I find it hard to believe this happened as stated in the US, where any number of lawyers would be eager to take such an open-and-shut ADA violation case.
https://blindaccessjournal.com/2006/02/the-cold-equations/
https://blindaccessjournal.com/2006/02/torn-from-the-collect...
Edit: Found the original announcement: https://blindaccessjournal.com/2006/02/my-job-lost-due-to-in...
And yes, it was in 2006. And as it happens, his employer rehired him shortly after, but only because they found something else for him to do. I believe my point still stands; for a short time, he lost his job, without knowing what happened next, and he went through the emotions associated with that.
California Law is different in that it is like other civil laws with damages and attorney fees.
Consequently, cases from California make attention commanding headlines. Elsewhere in the US, citizens must beseech the USDOJ to act on their behalf…it usually doesn’t.
While ADA is federal law and awards no damages, situations like what was described would be more appropriate as an EEOC matter.
An award of damages is a potential remedy when discrimination (e.g., not providing a reasonable accommodation) is found to have taken place. It is also a perfectly acceptable offering during alternative dispute resolution or as a settlement.
Lastly, civil litigation involving the ADA does not require support from the DoJ. The DoJ, as with other matters brought before courts on behalf of the government, CAN bring about suit and are generally responsible for enforcement.
People with disabilities sue private companies all the time for alleged/actual discrimination without the DoJ.
I agree accessibility needs to be of higher priority. It’s a shame it’s seems to be almost always a secondary priority to everything in tech.
But this post feels like an open letter to some bigger issue when it seems like it’s a very niche and non-common security tool.
I mean no disrespect in this.
The standard workaround is to create a parallel DOM that's invisible, e.g. covered up by the canvas. To be clear, this parallel DOM should be based on the accessibility tree of the remote browser, not based on the original DOM, as that would undermine the whole point of the exercise. This work-around may not be perfect, but Cloudflare hasn't implemented even this.
> But this post feels like an open letter to some bigger issue when it seems like it’s a very niche and non-common security tool.
It seems to me, from Cloudflare's original pre-announcement of this technology [1], that they intend for it to be widely adopted. Here's the money quote:
> Operating costs translate directly to customer costs. The S2 system was designed to make deployment to an entire enterprise and not just targeted users (aka: vaccinating half the class) both feasible and attractive for customers.
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is...
nm, see (your answer) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28028892
What would be perfect then?
[1]; https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is...
A cursory look at QT's documentation seems to indicate that they are aware of screen readers, but I didn't dig deeply enough to find out if they were compatible by default.
I know VoiceOver on OSX can at least read out the interfaces on the included apps, but I also don't know if that's true for every app---or if it actually extends to the browser and canvas/plugin rendered (flash, java, etc.) interfaces.
As an addendum, I'm pretty hopeful that in this decade we'll get AI vision enabled screen readers so anything that's displayable to a sighted person can also be immediately used with some caveats by someone reliant on screen reader.
Qt is one of the very few UI toolkits that is more or less accessible. And even Qt's accessibility implementation isn't great. My advice for someone implementing a cross-platform desktop app would be to go with something based on the web platform. That doesn't have to be Electron; Tauri [1] looks promising, though I haven't tested it lately.
> As an addendum, I'm pretty hopeful that in this decade we'll get AI vision enabled screen readers so anything that's displayable to a sighted person can also be immediately used with some caveats by someone reliant on screen reader.
Sadly, that might be what it takes to get access to applications using the long tail of UI toolkits.
The problem with AI screen readers (Android already has one) is that they provide a "good enough" solution that drains the interest in building server frameworms that really work.
Not everything needs to be accessible; there are plenty of non-accessible reasonable use cases for canvas.
For example, I made a small game with canvas some years ago. This isn't accessible for blind users, and that's okay. There is no real way to make this accessible as it's fundamentally a graphical game. It's called a disability for a reason: there are some things you just won't be able to do.
The problem isn't with the non-accessible technologies, but when people use this in ways that make every-day stuff required for basic participation inaccessible. That's basically the issue with Cloudflare's product.