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Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't people communicating online; this is a business communicating to it's customers and offering core functionality such as refilling prescriptions. The situation is absolutely the same as wheelchair ramps: Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations.

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]

The fact the plaintiff didn't ask for damages, but merely for the website to be made accessible seems a pretty good measure of good faith on his or her part.

[1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.ht...

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> This isn't people communicating online; this is a business communicating to it's customers

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.

Perhaps they aren't saying that the internet is like a physical location, but rather that like physical locations the internet should be made accessible for everyone to the greatest extent possible.

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.

The core idea at play here is that the United States has decided that it wants to be a society where disabled people should not be significantly barred from leading as normal a life as they can, modulo their impairment(s). Internet services have become a key part of daily life, and so a pharmacy being accessible to disabled people is in the same category as it being wheelchair accessible. If you disagree with it, then try to get the law changed or move to another country.

Winn-Dixie isn't private digital communication; it's a storefront. We're not discussing some art group where people are posting pictures of their art; we're discussing a company that spent $9m on their website last year. Even if their estimate of $250k to fix their website is accurate -- and I doubt it is, except perhaps for their incompetence -- they have the resources. And as mentioned, hundreds of other sites seem to work in jaws; nothing winn-dixie is doing is so unique that it should be complicated to make it work as well.

America has wholesale adopted in law the idea that we require so-called "sub-optimal standards".

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