Justice Department Issues Web Accessibility Guidance Under the ADA | Hacker News Reader

Justice Department Issues Web Accessibility Guidance Under the ADA

justice.gov

202 pointsgreenie_beans275 comments

Blind developer here.

So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Accessibility of websites is a real problem for blind people. And the thing is it is relatively easy to make your website accessible:

* Use simple HTML controls: all of them work great in all screenreaders. Only when custom behavior is implemented in javascript this might cause problems. * Test accessibility with keyboard. That fancy combobox that you wrote that expands with beautiful navigation cannot be opened from keyboard.

This ADA guidance actually doesn't even mention this. Sure, providing alt descriptions can be useful but it's almost never preventing me from using a website. But a combobox or a button that won't click is a real problem. But I hope this is just the first step in making Internet more blind-friendly.

> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed

They were. AM talk radio hosts would whine about that one for years.

About four months ago, I used to cycle every week to the store, but an auto-immune disorder has me now disabled and I use a wheelchair. A lot of this annoying attitude honestly is people really feel like accessibility is for "other people" and many just lack empathy in general. But really, no one lives forever, no one is 25 forever hitting the bars every night, even abled bodied people grow old and their bodies change or like me, an illness or injury can strike without warning. At the very least if you cannot be empathetic to other people who are disabled just know that one day it could be you and you'll be thankful someone somewhere thought of accessibility. Today, the ramps I used to walk my bike up to the walkway under my apartment are now a godsend for the wheelchair and the stairs that I used to haul my bike up begrudgingly are now a curse.

This is a cringe analogy but may be, just may be this will help since this is hacker news: think of the "Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy" and how writing comments is for your "future self." Well, making things accessible is for your future elderly or injured self if you're able bodied today. If you can't do it for others out of mere empathy, at the very least do it for a potential version of yourself in the future!

[0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html

There is a category of non disabled people who benefit from wheelchair accesses : parents of newborns who have to push a buggy wherever they go. I find it interesting that this positive side effect is rarely mentioned in the discussions about this topic.

Edit : this is actually mentionned in other comments.

Same with the web. Fully abled users benefit from keyboard accessibility when e.g. their mouse runs out of batteries, or they’re dominant hand is occupied (e.g. carrying baby).

Also accessibility isn't all or nothing. A lot of elderly people benefit from low vision concerns being incorporated into web design.

They still are if you talk to small business owners. Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people, especially when it costs them money or time. Many of them rail against how the "government" or some other boogeyman lawyer is after them and how they're the victim when they ignore the needs, and are then cajoled into meeting legal minimum requirements.

This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered priviliged tech workers who see an affront in doing anything for anyone other than themselves, even if it is in their own best interest.

Generally, if you're asking person X to spend money they don't want to spend, claiming that it's in their own best interest, it probably isn't.

You could say that about all of taxes.

What is best interest is debatable, but we know for a fact that some people show no interested in survival of people around them - like drunk drivers.

Or like management of Grenfell tower in UK was asked to address fire safety problems, they didn't want to spend the money and about 100 people burned alive. Also the building is gone.

Or like that apartment block in US that collapsed recently.

Or like management of Bhopals fertiliser plant, that failed due to lack of maintenance and produced positions gasses that killed thousands of people, ofcourse starting woth employees of the plant. The CEO ofcourse escaped to US and US is refusing to extradite him.

In fact I don't know how to apply your advise to anything safety related, there are literally millions of examples of people saving a bit of money on safety and dying as a result and killing people around them.

Hackernews: "Externalities happen to other people, now why are my gas prices so high?!"

I have progressive mobility loss. one time I went down the stairs to a bar, assuming there'd be an elevator back up - it was a big building. Bartender just told me to fuck off. I had to crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees with a friend behind me, holding my walker and ready to catch me if I fell.

if the bartender had been apologetic I wouldn't have felt so furious, but his utter disdain had my blood boiling.

Is there a reason he should be apologizing? He's a bartender, the only thing he's responsible for is serving you drinks, he has absolutely no say in the accessibility accommodations the building chooses to put in. I don't really blame him for telling you to fuck off if you kept pestering/berating him after he told you there's no an elevator. What exactly did you expect him to do?

> Is there a reason he should be apologizing?

Good manners? The business he represents is unable to accommodate a customer's needs. He should be nice about that. We have no indication that the bartender got berated.

An apology from someone who has absolutely no ability to influence those decisions or policies isn't a sincere one, and is basically coerced under threat of getting in trouble when someone complains to their boss that they weren't "understanding enough".

Are you American by chance? I find that lots of Americans seem to want and even feel they're owed that kind of false sincerity/kindness from "low skill" workers they interact with.

Also I doubt it got to the point of someone telling OP to fuck off just for asking if there's an elevator, there has to be more to that story.

Also also there's no indication that the same business that owns the bar is the same business that owns the building, maybe they just rent a space on the bottom floor. So again, not the bartenders responsibility to apologize for something they have no control over, and possibly they're not even a representative of the same business that owns the building that chose not to include the accommodations.

In regards to accessibility accommodations, the only responsibility I can see to the bartender is telling people that there's not an elevator when they ask and he seems to have fulfilled that.

> Americans seem to want and even feel they're owed that kind of false sincerity/kindness from "low skill" workers they interact with

This is true to a sometimes weird degree, but...

> there's no indication that the same business that owns the bar is the same business that owns the building

A business is going to get judged on its physical space regardless of ownership or fairness.

There's a bar in Amsterdam with a rather unique tap collection and a remarkably annoying location, but every time I mentioned it to one of my friends there neither of those things would come up - it was always some variation of "oh isn't that the one where you have to walk up a sketchy spiral staircase to use the toilet?"

> A business is going to get judged on its physical space regardless of ownership or fairness

The portion you quoted from my post doesn't necessarily represent my actual opinion, I was just pointing out his statement doesn't always hold true.

But I don't disagree with you, you can definitely judge a business for it's physical aspects, however I don't think your friends go up to the bartender demanding they fix the sketchy stairs, and then get upset to the point your "blood boils" when they don't personally apologize to you for them. There's a difference between judging and complaining with your friends privately, and hassling someone that happens to work there over stuff they have no control over.

'not the bartenders responsibility to apologize for something they have no control over, and possibly they're not even a representative of the same business that owns the building that chose not to include the accommodations.'

So if you have a serious situatuon, like a disabled person stuck in the basement, and the responce is just, leave them there? Like what has to happen for the barment to get off his ass and get the manager?

- 'Mate, you have a dead body at the bar!'

- 'Sorry pal, calling the police is not part of my job description'

To the customer, you represent the business. I see no reason why an able bodied man can't help, but if so, he should get someone who can. Whatever is the highest level manager or owner present has figure out the problem

Nobody can give a disabled person a helping hand anymore because there have been too many instances of disabled people suing good samaritans into oblivion when they fall and hurt themselves. At the very least an employee could be written up by their employer for touching a patron and at the worst they could be sued civilaly and have their lives ruined.

If American, you're leaving out the factor that the bartender is likely paid below minimum wage by the establishment thanks to our tipped wages laws.

That doesn't opt anyone out of common decency.

Parent post that I replied to was replying to grandparent which stated: "Good manners? The business he represents is unable to accommodate a customer's needs. He should be nice about that."

I think the disconnect may be if we're talking about an American bartender, they're likely getting paid below minimum wage (welcome to USA tipped wages) by the establishment. They have no power over the setup of the establishment and likely dislike both their boss and the customers. Source: I know a bunch of bartenders here in NYC.

I didn't pester or berate him. I asked him once. He didn't literally tell me to fuck off, he just said no and went back to cleaning up, clearly uninterested in helping me. It was a big, two-story building, like a complex, so I'm sure there was an elevator at least for employee use (nobody's dragging kegs down all those stairs.) He just made it very clear with his body language he wasn't interested in helping me, and that my question annoyed him.

But no, I didn't pester him, I just went to seethe in a corner and ask my friends for help.

If he let you into the employee-restricted part of the building to use the elevator he would probably get in trouble with management and lose his job. How is that a fair expectation?

I've been escorted through restricted areas before for accessibility reasons. it's pretty normal. assuming more than one person is working in the bar, all he needed to do is get someone to accompany me. he could also have checked with his boss to make sure it's okay. also, complying with the ADA isn't optional. I could have sued them, and I bet management would have liked that even less.

also, how is it a reasonable expectation for me to crawl on my hands and knees up a flight of grimy stairs in public? why don't you try it sometime? it'd give you a taste of what it's like for me to live.

Okay, so maybe don't lie on the internet and go around telling people a bartender told you to fuck off when all he said was "No" and we won't have to make assumptions about what you had to have done to get a service worker to tell you "Fuck off".

Also -- if the bar is on the first floor why would they be taking kegs upstairs in the first place?

You can call EMS in such a situation if you can afford to wait. Fire and rescue usually will not bill you, and may find the proprietor at fault.

>> some other boogeyman lawyer is after them

or you know there really could be... There is entire sub-group of lawyers that are ADA Trolls, just like there are Patent Trolls, and Copyright Trolls. They exist not to make business more accessible, but to line their pockets and make business hard for everyone, these lawyers give the ADA regulations a bad name and it a real and actual problem.

>>Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people

Ummm no. That is not actually true. the problem is often times the regulations are inflexible, and unaccommodating themselves businesses are often put in position where they simply can not comply for some reason or another to every letter of very regulation (of which are vast, vague, and complex)

Business owners also do not like to be continually threatened with heavy fines, and government violence in order to operate their business.

>This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered privileged tech workers

it is very sad that we have come to the point where only authoritarian control via threat of violence are to be seen as the "acceptable" solution to a social problem. At one point the liberal solution was anti-violence now it seems the only acceptable solution for vocal block of ill-liberal self centered privileged tech workers is to use the power of government violence to force their will upon others believing in their own moral certitude that their world view is the "correct" one, and anyone that disagrees has to be selfish immoral bigot or uncaring capitalist scum, or other such thing......

