Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

In the case of websites... two years ago I started adopting a11y into my front-end code. But while plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y make the job easier, it honestly was also a huge pain in the ass familiarizing myself with the grotesque state of affairs in web accessibility standards.

However, one of the biggest gains might have been learning to properly leverage every HTML tag to its fullest. Modern day SPAs have all gone back to using wild div forests with no context or metadata available for readers. This also took much less effort than learning the rest of standards compliance. So start there!

After crossing that river, I think that accessibility is complex enough to warrant its own dedicated developer for almost any project if standards are to be achieved.

Still... until our bosses catch up, we do what we can. Here are some great resources for developers who wish to learn more about how to design for accessibility: https://a11yproject.com/resources/#further-reading

P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind?

EDIT: found this Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List with 132 items listed! Anyone have advice on which ones are best?

https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

Lately I have been part of building a quite popular website in my native country, and this time, as I have had more autonomy than before, decided to go ahead and add as much accessibility helping markup and proper elements as possible. Eg. everything that can be clicked is now a button (no more divs with onClick-handlers) and by the way, is adding tabIndex to divs even sufficient for triggering clicks? Since by default the Enter-key is not bound to trigger the click-event for elements other than buttons and links (I assume).

Anyway, I went ahead and added as much accessibility I could, but some things were bit too much of extra work that I decided not to add them. So I was just wondering, how bad is it when modals don't automatically capture the focus and you can't really travel into them unless moving all the way to end of the document (where the element lies)? From what I glanced from the aria spec, the focus should immediately move into the modal and get trapped where you can only by invoking an action (eg esc-key, click x-button or submit) dismiss them.

Also how important are the aria-labels for buttons and such? Should everything worth noticing be annotated? Or can you guess from say the button text what they are for. Also I read somewhere that inputs should always have labels, but sometimes it's problematic to add them eg dates with three inputs with only one label "Birthdate". Can I supplement the label with some aria-property instead?

Sorry for asking so many long questions, these things have been on my mind a lot and I really haven't had anyone to tell me if the accessibility fields I have added were correct or not. It's quite annoying how confusing the spec is and how difficult it's to know if the aria properties are correct/make sense or not. Eg how many aria-haspopup etc properties should a dropdown have and which of its elements have which.

How accessible is a basic, plain vanilla, semantic HTML document? I.e., a fully server side rendered HTML doc that uses paragraph and heading and so forth tags for what they semantically mean. Are those type pages accessible, or is more work required to make them accessible?

I'd like to make sites I build more accessible, but I must admit I'm only familiar with the bare minimal guidelines I've read in a couple articles. I don't even know if they're correct or up to date. Nobody I've worked for has ever made this a priority, so I'm quite ignorant on the subject.

As a note, for any sighted developers (like me) reading along: I'd highly recommend you to spend half an hour to learn and practice navigating software with a screen reader some time. It's a relatively easy step that gives you a lot of insight into low-hanging fruit in terms of accessibility improvements.

(Also, keep in mind that accessibility is not just vision impairments. Things like small click targets can make things a lot harder for people with motor issues, e.g. many elderly people.)

I want to do more than just run sites through validators. Is JAWS still a good accessibility program to test with? Are there other major accessibility programs I should be testing with?

What do you think of the multiple voice assistants out there? Do you think that would be an acceptable alternative or tradeoff if Domino made a bot to take orders?

Or they just mistype something and leave it... but your screenreader reads it and you hear/know how to spell it so you introduce bugs because you're using correct or localized spellings of a variable name when everywhere else in the code uses the incorrect or other-localized version?

- Force businesses/streets to add a curb lip for wheelchairs -> Stars above, suddenly it's easier to accept deliveries and bring in luggage!

- Optimize site for slow connections, suddenly you have a torrent of previously-unserved customers. [1]

Edit: Turns out it's called the Curb Cut Effect:

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-...

