a particular subset of users. Which is the point.
I highly disagree that requiring businesses have accessible services is a "dangerous precedent".
I went to their website and ran Wave. It looks like from a few pages I sampled most of it is just adding alt-tags. So seems like a single or two developers with the right tools and testing could fix their website page by page over a couple of months probably. A huge store chain shouldn't be a problem to afford unlike a small tiny startup.
"Separate but equal" was (essentially) shot down by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How can enjoyment be equal if by definition sighted people have a superset of abilities of blind people? The only way would be to not present a visual interface at all, and only provide an audio or screen-reader interface to any given website.
Can't you argue this for literally any company of any kind?
This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
So now if I build a shitty website selling homemade candles I can get sued because I didn't use the right accessibility tags?
Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low.