Liberal solutions instead would be using other incentives to persuade people to voluntary solutions

I just want to point out the juxapostion of this comment and the sibling comment where the commenter described their mobility issue and crawling up the stairs, in the context of the parent comment.

And what is your point? The practical effect of these ADA trolls is the complete shuttering of useful things that could not be made accessible in a reasonable fashion. E.g. universities have removed websites because they don't have the funding available to make the resources accessible. It's not trivial amounts of money, the case I was remembering was a court ordering the subtitling of years of video courses, ... or their removal.

I really feel for people with disabilities, but there's a heavy profit motive to abuse the ADA, and that's what causes people to hate it. There's other issues as well like rising costs of construction and doing anything productive due to red tape that are no doubt related, but what people see are the ADA trolls.

'It's not trivial amounts of money, the case I was remembering was a court ordering the subtitling of years of video courses'

Why can't a university afford subtitles, this is not a tall order, its a job a part-time first year student could do.

Then go after ADA trolls, instead of advocating effectively that disabled people (26% of the population) should just accept dehumanization and utter humiliation through no fault of their own and that they cannot change simply because society considers it too expensive for them to have basic dignity.

If all that people see are the ADA trolls they need to spend more time looking at their disabled brothers and sisters.

At the end of the day the question is, are we content to let them crawl? Are we content for the public space to be segregated? Would we allow this for our family or ourselves?

If we consider these things unacceptable then we need regulations. Regulations come with drawbacks and avenues for abuse, all of them, but it shouldn't be the primary and prevalent focus when they're put into place to protect marginalized sections of society. In a healthy society, I would expect of a tech forum to mainly be discussing tech tips and methods to comply with these norms. The truth is people don't want to do the minimum work to help these people, western societies are incredibly individualist and every effort or capital spent on helping others is seen as personal injury. It's this mindset that makes it so even in new products and constructions, the simplest norms aren't applied. I think there needs to be a change of mindset, because the first thing that should come to people's minds when reading this article is the social good that will come of it, not the reactionary examples of abuse.

The trolls are very visible and could eventually erode support for the ADA in the general public. This is true for any vulnerable population, actually. Asking people to ignore them never works well, there needs to be legislation work that specifically targets them so that the ADA doesn’t lose popularity.

I'm not asking people to ignore them, I'm asking for a hierarchy of concerns with regards to the ADA. The first concern being the acknowledgement of the good it does and its necessity.

It's arguable, but in my opinion you've got the chain of causality backwards. People here focus on the trolls because the ADAs popularity is low, they don't like the effort it entails, and they don't like government regulations in general, and they'd just as much not have to apply norms at all.

I can tell you the vast majority of businesses are not ADA compliant and do just fine.

The trolls are what make the ADA less popular, I’ve seen it happen in LA (a place where compliance and awareness is high)…some grifter was actively trying to figure out how to lodge an ADA complaint against the bagel shop I was in. It was utterly obvious, and this place, being in LA, had done everything right in terms of accessibility (the doors don’t have to be mechanical, just easy to open and wide enough to get a wheelchair through). You get a few bad actors in an otherwise good thing and they give the entire program a bad reputation.

Now…I don’t quite remember much when the ADA has done good, but I do remember that one troll shopping for a settlement check. This is the popularity problem the ADA faces.

>>because the first thing that should come to people's minds when reading this article is the social good that will come of it

Wishing does not make it so, and human psychology does not work that way and never will. if you continue to base your responses of this flawed view of reality you will continue to be disappointed.

One must plan for how humans actually are, you know reality, not how we wish things were. This is often the problem with regulations, economic policies, etc. People crafting them are crafting them for a population of people that does not actual exist, so they always fail

Humans are tribal, that tribe is generally viewed to max out at about 100 people or so, any group that is larger than that is going to be an abstract concept not something that can be held deeply personal. For a pure altruist motive that is the target, that is why local community groups are far more effective at charity than national programs, the people are more personally connected.

>>western societies are incredibly individualist

Through out history collectivist societies always fail because they are incompatible with human psychology. A collectivist society must stay small, it could never be the size of a city let alone a nation state. Individualist pursuits are the best way to organized large groups.

Collectivism works at a small, family or tribe level, not for a mass population

I don't know if you intend it that way, but it comes off very patronizing. You cannot ascribe the status quo to human nature, and paint people who seek to change it as naive idealists.

Society is changed by writing laws and changing minds. Cultures evolve, people acquire new perspectives on issues based on their peers and the discussions they partake in. Regulations are being written and discussions are being held as to their moral importance. No one is content with wishing on a star for a better world.

As for collectivism, you only need to look across the Atlantic for examples of functional western societies which strike a different balance than America between individualism and collectivism.

You can also look at the past, back when black people weren't allowed in white businesses and black schoolgirls had to be escorted by the state to be allowed to attend school. People didn't ascribe to a fatalist view back then, they believed things could change and they fought for it.

>You can also look at the past, back when black people weren't allowed in white businesses and black schoolgirls had to be escorted by the state to be allowed to attend school.

I always find this argument ironic given the Jim Crow laws you are referring to were government regulations that required said discrimination, they were collectivist policies being imposed upon individuals. Would discrimination still have occurred absolutely, but it would not have been as wide spread nor as abusive. Only government action can cause the kind of oppression seen, only government has that monopoly of violence to allow such perversion of morality, that is the hazard of putting your faith in government.

Just like the EU nations you admire so much you only seem to want to ever talk about the positives of this "balance" of regulation and never talk about the enumerable negatives that come from those policies

Do you believe the EU is rainbows and unicorns and none of the their policies have any downsides, that the American model is 100% evil, and the EU model is 100% good? are you that much of a "naive idealist".

I do not claim the American model is perfect, though I am pretty sure we will differ on where the root cause of most of the problems are (hint I blame federal overreach for most of America's problems)

>>Society is changed by writing laws and changing minds. Cultures evolve, people acquire new perspectives on issues based on their peers and the discussions they partake in

Culture evolves yes, and laws always follow culture, not the other way around. you can not regulate ethics or morality, and attempts and trying always fail.

That is my point. The regulations that work, that do not have massive corruption, or massive amounts of unintended consequences or regulations that only need to control a small portion of outliers in society. to prevent actions that are viewed by the vast vast majority (not just a plurality, or even a simply majority) as abuse.

When "democracy" passes laws and regulations based on plurality, or simple majority you run into all kinds of problems, these are compounded even further if the regulation are acted via fiat authority by an unelected administrative state.

The fact that discriminatory laws exist does not invalidate the usefulness of the rule of law. Jim Crow was very much in line with the cultural beliefs of the population. Culture does not absolutely precede law, law and culture feed each other. A recent example are the rates of acceptance of gay marriage before and after the laws passed.

>> Do you believe the EU is rainbows and unicorns and none of the their policies have any downsides, that the American model is 100% evil, and the EU model is 100% good? are you that much of a "naive idealist".

I see now you were not being patronizing by accident, but are willfully insulting. Painting a caricature of my argument does not strengthen yours.

I'm just telling you what a fair number of people think. Separate what I am telling you from what I may believe.

We do not know the full story of that comment. Remember all stories have 2 sides we only have one. Even taking the story at face value all we really know is the one employee of the bar was an asshole. Asshole exist in the world and no amount of regulations is going to change that, in fact the inverse is generally true in that more regulations simply create more assholes (i.e malicious compliance)

You don't have to restrict yourself to that comment, ask any physically disabled person they'll have a story of having to crawl or being trapped in an inaccessible space. The bartender is not the issue, the issue is the systemic lack of basic human dignity and access afforded to the disabled.

Yep, if you look at their comment history, you can see it case in point. Rants about how fiat currency are the biggest fraud in history, etc. Every talk of government is using the phrase threats of violence.

Another one talking about the virtues of Trump government. Its kind of surreal in its divergence from reality.

A guy my Dad knew had a business, and the parking lot could hold about 4 cars (his, and 3 customers), all right in front of the door. He couldn't blacktop the lot, because if he did he'd have to paint a designated accessible-only parking spot, which actually would take up two spots. So he had to leave it as a gravel lot, which made it harder for wheelchair access.

It isn't that he was against accommodations, it just didn't make sense for that location where each spot was right by the door.

The space being wider and the spaces being close to the door are two separate accommodations. Leaving it gravel leaves one solved (distance) and simply avoids the other (width) completely while ignoring that caused a 3rd (gravel if you do manage to get out). The guaranteed width is so there is a standard amount of space to exit the vehicle, see the drawing at https://www.ada.gov/restriping_parking/restriping2015.html

But yes it gets increasingly hard to have a good solution for everyone when there are so few spaces.

I read years ago that there was a minor industry of lawyers looking at satellite photos to find motels with a swimming pool, and then suing them for the pool not being ADA compliant.

The usual result was the pool got filled in, as it was too expensive to upgrade it.

Who came out ahead? Nobody but the lawyers.

Who did pay those lawyers?

The lawyers settled with the motels for $$$.

I do not live in the USA so I'm woefully ignorant of US legal matters but how does a lawyer, having identified a breach of a federal law, then get a payment from the miscreant ? I mean the only way that comes to mind is to write to the offender saying "You're breaking the law but if you send me a cheque I won't tell anyone". For a lawyer in particular that doesn't strike me as a sustainable business activity !

So there's obviously something I'm missing here ... would you care to explain ?

Punitive damages, I'd think. "you weren't compliant now you have to pay x. Because lawyer y brought the suit, that lawyer gets the money"

The lawyer needs to find a person that has suffered as a result in order for the suit to be valid. So they team up with someone who is unable to use the facility as a result of it not being compliant. They sue, and split the money. Often, all that is needed is for the lawyer to demand compensation since it is far easier and cheaper to just offer them a few thousand dollars to settle than it is to hire a lawyer and figure it out in court.

