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Comment by _moof | Hacker News Reader

Fighting discrimination is difficult and can be exhausting. As someone in a (different) protected class I just want to say kudos for doing this work.

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Isn't demanding that non-trivial work is done just to accommodate your class the opposite of discrimination?

They shouldn’t have to demand accommodation. That’s the point.

And my point is that discrimination is an active effort, which this is not. Things are, by default, not accessible, because things are generally crafted for able bodied humans.

It takes something that once was made accessible, through active effort, and makes it inaccessible. That's the point.

Where did you get the idea that discrimination has to be the result of an active effort? Anything that makes one group of people excluded or treated worse is discrimination, even if it is the result of an oversight.

Your second sentence is basically exactly the problem: able-bodied people are arbitrarily treated as the “default”, and others are left out.

If it's an oversight how can it be an active effort?

Able bodied people are the default because they are the absolutely overwhelming majority.

Let's agree to disagree, I think.

People like you are exactly why laws like ADA were created and collectively we have decided not to just disagree with you but to pass legislation that makes it illegal for people to follow this lazy and selfish position. The first fights were over physical access and in a lot of cases it required significant reconstruction or re-architecting of spaces at great expense. The next round of fights will be over online access, where the cost of compliance is significantly less -- expect tech firms to start losing these battles now that it is much easier to attach specific harm to failures to provide accessibility.

> Able bodied people are the default because they are the absolutely overwhelming majority.

Almost everyone develops some disabilities as they age. 10-15% of the population has some disability, which is a huge group. I hope you would not argue for discrimination against ethnic minorities on the same grounds.

It's not an oversight because the author of this post advised them of the potential issues and received acknowledgement.

The internet was very accessible by default for a long time. Plain text is very accessible. Plain HTML written by humans is very accessible.

> And my point is that discrimination is an active effort, which this is not.

That is an absolutely incorrect and indefensible point. Discriminators can be individuals, but discrimination is systemic. It can be a result of collective acts of malice over years or generations, or can be simple ignorance- being left out of the scope of the discourse and never really given a chance to get in the loop.

Discrimination absolutely does not require an active effort. Neglect is just as effective at keeping people out.

In any case Cloudflare's inaccessibility is a direct result of choices they "actively" made. Technical decisions, prioritization, maybe even company culture.

And remember, I advised them of the need to pay special attention to accessibility in this product over a year before it launched.

Exactly. They deliberately chose not to do anything about it.

It's not a matter of agreeing; it's a matter of the US govt is saying these are the rules for doing commerce or hiring employees in the US. As codified by the ADA. Post domino case, that clearly applies to company websites.

In this case the data basically exist in accessible form and they are doing nontrivial work to make them inaccessible.

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