Seems like all humans should be on Domino's side, at least all techies.
Edit: before the cacophany decends to tell me how easy accessibility is, let me preemptively highlight that opportunity cost is the fundamental unit of cost to a startup. And this is a ycombinator site. So everyone should already know this.
Why would anyone oppose this? Is the only way to get your startup off the ground to walk over visually impaired people? Restaurants have razor thin margins too but I’ve never heard of any restaurant looking to save a buck by limiting wheelchair access.
The point of the ADA is to make violating it more expensive then complying with it.
Are we going to force Domino's to offer Braille menus? What about menus in Russian? Or large print menus and menus?
No. I believe a company shouldn't be forced to accommodate everyone who may want their products, though I certainly think they should do it voluntarily. In fact, I'd support boycotts and critical press about it, but not a law.
It should be accessible, I disagree that it _must_ be accessible.
1) Obviously accessible is better. Everyone agrees. When all cost is opportunity cost, do things that don't scale. Target your market aggressively. Cut your market to reduce your opportunity costs of getting to a revenue stream, then expand your market.
2) the more burdens you place in the market, the more you favor established players and make it more difficult and costly for startups to happen and succeed.
3) since when did not spending the time to build something for blind people equal walking over them? They're a valuable part of the market, to be sure, but come on. I can't sell a product to seeing people until i build in functionality for blind people? This is why the federal register is so large. Pointless crusades from short sighted busybodies.
OTOH ... big sigh here. It's really, really depressing that we've reached the point where websites, and their typical toolchains, are so bloated that it's considered a burden at all to make your site accessible. HTML is basically designed to be blind-friendly! The only reason it's a noticeable burden at all is because everyone's bought into stupid patterns that make their sides so inelegant, non-functional, and meth-addled.
If we use an unusually big stick to slap website conventions back into sanity, I'm probably not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.
Using fancy frameworks and scripts can certainly break things unnecessarily, but there are some things that require significant labor to make accessible no matter what you do.
Suppose I want to put my vacation photos on my personal website. I took a thousand of them. But a blind person can't see photographs; do I have to sit there and caption them all now? That's going to take hours. If that's required I'm just not going to post them.
You get the same sort of problem with universities posting course lecture videos. Recording the class costs almost nothing on top of not recording it (just station a camera in the back of the room), but having someone sit there and closed caption all the lectures would add a full time employee who does nothing else. When they're posting the videos for free use of the public, some schools are just going to choose to stop publishing them instead of picking up that level of expense in exchange for no compensation from anyone.
And if you want to suggest speech to text software as a solution, isn't that better accomplished by building it into the client rather than the website, so that it works everywhere? But then we shouldn't have laws that mandate it the other way.
And the lower that bar is then the higher the barrier to entry for a web presence for anyone.
There is the accessibility standard but is Domino's on the hook when it's not enough to actually use the site with some applications?
That being said, I don't know the legal precedent on this, I'm just talking from what I consider moral.
You shouldn't have to lower all of the shelves (or provide ladders) just because really short people exist, but if your employees refuse to assist when asked, then you have a problem. Likewise, Dominos will help blind people at their stores or over the phone, so there's still a way for them to reasonably order food from them.
I don't think Dominos should be forced to make their website accessible, though they certainly receive the negative press.
The thing is that most sources of impediments to disabled people come from people creating procedures, designs or structures and not considering that not everyone has the same abilities. There are few people who have malice against people with disabilities so having deliberate acts of discrimination be the threshold would not be effective in solving the problem.
I don't think we should even consider this from the perspective of morality or punishment. Corporations are amoral profit maximisers by their nature. When corporations don't create accessible sites what they save by not creating an accessible site is paid by the people with disabilities. The ability to sue over ADA violations is a way to capture this negative externality.
Making pages that a program can easily read is pretty fundamental to how everyone uses the web.
More discussion about how both digital and physical accessibility helps everyone:
https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...
https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-ma...
https://www.npr.org/2015/07/24/423230927/-a-gift-to-the-non-...
This is not necessarily so. I develop mobile apps for a large corp. Our designers are often told by the accessibility team to change their design in ways that make the more accessible, but reduce the usability for normal users. I'm talking about simple controls that most people take for granted, like date/time pickers, carousels etc.
What about your older customers? I have it on good authority old people also enjoy pizza.
And how do you know you're not going to need that accessibility when you least expect it? You don't wake up expecting a retinal detachment or an accident, but sometimes shit happens.
And, though I'm a designer and not a developer, accessibility has had a strong correlation with technical debt. Semantic class names, well structured HTML, not rendering your headline fonts as a bitmap so you can have your on-brand typeface…accessible code tends to go along with resilient code.