The ADA is interesting because, to my understanding, the law asks for ‘reasonable’ accommodation without defining what that is. So it leaves it to the courts to decide. It is reasonable that new building should be completely wheelchair accessible. But is it reasonable for architecturally or historically significant sites to be modified for wheelchair accessibility? That’s where the lawyers come in.

Think of how much easier this process will be with websites. Just crawl and email legal threats. Lawyers will get paid again. Some tech people might even go along for the ride.

"Actually helping people is bad" is an extremely attractive narrative that sticks very effectively. It is regularly used to resist all manner of useful systems from welfare to charitable giving to accessibility.

"I read years ago that _nonspecific_thing_" should be a red flag for making broad judgements about the merits of accessibility. One story about "welfare queens" poisoned millions of people against anti-poverty measures for generations.

> should be a red flag

I'm sorry I don't have a photographic memory. But hey, a simple google search comes up with:

"In California, serial plaintiffs and their lawyers have found these cookie-cutter lawsuits to be lucrative as plaintiffs can claim statutory damages, compensatory damages, treble damages and attorneys’ fees."

https://hotellaw.jmbm.com/ada_defense_lawyer_pool_lift_l.htm...

Accessibility and building regs ironically combined to prevent a bookstore where I used to work from replacing a set of skinny, awkward, inward-opening doors which made the entire store a fire trap.

Why? Because state law required that any part of the building being modified be brought into compliance with modern building code. In this case:

- Replacing the doors with outward-opening doors would mean bringing the doorframe into compliance by widening it

- Widening the doorframe would mean widening the alcove into which it opens, and in a 19th-century masonry mid-rise every wall is structural

- Widening the door also means widening the short (3-4 steps) staircase leading up to it and bringing them into code by making them less steep

- Making the stairs less steep means they are now longer than the alcove and protrude beyond the property line onto the sidewalk

> it costs them money

The value calculus of something always seems to be heavily dependent on who gets the bill.

> even if it is in their own best interest.

I'm one of those people blessed with knowing what's best for other people, but I restrict my efforts to giving them unwanted advice. I don't care to force it on them.

Your comments are usually much more substantive. Using the sliding slope argument for wheelchair access makes you look like a right dick.

When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time.

> Test accessibility with keyboard

One very simple step a dev can take is to just `tab` over their pages and check that important elements (links, buttons, etc) receive focus. Especially if they toggle something on the page via JS. If something doesn't, replace the div soup w/ a focusable element like `<a href="javascript:;"></a>`

For those saying accessibility is hard, doing just this one thing can make a big difference.

You don't even really need to replace the divs, just add tabIndex="0" on the things that should be focusable/tab-able.

This is mostly true, but it's usually better/easier to use the semantic element for any particular use case. In this case, for example, to correctly mimic how the <a> tag works, you'll need to handle both click events and keyboard events (e.g. space for clicking), and even then you'll struggle to handle right-clicks, ctrl-clicks or middle clicks in a way that is truly cross-platform.

The <a> tag, on the other hand, just does all that for you.

Bonus points: if you realize that you get annoyed from having to tab through the navigation every time, add a skip link at the beginning of the page.

I've always wondered but never really investigated... do screen readers handle css-only drop downs well? We've always avoided it and instead used javascript to toggle aria attributes which seems very backwards.

I think it depends on the implantation. I think it is more important that your drop down is keyboard accessible. I usually expand my menus with ":focus-within" as well as ":hover" and make sure that one element which is always visible is also focusable. That way you can tab to it and the menu expands.

Element visibility should not be triggered via focus or hover. Visibility states should be triggered with a button click or enter key press.

Indeed, you should probably just use "<details>" and "<summary>" for drop downs today (works perfectly without any javascript and have accessibility built in). CSS only dropdowns were a hack for an era before these elements were widely supported.

> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed.

Not as far as I know, nobody I knew was hating on any disabled people, but laziness, procrastination, and the cost of accomodations was enough to prevent quite a few businesses from accomodating the disabled ( with ramps and such ) until they were legally forced to do it under penalty of law... And even today only businesses considered "public accommodations" are required to comply... that's it really not hate, just laziness.

How much of the nation’s wealth has been invested in this, and where has it not been invested? Make sure you count lawsuits, paperwork, planning, construction, maintenance, and enforcement. And try not to respond without pointing out something more wasteful, rather than something productive. Let’s pretend you took that money and invested it in advanced education for young black women in Chicago instead. What did we forgo?

There's no guarantee it would be invented in that instead of a new jetski.

The reflexive, but non-engaged and and economically dishonest answer here is to avoid the question by comparing any investment to a write-off, this justifying anything. Nobody thinks like this looking forward, as it’s clearly nonsense. That’s why I proposed you not do this.

Where's the incentive for business owners to invest in the latter instead of reinvesting the profits? I just don't see it.

A system where we invest our money in only the maximally productive places is not a system that is just. Ensuring that people aren't left behind is a virtue and even if investing in people at the boundaries ends up leading to less society-wide productivity it is still valuable.

Your proposal falls prey to a sort of "investment-productivity monster." What if we identified the brightest kids in 2nd grade and spent all of our education resources on them, while shuffling the rest into the Amazon Fulfillment Centers? Maybe that'd increase overall productivity. But it'd be wrong.

Your reasoning in itself is faulty: It pitches perceived good for one group ("young black women in Chicago") against perceived good of another group ("wheelchair users").

Let's for a moment disregard that there are a lot more wheelchair users than young black women in Chicago, and that the wheelchair users obviously are a lot more disadvantaged - a government is not a business. Its goal is not necessarily to use money "ideally beneficial" in a utilitarian way - its goal is to keep a society working, which in our liberal democracy environment means protecting the weak and keeping things relatively fair (in the sense: to help those who cannot help themselves).

While every young black woman from Chicago can stay in school, attend night school, or spend time in a library, not even the most athletic wheelchair-user can consistently hop their wheelchair (plus body-weight) up the stairs. And even if every single black young Chicago-woman becomes a new entrepreneur, resulting in a larger net-good for society as a whole, the wheelchair-user still would have the same problem.

The ADA is enforced by civil lawsuits. You can make a lot of money going around finding "violations" and suing over them. In the heyday of compliance for restaurants, a fair number of iconic restaurants in our area were put out of business by these lawsuits because they were in old buildings where it was just not possible to make accommodations. No rooms for ramps. No way to put in elevators. You get the idea.

This action may result in some benefits for those who need it, but the main beneficiaries will be law firms.

Is that true? I thought ADA compliance is like building code compliance. It is only enforced during changes. I would guess a lot the restaurants failed because lots of restaurants fail.

Restaurants remodel all the time. Does replacing an old door trigger lots of other work?

My city has published a guide on this topic.

> Americans with Disabilities Act

> First, the ADA requires all places of public accommodation, including retail businesses, to remove barriers to access whenever it is readily achievable to do so..

> "Readily achievable" means easily accomplishable, and able to be done without much difficulty or expense. This is an ongoing obligation, and is required even if you are not performing any renovations.

> In addition, if you are altering or renovating an existing building, the ADA also requires you to make the altered areas readily accessible to and usable by people with disabilities. The ADA also requires you provide an accessible route from the building entrance to the altered areas, so long as doing so does not result in disproportionate costs.

> "Disproportionate costs" are defined as those costs exceeding 20% of the overall cost of the alterations. For example, if you are spending $50,000 on alterations, under the ADA you may have to spend up to an additional S10,000 providing an accessible route.

https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/EconDev/Interi...

Thanks for your perspective here. Surprised at the pushback as well, on HN of all places.

Why are you surprised at the pushback?

Yes. The ADA in the 1990s got huge push back from right wing America where it was widely and publicly derided.

It is easy to make a basic web form, e-commerce site, or blog post accessible. But the web is largely becoming a space for arbitrarily-complex, fully-interactive applications. Today's web is full of products with:

- complex information architecture, with nuanced relationships between nodes communicated by position, spacing, boundaries and other visual cues

- real-time data updates that transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways

- screens where nearly every square inch is actionable, and these actions transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways

- controls that are not simply a button or text link, but regions full of structured content embedded within them.

- screens that respond to inputs in real-time in arbitrary complex ways

- rich graphics that eschew the traditional document model, with its established accessibility guidelines, altogether

To make such an application accessible requires:

1.) auditing all the visual cues, writing supplementary text if necessary, and adding the ARIA properties to communicate these cues

2.) communicating all document transformation to the user, either by navigating focus to the new content, or communicated to the user some other way. In the case of real-time updates, this also can't obstruct the normal usage of the site.

This is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of how screen-readers work or the ARIA spec. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually test every product on a screen reader.

Unfortunately, few engineers (and even fewer designers) have this expertise. Many years ago, I did a 12-week, 70-hour-a-week web development bootcamp, and, of those 800+ hours, exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes were spent on web accessibility. To be honest, I doubt the instructors even knew anything on the subject.

Sure, it would be easier to build an accessibility web by just simplifying product requirements. But I have had little-to-no success doing this as an IC engineer.

I agree with you. But we’ve had decades to get better at accessibility, and yet it’s practically mostly worse today than with desktop apps in 1999.

A forcing function is needed. Those wheelchair ramps didn’t get built because architects and real estate developers thought it was fun and interesting.

I don't disagree, and I am not trying to argue that these laws aren't a good thing. But I'm also not sure the lawsuits are going to make a big difference.

My last company, despite facing an actual accessibility lawsuit, was willing to let all 3 of the engineers with the most accessibility expertise walk (including myself) rather than allow a long-term WFH policy.

Turning an existing application into a accessible one is a huge issue, but only if it was built without accessibility in mind.

That is a bit like saying "todays applications do all sorts of potentially dangerous operations and need to be integrated with social media etc. Making all that secure is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of IT security work or the OWASP top 10. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually pen-testing every product."

Yes, accessibility is work. But not optional. If you build non-accessible websites you are just bad at your job.