[1] Summary at this HN discussion, follow through to the story for more details. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601977

Do you follow the standards? If you show me a web site that you've developed I'll show you a site with multiple violations of WCAG 2.0. Hell, JAWS' own site is littered with WCAG violations! Yes, "accessibility at the basic level" is easy but WCAG 2.0 is not "accessibility at the basic level". It's a huge set of rules that are often unclear and ambiguous. And that's fine because WCAG 2.0 is just something that you should aspire to. But if you start defining accessibility by whether a site conforms to WCAG 2.0 or not, then I can guarantee you that every single popular site is non-accessible.

We got sued and believe me it has nothing to do with blind people. Our site is of zero interest to them. Companies are sued by scumbag lawyers, who have made a nice little racket out of this thing. It's really unfortunate that the HN crowd is siding with them, as if they are championing the rights of disabled people. It's all about money.

A unanimous denial of certiorari (declining to hear the case) sends a pretty strong message to lawyers and their clients. It only takes 4 votes (1 less than majority) to hear a case, so the fact that there were zero justices interested is a clear message. While it is technically possible that there could in the future be a circuit split, which could then be appealed to the SCOTUS, it is unlikely SCOTUS would hear that case.

And given what happened today, it is even less likely that a competent lawyer would counsel their client to appeal a similar case up to a federal appeals court (because it looks like it would be a loser of a case).

So while the SCOTUS did not affirmatively speak today, their unanimously declining to hear the case does actually say something new, and this is being hailed as a landmark-ish case in the legal accessibility community.

FWIW, IAAL, and I run an assistive technology startup.

There is a clear difference between 'discriminating' against someone because of their disability, and a person's inability to participate in something because of a disability.

Later in the law discrimination is defined, and it gives an exception that auxiliary aids must be provided, except when providing them would be an undue burden.

If I were Dominos (I'm not a lawyer, so I probably have this wrong), based on a reading of the law, I would argue that since Dominos offers pizza ordering through the telephone it is not depriving anyone their services if the website is not accessible. The service Dominos has to provide access to is delivery of pizzas, not the use of their website, which only exists specifically for the purpose of ordering pizzas. Could a library be sued because a specific book doesn't contain braille, when the same book is available in braille? What if Dominos had two phone numbers, one that offered teletype and one that was voice only? This judgement seems to imply that they could be sued unless both their phone numbers offered TDD, because they are depriving people of the use of the other phone number?

I'm all for making websites accessible, but I find it hard to believe someone who orders a pizza over the phone is being deprived of 'equal enjoyment' of the pizza.

On a basic level, yes. But what does the law consider to be reasonable? There are so many degrees of compliance, some of which often go against brand guidelines, against common js libraries, etc.

I know there is a snarky comment about enjoying Dominoe's pizza...

But it is comical that Dominoes championed ordering pizza by tweeting an pizza emoji, but failed to address helping the bling order online.

What I find appauling is I need to be disabled to demand a website that doesn't require font.js and 600 trackers to run, that doesn't intercept my scroll wheel or make me use a Google product for captcha.

hyper text mark up language is dead. Long live the world wide web.

Sounds like it could be part of SEO effort. If it can be checked programmatically then search engines should add accessibilty to their ranking algorithms. It worked for mobile.

Not every disabled person is blind. It's not enough to set some tab indexes, add alt tags and call it a day. It's not a process that can be automated and not a simple matter of turning off your screen and using a screen reader (again not all disabled are blind). And as a small business, even if you think your website is accessible (after paying that accessibility dev who you thought fixed it), if you were pursued by a law firm and your options were to try to fight it in court or pay a settlement, you'll likely only be able to afford the latter.

>there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility

Which is it?

Because it costs money to do so, and sometimes mom and pop sites are barely scraping by to begin with. It's also their prerogative to make the content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit - it's their loss if someone cannot buy their product, but it's also their choice to accept that loss. I think it sets a dangerous precedent to make them legally obliged to make their content available in a specific way.

A accessibility dev, does not need to have a deep understanding of your business processes, you back end or your dev cycle. They really just need the front end assets in a manner that they can run and access to a source control repo to check in their changes for the mainline dev team to pull in.

The problem isn't so much "how do I make my site accessible?" but "what counts as accessible in the eyes of the law?" Sure, you've passed an accessibility review from one person who is actually blind. But currently, what you need to do is pass an accessibility review from anyone who could ever potentially sue you over an ADA violation – many of whom don't even care, they just got roped into it by lawyers looking for easy money!

