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Comment by heartbreak | Hacker News Reader

> And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100

Which brings us to one of the author's other points: Not everyone is rich. There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. Do we (in the U.S.) need an ADA for websites? We essentially applied it to government websites, but my personal blog doesn't have to be compliant.

Regulation of that nature would have an immediate impact on solo and other small web developers, just like GDPR. Perhaps it's necessary, though, so that we aren't excluding wide swaths of people from having equal opportunities on the web.

Edit: Note that certain interpretations (including court opinions) of ADA apply the public accommodation concept to business websites. I'm not aware of such an interpretation for personal websites as ADA would probably not apply.

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> There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible.

All HTML and JS documentation is available gratis, and every operating system is distributed with a text editor.

  <html>
    <head>
      <title>Accessible Web Page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <p>This is an accessible web page.</p>
    </body>
  </html>

Perhaps you meant to specify rapid, tool-assisted development of a feature-rich website?

Making an accessible website is simple as dirt. It will just look dated to people who don't need to rely on the accessibility features of their browser or OS. It may even "look" dated to people who use screen-readers.

The plain HTML example is a bit of a straw-man. It's beyond "dated", being a faux pas for all but the most ascetic of users.

My interpretation of "resources" here would be time / money. Making sure a site is accessible by everyone takes effort which is difficult to justify, particularly if you're already stretched to capacity.

That's a way of saying that accessibility is a low priority. Everyone has a choice between finally making the site usable for a minority of potential users, or putting in a new feature. If you always choose the option that makes the most money, some people always get left out.

The ADA was drafted to force physical businesses to make reasonable access a higher priority. Accessibility has the same time/money costs as any other feature. The same goes for internationalization and localization. Or for robust user data protection and security. The longer you wait to consider doing it, the more it's going to cost you.

You don't need unstyled HTML to look accessible. But you need to keep accessibility in mind from the very beginning with your project.

Of course, I've worked in web design, so I know the workflow doesn't really allow you to do anything right from the beginning. Things get hacked up, and accessibility is sacrificed.

There is an ADA for websites. It's called the ADA. https://www.emedialaw.com/does-my-website-need-to-be-ada-com...

I think laws and enforcement are the wrong way to look at it.

A small business doesn't have to spend money developing tooling and a framework to, e.g., make asynchronous database calls and update page data without a refresh. The community developed that because the community cares about it. The community has shown significantly less caring about persons with disabilities being able to use websites. If the developer community had developed the accessibility version of AJAX we would use it just like we use AJAX.

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