Hey I'm curious: how's MS teams? Slack? Discord? Zulip (chat.zulip.org)?

I hear that many of you are uninterested in doing the work required here. Allow me to offer a couple arguments in favor of taking accessibility seriously:

1. Disability is a spectrum, not a condition, and a temporal, not a terminal state. Ever get your eyes dilated? Ever break your foot? Ever try using most common devices with a baby in your hands? Ever needed to watch a video in a loud room, or a place in which you cannot use headphones? Ever try using a laptop outside on a sunny day? Ever try getting old?

2. 26% of all adults in the US have some form of disability. 10% of these are sensory (hearing/sight). Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population?

3. We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public, not just a subset of it - we're making an average of 2-5x the median income, presumably based on our professionalism, knowledge of our craft, and ability to do hard things.

4. It's the right thing to do, both morally and practically. It allows every person to participate in society, allows us to leverage the full skills and abilities of every available human, and doesn't give us an "out" to start excluding people because we're too lazy to consider their needs.

5. If none of that sways you: some day you too will need this, if for no other reason than you've gotten old. It'll be nice to live in a world in which the people we are today are willing to take care of the people we'll be some day.

Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels.

In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image.

The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.

The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...

One of the weird parts I find about accessibility is that it tends to be considered as ‘something the developers do’. That we can solve accessibility just through technical means, and generally just by playing around with the user interface. In organization after organization I see accessibility as something the tech org has to champion to get time to deliver on, so it gets seen as an ‘extra cost’ of developing a feature. But the fact is that some features, as requested, are really hard to deliver in an accessible way - but if you thought about what you wanted to deliver from an accessible angle in the first place you might find there’s a way to solve the problem that is intrinsically more accessible.

In general not enough attention is paid to just flat out whether an entire business process is accessible. Or perhaps more - how you can adjust your business, your offering, or your process in order to make it possible for more people to access it, or to be employed by you in delivering it.

If you treat accessibility as a box checking exercise done by web and app devs you can end up worrying about making the driver portal of your ride sharing app work for a blind user, rather than thinking about what features are needed to make it possible for a person in a wheelchair to hire a rideshare that can accommodate them.

Accessibility doesn’t begin and end at screenreader support and text contrast levels. But if you leave it up to developers to do then that may be all you’re going to be able to get.

Agree with this. As much shade as I tend to throw at engineers for not considering the consequences of our actions, finance, sales, and marketing are absolutely different beasts here, and you're right that it often does wind up being engineering that's trying to push for these viewpoints.

All of this is right, except for this part:

> We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public

“Asked” is wrong here. I can “ask” someone to do something. The government can “force” someone to do something, ultimately at gunpoint. That’s what I don’t like about this.

I think the parent comment makes a fair point. No matter how small the issue, the government's rules are ultimately backed by the threat of deadly violence [0].

I think the rhetorical difference between "ask" and "force" is ripe for abuse in discussions regarding contentious government roles.

[0] If this seems implausible, consider this thought experiment (U.S.-based). A police officer gives you a ticket jaywalking. If you don't pay it, you're at risk of being the target of an arrest warrant. If the police find you, they will attempt to put you in cuffs. It goes downhill from there. For jaywalking.

I'm not arguing for or against things working this way, but I do think it's reality.

In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking

> In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking

I agree. But you are being arrested for the consequences of fully refusing to accept the jaywalking rule.

No, I don't think you are. You're being arrested for not paying the fine. Each was an independent choice on your part.

All social compacts are ultimately backed with force. If you and a dozen people fucked off to SeaLand and lived in an anarchic commune, your agreements with one another would _still_ ultimately be backed by force, in the same way that everything here is: Your SeaLand commune agrees on some principles for behavior - say, no pushing other people; someone in the group decides to push other people; the group intervenes, attempts to talk the person out of pushing other people; the Pusher refuses to see reason; the group either resorts to force or abandons the commune to a pushocracy. If you want to argue the government is illegitimate, then go ahead, but to just point vaguely to "socially defined rules are backed by force" isn't really _saying_ anything without that.

In the same way that architects and contractors are forced to follow building codes, yes.

I'm looking for the day when someone has a gun held to their head for not making their website accessible. More likely, you'll just be fired for not doing your job.

By that logic, I can refuse to follow this law without consequence? Sounds to me like my options are to comply, pay fines until I can’t and then comply, or go to jail (which would be done at gunpoint).

What am I missing? What’s the magic way to avoid complying with this new government edict without escalating to violence?

> What’s the magic way to avoid complying with this new government edict without escalating to violence?

Move to the mountains and farm turnips.

If you mean "how do I avoid complying with laws while still participating in polite society," you're right, that one you can't do.

Right, but the law doesn’t prohibit me from farming turnips*. It prohibits me from running a website without doing certain things. That’s what will be enforced, in escalating fashion up to and including violence.

If someone “asks” me to do something, they usually don’t mean “otherwise I will take your money and/or jail you”. But all laws have that threat, otherwise they wouldn’t mean anything. Hence why I take issue with saying the govt is “asking” us to do something - even though that thing is good and honorable, it’s still not an “ask”.

*well, I mean, there’s probably mountain turnip preservation zones or something, where it would prohibit me from farming mountain turnips.

What do you propose instead? All governance has force at its roots.

Certainly, no disagreement there. What I propose is that we avoid being cavalier about the implications of creating law.

Using the force of government is, or should be, a serious affair, and I think we water it down by using language like “they’re just asking”, etc. The force of government never “just asks” - when Trump was deporting people, no one (reputable) said they were “asked to leave”.

That sense of seriousness about government force would help us see clearly what is, and is not, worth bringing government into.

I really do love the fact that mass deportation and the digital equivalent of building codes are being treated as equivalent. Peak HN.

I don't think anyone is really unclear on law. You are expected to follow it, lest you be punished.

Have you put an accurate description on every image you've every uploaded to the web? No? You're going to jail or pay a fine since you didn't accommodate blind people. You uploaded 40k images and it will take you an entire year 8yrs a day 5days a week to tag and annotate every single on of them and not working your kids will go hungry and your pets starve. Too bad for you.

Note: I have around 160k images on the net, all marked as CC-BY. Thought I was doing something good by sharing but now I'm told if I don't make them all blind accessible then I'm a criminal.

I also have ~200 open source projects, 10 or so are fairly popular. Volunteered lots of time to make them, don't believe I should be forced under threat of fines and jail to have to put more time into them.

The government needs to do that when the market fails to do it.

I don't think somebody should honestly call themselves an "engineer" if they can't be bothered to make their systems usable by the masses. It is an utter lack of professionalism.

> 26% have some form of disability

Find that hard to believe purely on common experience + if not, likely not "disabled" in the sense of being affected to a degree of not being able to use a standard website. in the same vein, counterargument here is a lot of disabled people _can_ indeed use a standard website.

> Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population?

Irregardless of what kind of of business I'm running, I'm targeting only tiny sliver of population. I'm easily ignoring 90%, sometimes 99.9% of population, as long as it allows me to make a better product for the remaining few.

The very first place I worked at (as a developer) was a university. We were, for obvious reasons, very concerned with accessibility. I know this doesn't sit well with most web developers, but the primary thing that made it easier (back then, and IANAL), was to use HTML instead of javascript. Another way of saying that is, the primary problem with making websites accessible, is that they have far more javascript than they need, for functionality like "allow the user to submit a form" or "allow the user to click on a link". 99% of accessibility problems with current websites would disappear if they were made with 20th century web technology.

Also, I have to add, they would work better for the rest of us in 99% of the cases. There are a few websites whose functionality actually benefits from React (or Vue or whatever), but most websites are either doing "show this static content" or "allow this form to be submitted", and the primary reason the javascript is there is that the developer wants it there, not that it does the user any real good.

It’s extreme developer specific tunnel vision to think removing JS would be good.

Your comment is pretty ironic because that same sentiment (“this is how I see the world”) is what makes the web so inaccessible for disabled people.

I disagree. They speak from experience. Removing JS from the user experience simplifies the developer's toolset to a subset which is usually also accessible.

There is still room for beloved JS, such as serving ads, tracking user behavior, mining crypto on unsuspecting users' computers, centering a div, and all the other arcane utilities for which one disables JS in the browser for.

Accessibility and JS are not mutually exclusive. It's just much easier to do accessibility without JS.

Exactly. Removing JS simplifies a developers toolkit to a subset that is also often accessible.

Correct. More specifically, the HTML standard itself has quite a bit of accessibility friendliness baked in, and the remainder has been patched over by screen readers and other tools successfully due to sheer age of the standard.

When you make the site self-modifying with JavaScript, you as the developer are taking on the responsibility of continuing that chain of wise design decisions. And much like the thought that you probably shouldn't roll your own crypto unless you're a cryptography expert, maybe bending the user experience too far is something you shouldn't do unless you have some accessibility training.

Man, I'm really surprised anyone here actually seems to like JavaScript

I use so few websites that legitimately need it.. looking at my open tabs right now, I have Gmail, Discord, and Coderpad that legitimately implemented interactive web applications with JavaScript, and then every other one of the 20 tabs is just a static website that uses JavaScript as a weapon to track me and interfere with me in various ways

I'm not surprised, if you look at the front-page articles a lot of the time there will be something about the latest JS framework. HN has a significant number of web developers in its userbase.

Gmail has a static HTML version too.

Odd, because when I was the effective head of web for a university, they weren't concerned with accessibility in the slightest (This extended into the physical realm, wheelchair users complained constantly). What they wanted to do was deliver pictures, pretty pictures, and lots of them, and have effects. I couldn't get anyone to spare the time on it. I had my own tricks (lynx, glasses in weird prescriptions, dark sunglasses, odd mouse settings) to simulate various issues, but ... they ain't got time for that!

Finally, I found an argument that worked. Just as pointing out that many accommodations help out those who are not disabled, well ... disability-friendly sites naturally lend themselves to better rankings on search engines.