For physical accessibility, we already have rules about exactly how steep a wheelchair ramp needs to be, etc. For website accessibility, we have nothing, just a very vague "has a user complained?" Supposedly the Obama administration promised in like 2012 that they would have actual standards for what counts as accessible, but that went nowhere and in like 2017 the Trump administration just canceled that entire project.

And, like, if you've ever run a website, you know how vague "has a user complained?" is. My sighted users complain all the time, and it's not like I haven't expended years of effort making the experience good for them!

So, while it might be cumbersome, but doable for, let's say, Amazon, it could be a real problem for a new small business. Consider this: as a startup, you always wish you can satisfy all you customers. But you cannot. So you make sacrifices, trying to satisfy the customer base that brings to most money first. You always discriminate, even while US Supreme Court may not be able to see it. And there is no other way.

So what this law really means: there still will be commercial web-sites, that are not accessible for some customers. But they can be sued for it. And while it won't drastically improve lives of many of disabled customers, it will improve lives of some lawyer firms, that can use blind people to sue businesses. This won't happen to everyone, but this is one more additional risk, that every entrepreneur will have to consider

I always tend to support blind/deaf/etc people as much as I can, and I honestly care for them. But I don't feel I must be legally obligated to target my services to anyone. And I think this is a stupid law.

And yes, courts really do want to get into the issue of which businesses need to comply and which don't, regardless of whether they exist physically or as a website.

[1] https://www.ada.gov/briefs/uc_berkley_lof.pdf

If this is the question you want to answer, then you should agree with SCOTUS that this case should not be heard. A pizza delivery company falls very clearly on one side of the question. Instead, you should wait until a case comes up that actually squarely deals with the question of if an online-only site might qualify as a place of public accommodation.

The best you can get with this case as it stands is whether or not the website of a brick-and-mortar store must be accessible. And since trial hasn't even started, you don't even have any sense yet of what the interpretation of "the website must be accessible" even means.

The facts of what constitutes a sufficiently-accessible website necessarily have not been discussed, because Dominos was trying to boot the case before any factual determinations were made.

Their argument was that, as a matter of law, they could not be sued under the ADA based on their website. This argument prevailed at the District Court, lost at the Ninth Circuit, and was unanimously declined to be heard at SCOTUS.

That sends a loud and clear message, and this will essentially become the law of the land for at least the next few decades.

Note: I have not deeply read all the opinions, but I am a lawyer who is familiar with appellate procedure and the ADA.

There is contradictory case law (like Southwest Airlines 2002) that says the ADA does not extend to virtual / online stores.

Companies are policing themselves on this issue out of liability to be sued, which is a far cry from a declarative right to have accommodations online. It is not that certain.

"Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) one image web site is not licensed; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover the unauthorised use of the single image without license"."

That happens all the time. Enough that it's fairly well known now. I think few would just lift an image off another site these days.

If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great! A few headline cases of huge, crippling fines, and few would just put out a site without accessibility, or give a tender to developers without a contract section covering it.

So the only remaining issues are whether $4k is a reasonable sum or just a lawyer trying it on, and whether she can sue OpenCart for providing a non-accessible platform.

Also, something is wrong with your example. Cost of buying the original platform is $X, sales (not revenue) for multiple years is $3,500, fixing it or replacing it by a compliant platform is $Y. A "fix" is clearly not more expensive than $X and that was much, much less than the revenue from the sales.

Also, it seems to me that the original product was defective (illegal), so why should she have to pay for the fix?

I haven't read into what the exact ruling covered I'm just pointing out it doesn't have to be black and white to the point it runs all guy large places out of business.

Edit: apparently my phone typing speed is no match for the interest in this topic :)

Since it only applies to "public accommodations", it's highly unlikely that a drawing program will be covered, unless it's tied to a good, such as if you can have the drawing printed up for you.

Yes it works for pizza, but American Airlines charge $35 per ticket[1] when you call them to book.

[1] https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/optional-se...

