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Comment by challenger22 | Hacker News Reader

The expected steady-state outcome of this situation is that all website-owning educational companies will be targeted for lawsuits, many of which are valid, and many of which are not. The net effect of these lawsuits will primarily be a massive loss of productivity. It is very technically challenging and labor intensive to make websites accessible to the blind or otherly disabled, and doing so is to the benefit of a very small population, who will continue to primarily use other communication platforms anyway. Net effect: For every hour of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent by others. A saner society would choose a different path.

I wish I could see actual statistics on this, I admit this is wild speculation on my part.

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You're thinking short term. And you're probably right, short term. But we had the same set of concerns raised about many other ADA issues in the past, such as wheelchair-accessible ramps and doors. Over time, the standard practices (and what we'd think of as tooling and common design patterns) for new construction evolved. ADA lawsuits about websites create a similar incentive for long-term change.

and, hopefully, just as we've realized that ADA compliance benefits all of us, whether it's in the form of getting old or pushing strollers or nursing a sprained ankle, we'll get to the point where the improved information availability from ADA compliance becomes an intrinsic part of the power of the web.

Yet there are still scammy lawyers who file ADA lawsuits against small businesses. Here’s a great example of what I consider a typical ADA lawyer: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prenda_law_attorney_w...

There are bad actors in every domain, but cherrypicking one doesn't tell us much about the overall balance. (Heck, for every scummy lawyer who uses the ADA as their club of choice, there are probably 100 who specialize in extracting money using questionable torts claims. Prenda Law was infamous for being a pile of snakes, enough so that they justify their own wikipedia article [0]).

Countering anecdote with anecdote, here's an example of the importance of ADA lawsuits:

https://www.peds.org/campaigns/sidewalk-maintenance/curb-ram...

Atlanta has been awful about keeping their pedestrian infrastructure working. And this wasn't a profit-seeking lawsuit -- it was the DoJ.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

I think that even long-term the approach as described in TFA will always require many hours of work for an hour of time saved. The saner way to do it is probably have direct personal assistance for the blind. Phone call systems for the deaf and hard of hearing have been in place for decades, and many of these systems rely on direct personal assistance.

It's only saner if you value the money of website companies over the dignity of their users

These laws definitely increase expense though, wheel chair ramps aren’t free in material and space. We do have to pay for it in the form of increased real estate costs.

For websites, either they will have to spend more money making them or make fewer of them using existing budgets.

No, design tools & frameworks can also evolve to make them more easily. It doesn't always have to be as cumbersome as it is now.

Accessibility is much more of a design (to design accessible experiences) and legal challenge (to defend your experiences as compliant in the face of malicious litigation and vague laws) than it is an engineering one. Yes, we can solve the technical problem fairly easy, but that won’t reduce compliance costs very much, if at all.

Why would compliance costs differ greatly once the technical problem of tools that build for accessibility by default are commonplace? Maybe some minimal oversight to verify accessibility, but no much else. Or am I missing something?

You are missing where most of the work/cost is occurring, it isn't in the code, but in the design and verification process.

How much of my mortgage[0] is due to compliance? How much of my student loan[1] is due to compliant websites?

[0]hypothetically

[1]hypothetically

Probably very little, and a fraction that goes down over time. The cost of making new construction ADA-compliant is very small [0]. Retrofits are more expensive, but there are thresholds to try to reduce the pain. As we move to more and more post-ADA construction, the overall share of construction costs becomes fairly trivial.

[0] https://adata.org/publication/ADA-faq-booklet ("under 1%")

As to your student loan, again, probably very little. Let's say it cost a few hundred k spread over a few years -- at CMU, at least, adding 100k spread over 10k students is a molecule in the bucket.

Is 100k a realistic estimate for the cost?

You can make the same argument about many things in the ADA. It's not supposed to be "worth it", and I don't think it's insane to spend a disproportionate amount of time/money catering to a small minority of the population. We, as a society, decided not to be economically optimal on this issue, and I think that's a sensible choice to make.

> For every hour of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent by others. A saner society would choose a different path.

Championing the rights of the disabled despite it being a net loss of productivity for humanity (which is my reading of your comment, and could be inaccurate) may look insane to a logic-less machine, but less so when reasoned through for a bit.

If you're suggesting we change the laws to avoid this kind of productivity loss, it may be worth wondering why all these government websites only reacted to the stick, not the carrot.

This isn't a matter of rights, it is a matter of legal obligations.

Whether a person or entity is or is not legally obliged to do something is a conversation about rights.

I expect the universities will outsource more and more of their IT departments, and write in 'accessibility' into the contract. This way, they can continue not care, while also pointing the finger. Inevitably, costs for IT will go through the roof for these universities.

Seems like a market ripe for disruption.

Nope, really not that complicated. Where I work, they just hired on a specialist contractor for a year. That person assisted with the audit of sites at the same time they trained web developers in remediation for existing sites and methods for building new content.

Really? I know non-specialists that churned out blind-friendly sites by the dozen in '97, without even trying.

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