Sadly, that was the only argument that carried any weight.

When we’re you effective head of web?

About 2000 through 2007.

Clever. I don't know why Univ of Texas at Austin was different than your experience, but it was. It's the only university I've worked at as a developer, so I assumed that was it, but perhaps it was just that particular university's developer culture.

The thing is, sure, plain HTML pages can be accessible, but my goodness they can be tedious.

Sighted browser users don’t particularly care if when they click through the page forward/backward links or sort a grid view by clicking a header, if the whole page reloads or if an Ajax call happens in the background. Their mouse pointer and their visual focus remain on the same place on the screen, and whether there’s a flash of white before it reappears, or a slick animated spinner, they can fluently interact with the page regardless of how it accomplishes that interaction.

But imagine using a screenreader on such a site where, every time you interact with a grid, it loads up a new page. Every time you do something, the screenreader tells you the page title, starts reading the navigation. You skip to main content. Then you need to navigate back through the table to where you were. Then you need to interact again, and.. boom, back to another page load.

This is an experience that can absolutely be enhanced through JavaScript. ARIA makes it possible for you to offer that screenreader user a much more fluent experience, where navigating to another page loads more content and immediately reads it back to you.

Sure, the HTML version is always going to be somewhat navigable with a screenreader. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually tolerably accessible.

It is, absolutely, possible to make an accessible web page with javascript. It is an order of magnitude (and I mean that literally) more likely to happen with a plain HTML page.

I think you're underestimating the capabilities assistive technologies have for dealing with dynamic UX.

Apps can be accessible. Video games can be accessible. The claim that any experience delivered in a web browser should, to enhance accessibility, remove and simplify interactivity down to just hyperlinks and forms, rather than support assistive technology in the use of more advanced interactions, seems completely defeatist.

This has the possibility to be a giant step backward, as the following example shows.

Back in 2019, California tax agency FTB made the following announcement[0]:

State agencies’ websites are often the primary way of communicating information to the public and it is important that these sites and the information they provide are available to everyone. AB 434 (2017) required state entities to improve the accessibility of websites and certify that their site meets Web Accessibility Initiative standards by July 1, 2019.

So what happened? Many tax documents, which taxpayers rely on to understand the tax law as it applies to them, stopped being available as downloadable PDF files, or else to obtain the PDF file, you have to provide an email address to FTB and then wait until they get around to sending you a copy. Previously, you could immediately download all the PDFs using self-service.

While some of the docs are also available in HTML format, that is not as handy as PDF in many cases. Also, many documents are only available as PDF.

I don't understand how this helped visually impaired users, but it certainly harmed everyone else.

[0]State of California - Franchise Tax Board - Tax News May 2019

The problem here is people choosing to give up instead of comply with policy. How do you propose addressing that? What kind of policy would prevent this outcome? They clearly didn't want to do the work to make their content accessible, and up until that point they were allowed to get away with not doing the work.

It's usually marginally funded and/or essentially private ventures that back out or go bankrupt. There's cases of restaurants having to close down because they simply don't have renovation funds. If it's truly a public good it should be publicly funded. The public likely won't want to fund it, so you're gonna have to go with something more lax like exempting old construction entirely or publishing piecemeal best practices.

Like in this case, readers are to the point where a plain HTML offering should suffice. This is thankfully something that is not a ton of extra work. But for physical ADA compliance it is unfortunately expensive.

> They clearly didn't want to do the work to make their content accessible

I would rewrite that to: "Nobody who wrote the law allocated any money to DO the work."

I'm sympathetic to your cause for "official" documents. Government needs to be accessible to everybody. Consequently, those kinds of websites need to be held to strong standards.

I'm somewhat sympathetic for holding big businesses to account. Your utility website needs to be accessible. Registering for your college classes needs to be accessible (mentioned because class registration web stuff is normally barely functional for anybody). As does your ISP billing website. etc.

I'm less sympathetic when small businesses are involved. We have already seen the ADA being used to shake down small businesses in meatspace. Moving this to webspace is a bad idea. There need to be both size and grandfathering limits.

I'm not sympathetic at all after that. We've have been down this road. UC Berkeley pulled a ton of teaching videos from the web after being forced to comply with web ADA. Those videos are offline and aren't coming back. Technology changed and now automated captioning could probably work for most of those videos--except that they are gone by legal order and nobody is going to put themselves out to reverse that.

This was a terrible result--for everybody including those needing accessibility.

The people preaching web ADA need to remember that this isn't meatspace ADA--"Pull content off the web completely" is always an option.

ADA policy generally isn't being set by the people who allocate funds. Someone deciding what policies will enable accessibility for the blind almost certainly has no control over whether a conservative lawmaker will decide to actually fund the local agencies responsible for accessibility. So again, what policy do you suggest to address this? This is not a problem with the accessibility policy, it's a problem with the way the agencies responsible for compliance are run and funded. The ADA could close up shop and the underlying funding and compliance problems would not go away, they would just cause other problems.

How would the lawmakers responsible for the ADA have magically conjured the money necessary for every agency to comply?

> How would the lawmakers responsible for the ADA have magically conjured the money necessary for every agency to comply?

How would you feel if the government passed a law that every restaurant must set aside 2 tables with a special HEPA circulation and sterilization system just in case someone immune compromised wishes to eat there? Or perhaps you need that HEPA system so that unvaccinated individuals can be isolated. (just to make sure I offend both sides of the political spectrum)

This is equivalent to what ADA laws do.

Don't get me wrong. I really like ADA laws (having a broken ankle drives this home quite painfully). However, I like ADA laws that apply strongly to entities with lots of money and much more weakly to the small players.

I want WalMart, Starbucks, the state government and the megaconglomerate behind an apartment complex to have to adhere to the full battery of ADA laws. I'd like my local mom-and-pop coffeeshop, by contrast, to have a lot of latitude. The big boys have enough power--we don't need to give them yet another way to cudgel those who might compete with them.

> This is equivalent to what ADA laws do.

That’s untrue; you literally just set up a straw man and then argued against it. Point to sources instead. Point to the ADA wording directly. Point to case law. But making up random hypotheticals completely devoid of evidence they connect with reality in any way is exhaustingly bad faith.

Berkeley is a terrible example, if you have ever read DoJ’s findings.

Berkeley had university resources available for teachers to assist with making accessible content, as well as policies in place requiring accessibility. Professors chose not to follow those policies or make use of those resources.

Never mind the fact that regardless of where Berkeley hosts/distributes the content, they are a publicly funded institution and still need to make the content accessible even if not distributed to the public.

In other words, they pulled the content down out of spite, not necessity. That is not the fault of laws requiring disabilities, that’s a toddler having a temper tantrum.

I disagree. They were a byproduct of the regular teaching which followed accessibility standards. If a student in a class needed accommodations, they were provided, however the videos were similar to someone posting a video of their security camera rather than Berkeley orchestrating a recorded class session.

The point of the ADA is social good and not one single person benefitted, directly or indirectly, from the Berkeley videos being taken down.

For example, the California State Parks website complied with this. Here's an example of a PDF that needs to be requested: https://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/21299/files/angel_island_gp_a...

It seems silly, but it does create a very strong motivation to make these documents accessible. And I can already tell that previously removed PDFs are now available again, presumably with their accessibility issues fixed.

I think we can all understand and agree with wanting to help disabled people as well as possible, but there's no clear binding standard for what constitutes an accessible website. Two different experts can look at the same site and give 2 different opinions about what's accessible about the experience or not or how to best improve it.

Additionally, technology changes all of the time: new screen readers and new web APIs come out and and more. Best practices don't necessarily get perfected on day 1. Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best? This is complex enough for large tech companies who can write a blank check for a large team of full-time developers who can work full time on nothing but accessibility, let alone a little corner cupcake store who managed to save up enough to build a custom cupcake website or something. Do we seriously expect every small non-technical business eking out a living with a small store to be experts on every facet of accessibility?

If we're going to cover websites under the ADA, I think there should a lot more leeway for "reasonable accommodations" that can be made. If a small business can't make an accessible order form for some reason, they should be able to take orders over email or the phone or something before getting sued for this.

Regarding your last point, I think that is already the case? Dominos was sued because their site/app was not accessible, and lost, partly because the court ruled that calling in an order was not an adequate alternative because the plaintiff was placed on hold for 45 minutes multiple times.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-finds-domino-s-pizza...

> new screen readers and new web APIs come out and and more.

New web APIs, for sure. But the screen reader market is not fast moving, in terms of new software being adopted. The line-up of the most used three screen readers (NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver) has not changed in over a decade, despite the individual software applications themselves undergoing changes, and of course the market share of each one increasing and decreasing over time.

> Do we seriously expect every small non-technical business eking out a living with a small store to be experts on every facet of accessibility?

No, but I also don't expect such a business to be up on the latest in security, PCI compliance, GDPR conformance and more. For that reason, they are probably either:

1. engaging a web design/development agency; and/or 2. using a pre-defined platform, like Shopify.

In the former case, I do expect anyone making money from website building to at least give accessibility some thought. For the latter, Shopify is one of the businesses you describe, as a "large tech company who can write a blank check for a large team of full-time developers who can work full time on nothing but accessibility". As such, they absolutely should be setting up small business owners for success, by making their out-of-the-box themes, widgets, flows, etc. reasonably accessible to the widest possible audience.

Ah, so that is why small businesses so commonly do not have a website and use Facebook instead.

Most small businesses want some solution that Just Works^TM. The less time and money spent, the better.

Most small businesses will also not jerry-rig their own payment processors.

Can we acknowledge that there’s more than 1 important competing “socially good” value that’s in conflict with your prescription?

Your prescription is a large step towards the death of what portion of the free and open web still exists. Just saying “build your business website on some default storefront or walled-garden by Facebook, Amazon, Shopify, or some other mega corporation’s platform and don’t change 1 line of code or risk legal obliteration” is close to a death sentence for an independent web.