And then they'd be compliant.

My inexpert suspicion is that investment in better screen reading technology could make millions of sites accessible which currently are not, and that there should be some way to meet in the middle -- perhaps companies funding a consortium to push screen reading tech forward while at the same time making it an order of magnitude easier for a site to be accessible.

Then again pizza websites are pretty garbage from the get go. Not sure why they make them so damn convoluted.

Imagine if this were changed to tax fraud. Now we have computers that can automatically find discrepancies and we can notify violators at scale. The horror!

Whomever does the compliant would either need a ton of liability insurance, or would need contract language that actually gets them out of responsibility (similar to the language in many travel insurance and point-of-dale service plans). The former would be expensive, so you’d probably end up with the latter.

Web accessibility compliance does require a human to look at (and interact with) a site, and it requires people who either have training, or experience. That costs more. I really hope we don’t end up with “Uber for accessibility compliance”, with testers who aren’t paid enough, and who don’t get enough time to test a site.

I worry about it getting much worse, especially with the animosity the larger tech companies face from the public. What people don’t understand is that those big companies will weather any of these regulations, and that they will stop smaller startups from ever happening.

The act basically requires companies to make "readily achievable" changes. So if it would bankrupt the company then it is not required. However you can’t just sleep on the issue and pocket the profits for not putting in the effort.

>The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business groups that said they represented 500,000 restaurants and 300,000 businesses joined in an appeal urging the high court to review the 9th Circuit’s decision.

I have a friend who is a wheelchair user who has been trying to get ramp access to the shops where she lives. First avenue is a friendly chat, second is a letter before action, third is court. She would much rather it was enforced by the government like most other regulations - in addition to being draining to go to court to argue for her rights, it leaves those who ignored their obvious legal responsibilities, and the friendly chat, and the letter, personally furious that she took them to court. So even victory is fairly Pyrrhic.

You jump though the hoops to make your order, make an account, choose your pizza, and enter your credit card info.

You click submit. Nothing happens. Did the order go through? Do you call to find out? Wait and hope? Order from someone else? In the future you'll have an answer (or 4 different deliveries because you went somewhere else 3 separate times until you found an accessible website).

What if you didn't have another option? Should we prevent the blind from eating pizza?

Websites are navigable by screen readers and tons of other accessibility software by default. Hacker News is completely usable in JAWS. It's the things Domino's layered on top that broke it, so it's Domino's's job to fix it.

Having domino's create a new web browser for physical accessibility devices would be an undue burden. Having domino's fix their aria tags and tab order is not.

The SCOTUS isn’t making a new law. What they are saying is that the law as written covers websites as well. The law says you can’t discriminate against a person with a disability and the courts job is to work out what constitutes discrimination.

[0]: https://www.justia.com/business-operations/managing-your-bus...

[1]: https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality

Legally, SCOTUS seems to be taking a specific position on what “full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services ... of any place of public accommodations.” means.

Note that US airlines have had to provide accessible websites since December 12, 2016, under the Air Carrier Access Act. So there's some existing work other industries can follow.

Under the ADA, only new businesses (post ADA) are/were required to build accessibility into their business. Older businesses were grandfathered in and didn't have to make changes to existing facilities until they renovated them. In terms of websites, this means only the oldest websites would have been grandfathered in.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990:

"No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation."

"a failure to take such steps as may be necessary to ensure that no individual with a disability is excluded, denied services, segregated or otherwise treated differently than other individuals because of the absence of auxiliary aids and services, unless the entity can demonstrate that taking such steps would fundamentally alter the nature of the good, service, facility, privilege, advantage, or accommodation being offered or would result in an undue burden;"

Are you arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act is wrong, or that making a website accessible is an undue burden? (while say, ramps for wheelchairs is not)

What is a mere convenience for many people is de facto the equivalent of a flying wheelchair for handicapped people -- when it actually works for them and isn't some new "fuck you" from the world.

But if you want to order online, then you increasing often have to interact with a website. Brick and mortar have employees that could help you, websites do not.

The reverse of this situation would be telling people with wheelchairs that they should only shop online instead of expecting accessible stores.