Is it not valid to point out that doing our best to maintain an independent web is also an important value as well for the world, for disabled people, and future generations?

It is not valid to say that the value of an open web trumps the value of people being able to use the open web.

Inaccessibility can prevent a person from getting a job, or cause a person to lose their job if the requirements for that job change (I've seen it happen). What is the equivalent personal cost of further centralizing the web?

Hit the nail on the head. There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way. When does a bug or bad design choice impacting screen readers constitute discrimination or failure of reasonable accommodation?

The answer is nuanced and will depend on the history of the website and not just the current state. Is the site always buggy for everyone? Is the site confusing for everyone? How do the developers respond to bugs/feedback for general bugs vs bugs impacting accessibility.

Of course if you completely ignore accessibility that is much more straight forward.

> There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way.

I wonder if any ADA defense attorneys have tried this angle. “We aren’t discriminatory, your honor, our website is a terrible experience for all of our users.”

> There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way.

Your comment made me wonder if this will lead to the situation where some businesses will just opt to have 2 different versions of their website, one designed primarily to hit the accessibility requirements, and the other one made for users who do not require accessibility accommodations. Kinda similar to certain businesses which, in the past, used to have separate mobile versions of their websites (before reactive website layouts became easier to implement and more commonplace).

As long as those accessible versions of websites comply with legal accessibility requirements and provide the exact same services as the non accessibility-targeted website versions (i.e., features and functions are not exclusively present in one version but not another, so you can perform the exact same functions in both), that shouldn't cause any legal issues, right?

Note: I am not trying to come up with some "workaround" to "beat" the requirement. I think that, overall, accessibility is a great cause, and I am not taking a stance on this issued guidance from the Justice Department. I am just trying to see where this could lead us, based on my current understanding of this guidance.

WCAG does allow for “conforming alternate versions”[1]. However, it’s one of those areas companies think they’ve found a loophole and then quickly realize how impractical it is to maintain two entirely different applications.

If you’re going to go through all that effort, why not just build and maintain one application that is more accommodating?

Alternate versions are typically best reserved for minor feature flags (e.g., user given option to change colors to a high contrast non-brand palette), for instance, than wholly separate versions.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#...

> There is no guarantee that a website will be functional or work correctly for those without disabilities, much less be designed in a user friendly easy to use way.

Is this a strawman argument by someone who doesn't understand accessibility or do you have actual examples?

Serious question, are you really asking for examples of broken sites? Have you never used a site that was broken, took forever to do something simple, or was otherwise not acting as expected?

Just this week the LMS our company uses accidentally removed existing functionality we relied on to sell courses. They didn’t purposely remove the feature, but instead a UI overhaul never included the UI for it. The feature was still available in the backend and for the legacy design, but they just forgot to include it in the redesign.

Also, present your argument for why I don’t understand accessibility.

The standard typically referenced in legal cases is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA. WCAG guidelines are generally clear and straightforward. Showing a good faith effort to comply with those requirements, is the bar for reasonable accommodations.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

The few areas where subjective judgment applies and two experts might reasonably disagree are unlikely to get you sued.

> If a small business can't make an accessible order form for some reason,

There’s no reason for any web developer to make an inaccessible order form in 2022. It’s a form. Put labels on your inputs. Use semantically appropriate HTML tags. Do validation before the user submits.

> There’s no reason for any web developer to make an inaccessible order form in 2022. It’s a form.

Well, that's OP's point - that's your opinion that it's easy. Maybe it's someone writing their own small business website for the first time and it's not so easy for them. They'd be more than happy to take the order over the phone for anyone unable to use their website. But it would be real shitty for their first official lesson in web development to be in the form of a court summons.

But perhaps that's on purpose? Even on HN you will occasionally see people who think software engineering should require a license. Perhaps this is a way to set up barriers to scare people away from making their own websites?

It's pretty similar to opening a physical store and not making the entrance accessible.

Not really, because we can all agree that the entrance must be at least 36 inches wide and at an angle of no more than 10 degrees (or whatever). Those are physical properties that can be measured.

Versus web accessibility guidelines are a collection of opinions and "best practices." Harder to measure and evaluate.

Not really - it's painfully obvious when a web developer takes no regard for accessibility or usability and instead wanted to create something that looked fancy. Look no further than people who replace `alert()` with a half-assed replacement that accomplishes 10% of what `alert()` does in 7 characters.

All I can say is that I'm glad physical accessibility isn't codified by "I'll know it when I see it" standards.

You kind of make my point though - sure, it's obvious when it's wrong. But it's not obvious if it's right, which is the actual fear. It's not even clear if it's possible to conclusively determine that it's right.

Can you give an example of what you mean - a scenario where WCAG guidelines are too ambiguous?

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

Sure, any time:

> text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.

What does "without loss of content or functionality" mean? If the resized text flys off the side of the screen (but there's a scrollbar now), is that a loss of functionality? I sure can't read it as quickly anymore, because I have to scroll to it. So that's less functional to me, but that's my opinion. And there isn't a layout solution to that, because by definition making text larger will mean less text on the page, assuming full-page content.

Does "without assistive technology" mean my website needs to manually implement a Size Up/Size Down control, or can I assume your browser has it built in?

You might consider that pedantic. But I can take almost any of these guidelines and ask the same questions. And the answer is always something like "what a reasonable person would think." But we're developers, and highly disturbed by ambiguity. So saying "the law is to follow these guidelines" doesn't fit right when the guidelines are not empirically defined.

> For the visual presentation of blocks of text, a mechanism is available to achieve the following: Foreground and background colors can be selected by the user.

Does "use an extension for your user-agent to swap out the CSS" count? I can't think of a single mainstream website that lets me choose the color of my text.

> Web pages do not contain anything that flashes more than three times in any one second period.

What is a flash? What is an anything? Can I embed a flashing YouTube video in my user-generated content that I post to make your website in violation of the WCAG? Do you have to implement technical countermeasures to prevent me from doing that? Does YouTube have to prevent users from uploading such content? These are the kind of questions that have to be answered before we could seriously consider this as practical law.

The WCAG guidelines do a good job of answering questions like these, in my experience.

Regarding resizing text, the WCAG guidelines provide the following example of a website that meets the standards: "A user uses a zoom function in his user agent to change the scale of the content. All the content scales uniformly, and the user agent provides scroll bars, if necessary."

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/resize-text.html

(There is also a note under the guideline that due to widespread confusion on this specific rule, as long as you meet the basic criteria listed under "sufficient techniques" you are considered OK.)

> Does "use an extension for your user-agent to swap out the CSS" count?

Yes: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/general/G156

> What is a flash? What is an anything?

A flash is "a pair of opposing changes in relative luminance that can cause seizures in some people if it is large enough and in the right frequency range" according to the definitions listed here, along with links to more detailed explanations and examples:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/three-flashes-or...

> Can I embed a flashing YouTube video in my user-generated content that I post to make your website in violation of the WCAG? Do you have to implement technical countermeasures to prevent me from doing that? Does YouTube have to prevent users from uploading such content?

Clarification on user generated content is part of the WCAG 3.0 working draft, which you can read here:

https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3.0/#user-generated-content

This is always the trade-off with regulation and whichever approach a regulation takes there are always people, sometimes (usually?) the same people, who will claim the other approach is the only viable option.

If the regulation is written with specificity, e.g “Must use size 12pt Times New Roman font” then the argument is: “But this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense for my $business. It’s not that I don’t want to comply but as a business owner I need common-sense rules that give me leeway to implement them in a way that makes sense for my company and my customers. Otherwise I risk getting sued and that wouldn’t be fair.”

And if the regulation is written with flexibility, e.g. “Must use a legible font of reasonably appropriate size” then the argument is: “But I just run a $business, how am I supposed to know what font is legible and what size is reasonably appropriate? It’s not that I don’t want to comply but as a business owner I need guidance so I know what it is I’m supposed to do. Otherwise I risk getting sued and that wouldn’t be fair.”

And around and around we go making painstakingly incremental progress because of bad-faith arguments.

HN would fail the accessibility guidelines with the low-contrast downvoted comments.

"People with limited vision or color blindness cannot read text if there is not enough contrast between the text and background (for example, light gray text on a light-colored background)."

Yep, and the horrifically small and close together click targets. Due to its simplicity however, HN is already heads and shoulders above so much of the modern web in its a11y-friendliness.

It's interesting that you are mainly considering the experience of a hypothetical small business owner and what they would be happy to do, and not the experiences of disabled people, and what's easy for them.

It's a lot easier to fix the issues the Justice Department mentions, and it's really a pretty short list, than it is to live with a disability. If your business is open to the public then it has certain responsibilities under the law.

Anyway phone calls don't necessarily work well for deaf blind folks, people with disorders like ALS (Stephen Hawking etc), and some folks on the autism spectrum.

>It's interesting that you are mainly considering the experience of a hypothetical small business owner and what they would be happy to do, and not the experiences of disabled people, and what's easy for them.

The reason you think about this from the perspective of the small business owner is because if it's too overwhelming/difficult for the business then they just won't have a website at all. Then accessibility of the website doesn't matter, but everyone is worse off in this outcome.

They might put up a page for the business on Facebook, but if you're not on Facebook then tough luck. Or maybe there's no page at all and you have to go there in person to find out basic information like when the business is actually open. In these cases nobody wins. Even a broken website that's only partly usable would've been better, but that would be a liability for the business.

I mean those are possible outcomes. It's also possible they may make simple changes and have a more accessible webpage.

Given they already have a site and pay for hosting and a domain name, that seems like they might see having the site might be seen as a sunk cost.

Agreed, but keep in mind that person is already technically required to follow standards for things like PII, sales tax, security etc. in addition to accessibility. Small businesses can outsource these requirements to a service like Shopify that knows how to handle them. If you build your own site, then not taking the time to learn and address these issues will always expose you to some legal risk.

This just means that you're asking for all businesses to end up using <the service> that will inevitably turn into a Facebook level service. But everyone will be forced to use it, so there's no choice.

Every business should have a website. But with the ever-mounting requirements it's probably safer for them not to have a website at all. There's no guarantee Shopify will fulfill all the obligations after all.

You're also right about having to comply with taxes. Those are already burdens that will stop some people in their tracks regardless whether their business idea is viable or not.

I just skimmed over the WCAG quick reference with a focus on just the level A and level AA items. I have to agree with thorum on this one - the guidelines are specific and straightforward. For a basic order form with no audio or video on the screen, seems pretty easy to me. Yes that is an opinion, but an opinion based upon this very specific set of testable guidelines.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

"It's hard" doesn't generally fly as an excuse; it certainly won't in court. If you're a web developer, accessibility is part of the job. If you're not, you can buy that expertise either by using a SaaS or hiring a professional.

And if you bother to read the guidelines, they are relatively simple. There are regulatory bodies that are legal minefields and whose certification process depends partially on the whims of individual auditors (e.g. HIPAA), but WCAG is not one of those.

> "It's hard" doesn't generally fly as an excuse; it certainly won't in court.

ADA requires reasonable accomidations, so it's hard is a reasonable excuse. If the accomidation is too expensive or too time consuming, it might not be reasonable.

Sure, but what you're saying can be be interpreted both charitably and not. The charitable interpretation is for scenarios like focus wrap-around in modals. It's possible to navigate by tabbing over focusable elements hidden behind the modal until you're in the modal again and it's sufficiently difficult to make focus work 100% correctly without extensive testing.

But if you're trying to argue in court that your submit button can't be activated without a mouse because doing so is too hard, that's likely not going to pass muster, since virtually every other website on earth can easily figure out how to do it.

Is it easy for someone running their own small business website to have a working feedback/contact page? Working encryption? Freaking readable type for seeing people? And yet if a business website didn't have these and they lost sales over it, would people blame users or say that the owner should find fixing certain things about their website as being their responsibility?

A lot of people would conclude that the owner should be able to decide whether to do anything about it.

>Maybe it's someone writing their own small business website for the first time and it's not so easy for them.

Ok, well some points though:

1. maybe someone shouldn't write their own small business website in the same way they shouldn't build their own entrance to the store.

2. someone first starting out should probably just make a simple html form. If so they are probably more likely to be accessible than many solutions made by big companies.

3. someone first starting out will even more probably choose some WordPress solution and that will probably be accessible enough to also meet the needs of their small site.

4. It is unlikely anyone is getting sued if they have made an effort to make things accessible, in your imagined scenario the novice making their own website for their cupcake business or whatever (and who does this, it's not 2002 anymore, it's 2022) don't know enough to think hmm, I better run this bit here through a screen reader just to see it works as i think, which is why my point 1 stands, the internet is now such a busy place that they should no longer build the entrance to their store wild west style even if they have the ability, but at least hire someone to do it who should be able to think of I better run this bit through a screen reader for them.

> maybe someone shouldn't write their own small business website

Youch, there goes a lot of literally world-changing startups, had this rule been in place in the past.

well in the context of the discussion it sounds like the idea is that the mom and pop cupcake store owner decides she needs a website and does it by getting out a your first website for dummies from the library written some years ago.

I mean in the case of Zuckerberg I guess he should have written his first website, although I don't think he considered accessibility at the time.

In the case of me and a lot of other people on HN, yes we should probably just write our own website, and I know in my case I will run it through Voiceover and make things work well enough that I doubt I would be sued under any EU or US legislation.

finally though my example of the wild west and the modern day, at some point things become so settled that it no longer makes sense for people to build their own thing unless that is what they do professionally, the analogy does not hold perfectly of course because websites are not physical buildings and someone can make a perfectly good and serviceable website for people if they use no JS, and no CSS that moves things into the order they should be in naturally or that makes elements of one sort resemble elements of another - for example no CSS that makes divs work as headings.

But in a lot of cases nowadays things need to be done by a professional, the adoption of accessibility codes just increases the requirement for professionalism slightly more.

Sacrificing people at the margins at the altar of holy capitalism is not exactly a system I'm excited about.

> there's no clear binding standard for what constitutes an accessible website

>Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best?

The DOJ cutes under "How to Make Web Content Accessible to People with Disabilities" the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These recommendations aren't new, but if you find them lacking, then what improvements would you suggest?

> Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best?

My understanding of webdev is sites are getting continuously re-written anyway to keep up with the latest opinions on what framework is best.

As a rule, accessibility is an afterthought in our industry. I would be more sympathetic to complaints if companies were making an effort. Even large tech companies fail miserably. This just reads like FUD.

The cupcake store can afford to install grab bars in its bathrooms; it can afford to hire a competent web designer. Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. should all be accessible by default.

There is plenty of leeway for reasonable accomodations.

Blind developer here. Even though web technology might move fast, things move slowly in the world of accessibility.

You're saying it's too hard to catch up with the latest technology - I wouldn't agree with this in the context of accessibility. What happens in practice is that a frontend developer develops for example a fancy combobox that needs to be clicked on with a mouse without thinking twice. And that combo box stays on the website for years. Now suppose that's a website to book flights. I go there and I spend half an hour trying to click that damn combobox with a keyboard and still it wouldn't allow me to select anything. Well too bad, it turns out I cannot fly XXX airlines. Or I'd have to wait for my sighted assistant who comes once a week to deal with these websites.

And what if I told you that half of websites on the internet are like this - that is not accessible or extremely ahrd to use? I have to avoid certain online stores, certain airlines, certain hotels because of that. Finally I work in faang company and so many internal web tools here are not accessible. I found my way around, but I have seen blind people being fired for not being able to perform while every other tool that is required for you to use doesn't work with your screenreader and nobody cares to fix that?

And what's the price to fix it? Educate developers to use simple combobox instead of fancy one? Try to test it with keyboard? Are blind people really asking for too much?

And also regarding getting sued - I have no idea what kind of lawyers can sue for this, I have never heard of actual blind people being able to sue someone because the website was not accessible. If that was the case I would be able to sue half of Internet including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so many more. I suspect certain lawyers are taking advantage of the system - e.g. there was this american life episode years ago about a lawyer who is specializing on suing hotels that claim to provide acomodations for disabled people -wheel chair users - and they don't satisfy ADA requirements or something. I suspect this Domino pizza lawsuit was initiated by similar type of ADA troll lawyer. Don't compare blind people to troll lawyers!

I mostly agree… but one thing:

> And what's the price to fix it?

I’m currently doing accessibility work with an in-house web framework of reasonable complexity. 90% of the accessibility issues are relatively straightforwards. Things like keyboard usability are easy to explain to devs and behave fairly consistently across browsers.

But the last 10%… things like “what should happen to focus when you open a modal?” get messier fast (the ARIA docs give several different behaviours for several different scenarios, which means every dev who wants to open a modal needs to understand enough to correctly select the behaviour for their circumstance), especially since different screen readers can behave in different ways when encountering the same content. The cost to investigate and properly solve these can be nontrivial.

That’s not to excuse people who don’t even try for that first 80-90% of the low hanging fruit… but please forgive the designers and devs who fall short of the last 10%!

As a perfectly-sighted user: please don't use modals, they're basically always very frustrating.

There are lots of scenarios where a modal is the expected way to accomplish a task. Preventing irreversible errors (Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this user’s data irreversibly?), save/load dialogs, etc. Modal overuse is a real problem (and one we’re addressing in our product), but there are some situations where they solve a real problem.

The last 10 percent are hard. Welcome to software development.

Welcome to the world

OP's point is that most websites, in their experience, fail to get the easy 90%. If what you've got left is a few focus issues, it sounds to me like OP can at least accomplish their task.

> Blind developer here.

HN users' tendency to opine about things they know nothing about is really aggravating here. You and a few other blind users come in and share your experience, only to be told by a bunch of people who have never used a screen reader in their lives that you're wrong. How weird.

Just know that a lot of us who don't comment are taking notes of what you say. :)

There are some things, such as putting text inside a bitmap image with no alt tags, that are fairly objectively going to make any sort of accessibility software much less reliable and more complicated.

But what about things like "most screen readers don't support the new WebX API that came out six months ago?" Where's the line between what website developers need to do to be compatible with screen readers, and what screen reader developers need to do to work with the websites their users want to use?

If you are providing a service it should be accessible. If you are using a fancy API that is not accessible (yet) you should provide a fallback, or—better yet—use the fancy API to progressively enhance the service.

If, however, you are making a fun little game which relies on Web Audio API, and there is no point in playing the game without headphones, then your good. The line is pretty obvious in most cases. Or at least you—as a web developer—should know it when you see it.

You make it sound like it's completely arbitrary whereas it isn't. I feel like the only conflict might be what helps neuroatypical people might be different than what helps deaf people or what helps blind people, etc. Unfortunately, "disability" is a very broad term an encompasses hosts of people. That said, the "churn" of "opinions" on what helps disabled folks is nowhere near as arbitrary as whatever new hot stuff js framework is out there and yet you people keep up with all that somehow.

> Do you expect every website to get continuously rewritten just to keep up with the latest opinions on what's best?

I mean let’s be honest we’re constantly doing that anyways

The problem is not the law, but rather the class action lawsuits around these cases. I have no problem working with blind users to improve the accessibility of the website, but I have been sued by plaintiffs counsel in a state where we had no customers, no business of any kind, the claim was bogus, and we had to spend money on legal counsel to get that thrown out.

Class action lawsuits are a plague on businesses and I'm confident that it would be a large "net positive" for society if they were eliminated.

The answer to "punishing" people should not be allowing lawyers to blackmail companies to settle class-action suits. Rather, it should be to make it easier to actually resolve smaller issues. I explicitly require the use of fairclaims.com for smaller disputes on my site. I recommend them as they are genuinely a fast, easy form of binding arbitration.

Maybe I could be on board with class-action lawsuits if the defendant has lost 5 or more individual suits for the same reason, or something like that if someone was truly a repeat offender.

I am a wheelchair user. Something that annoys me is that a typical small hotel or restaurant website will go to tremendous lengths to tell you how accessible its website is, including having a dedicated page with paragraphs of details about how dedicated they are to serving disabled users. Usually there is a prominent icon linking to this page on every other page. But, try as I might, I cannot find a single piece of information about the physical accessibility of the property. At best, they mention that you should call them for details. So it’s pretty clear that these places do not actually care about disabled people except insofar as not caring could get them sued.

I completely understand why accessible websites are important and fully support the cause. But I cannot stand doing the work!

I do some work for a Very Large Corporation that was sued over accessibility issues with their website and settled for a large sum of money, so their legal department is on high alert for this. They have a dedicated accessibility testing team, and I will often get a suggestion on how to fix an issue, fix it, and then someone else will test my fix and give me a totally different suggestion on how to fix it. It's infuriating.

Accessibility isn't something to patch, it is the foundation of the open web, shaken by the massive influence of div soup frameworks.

That's a ridiculous statement. Of course it's something to patch.

I wonder if GP Meant something like this. Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible. Or am I wrong about this?

> Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible

Nope. Dialog, progress, details, many input types, etc html tags are not very accessible by default and behave differently in browsers.

From the top of my head, you cannot get a proper date picker in safari using html alone.

You also need to change attributes to help navigate the user.

Mind you, accessibility goes beyond screen readers. You will need javascript for building gesture controls, keyboard shortcuts, etc which is very needed for people with restricted movements.

Many people will need UX feedback to understand what is going on. You cannot achieve that without Javascript. Animations, focus, etc are all part of usability and comes under accessibility.

Thanks, was not aware of these issues

HTML is not accessible by default, so this should not be confused with a simplistic "SPAs/JS are bad!" argument. In fact, many JS component libraries make it easier to comply with a11y since they can encapsulate and consistently share a11y needs like aria attributes, etc.

If pure semantic HTML isn't accessible then that is the fault of the browser/screenreader, and that's where the burden should lie.

Do a whole fix in one place for the benefit of everyone, rather than making every tiny website make a bunch of half fixes.

That's a nice principle, but legally the burden is on the website owner. We have to live within the reality that browsers do not provide, out of the box, accessible html components in some cases.

I also think you misread him.

He said something like: accessibility cannot be simply duct-taped on. It's a fundamental part of the core web technologies, that all the JS frameworks have obsfucated.

Having worked some in 508 compliance space -- if you treat it like a patch, you'll get a lot of different testers suggesting to try different things to fix it to bring it up to standards. I.e. the situation you are in.

You cannot patch some of the accessibility issues.

You will need to design your layout and order elements properly. You cannot patch it with aria- soup which many developers do.

I don't think there is a coherent historical or technical basis to claim that accessibility (as the term is being used in this thread) is "the foundation of the open web".

> I will often get a suggestion on how to fix an issue, fix it, and then someone else will test my fix and give me a totally different suggestion on how to fix it. It's infuriating.

Polite indication that this is a problem with your organisation, not accessibility or accessibility work. The same issues can occur with design and other areas where everybody and their grandmother has an opinion; it's up to a good org to manage all of those opinions and expertise in an appropriate fashion. If they aren't, and this is making it harder for you to create accessible experiences, you should raise it with someone.

I dunno. I agree this work is important, but I also find it boring and frustrating. Its like adding logging, plumbing configs, etc. Obviously it has to happen, but at least for me it's neither interesting nor exciting.

Sounds like you should look for a new job that has more of what you like to do. However so much of reliable software product development is confligs, logging, documentation, unit tests...

That's called being a professional. Engineers create useful and rigorous systems. What other professions get to complain about having to do the "unfun" parts? The world runs on software. I'm unhappy with the idea that the software running the world is just built according to what some people find fun.

Actual engineering professionals spend their time making sure systems are safe and reliable. Website "engineering" "professionals" spend their time doing anti-utilitarian make-work to fend off lawsuit trolls instead of making systems that are safe and reliable.

> anti-utilitarian make-work to fend off lawsuit trolls

Making sure that people aren't blocked from completing a task due to a situation beyond their control, such as a physical disability, seems pretty important to me. It's true that some organizations only implement accessibility for the sake of preventing lawsuits, but there's a legitimate reason to have that legislation in the first place.

From what I can tell, Title III (public accommodations) only applies to businesses with physical locations that serve the public. So are purely digital Saas businesses not subject to this lawsuit risk? If that is not the case, can someone more knowledgeable on the subject post a link to the relevant section of law or official regulation?

There's a whole section in the new guidance dedicated to that question:

https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/#when-the-ada-requires-web...

The tl;dr:

> For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.

That sounds like it applies to websites of businesses with physical locations, no?

> Teachers Test Prep, Inc.: The Department reached an agreement with Teachers Test Prep, Inc., regarding complaints that the test prep company’s online video courses did not provide captions and were inaccessible to people who are deaf

Does this imply that if you offer video content, you must have "synchronized captions that are accurate and identify any speakers in the video"? Does this apply to Youtube or Vimeo?

Youtube already supplies at a minimum auto-generated subtitles, which are imperfect, but usually serviceable.

YouTube's autogenerated captions are highly variable in quality. They are sometimes serviceable for carefully produced videos of English speakers with a neutral accent, and degrade rapidly as videos move away from this ideal.

It also appears to be trained on news broadcasts (not surprising) since it will often interpret unclear phrases by injecting oddly political content, often with much hilarity.

Yes. WCAG (the W3C guidelines referenced as the gold standard for web accessibility) require both captions for people who are deaf and audio descriptions (an audio track with a person describing anything important that is happening in the video) for people who are blind.

It’s a challenging requirement because both can be difficult/expensive to implement, especially for smaller organizations.

Technology is catching up to make this easier, with automatic captioning AIs and better software for creating transcriptions. On the audio description side of things we’re seeing improved browser support for TTS description tracks on HTML video, so you don’t have to hire a narrator.

It applies to certain videos regardless of platform (clips from TV which aired on cable or broadcast and certain other videos being the most common example). So if NBC uploads a clip to Youtube, they must caption it. Netflix Originals don't have to. Auto-captioning doesn't count because the quality is not consistent enough (although that is starting to change).

In the cast of Teachers Test Prep, it was training videos that someone had to watch as a condition of employment. So it was an employment law issue - they could have complied by offering one-on-one accessible tutoring instead of captions.

Mom-and-pop Youtube influencers do not legally have to caption anything.

Those distinctions aren't clear from the linked article. Do you have a source that Netflix doesn't have to caption their video productions but NBC does?

Teacher's Prep sounds like an online-only course program. Why couldn't they pull this alleged online-only Netflix loophole?

The requirement the GP was referring to comes from the combination of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) rather than the ADA. The Telecommunications Act requires "video programming distributors" to provide closed captioning for most televised video programming (televised being the operative word here). The CVAA extended the requirement so that it also applies to televised video programming distributed on the internet. But according to the FCC's consumer guide on the CVAA, it "does not cover programs shown only on the Internet"[1].

The CVAA doesn't apply to Teachers Test Prep any more than it does to Netflix. But Title III of the ADA includes a section on "Examinations and courses" that states "Any private entity that offers examinations or courses related to applications, licensing, certification, or credentialing for secondary or postsecondary education, professional, or trade purposes shall offer such examinations or courses in a place and manner accessible to persons with disabilities or offer alternative accessible arrangements for such individuals"[2]. That's what the Justice Department found them to be in violation of. The fundamental problem was that their courses were inaccessible; lack of captioning (or other "alternative accessible arrangements") was what caused them to be in violation but wasn't a violation in and of itself.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/21st-century-communicat...

[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-28/chapter-I/part-36/subp...

Thank you for writing this up! Very good summary of the relevant laws and regs.

They should recommend people use progressive enhancement, that helps a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progres... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538144

This seems really timely, but also a bit tide shifting.

[1] How much of the web adheres to these standards?

[2] If businesses or US government sites are not compliant, is that a "default" win? (Apologies if I am using the legal term incorrectly here)

[3] If hosting is outside the US for businesses within domestic storefronts, are they open to the same liability?

1) Not nearly enough. This has become more of a hot topic as of late.

2) IANAL and can’t speak to this.

3) The US lags many places in the world on its legal accessibility requirements. Depending on the country, you’re probably at HIGHER risk outside the US. Check out this really useful collection of laws and policies from around the world: https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/

Non-American law student here - can any US lawyers explain how this would work in practice? Are you telling me that a small business could actually be sued in the US for not having a website accessible by, for example, a blind person? How is this not considered prohibitively expensive and an unreasonable burden?

A former colleague now owns a website development shop in my city, they are as busy as can be updating school websites because a local woman went around every school website and found ADA violations. She’s making a ton, and has no disability.

She got her lawyer involved, frilessless or not all of the school settled with agreements that they would fix the “issues”.

What’s the answer to the technicality and legality of lawsuits? I’m not a lawyer, but at the very minimum the threat is enough.

There is a safe harbor for business with under 15 employees, but otherwise, yes

Not for title III. As another poster here asked this remains unclear whether a web-only SaaS business needs to comply.

I don't have a disability, but I love everything that makes my life easier.

High contrast, bigger fonts, and what not.

Accessibility isn't just for people with disabilities, but for everyone that can't focus while using your app for whatever reason.

Here’s background on standard HTML controls, their history, and their future development: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-selec...

The future of accessible web controls is likely Open UI - building standard, agreed upon controls that codify how “modern” widgets behave, though each browser might integrate the standard control with their underlying OS platform and/or screen reader conventions.

If you’re familiar with how JavaScript has stages of approvals for proposals, they have those as well: https://open-ui.org/working-mode

Like adopting new JS functions that make our lives easier, there will come a day when we need a particular new control and it’s up to us as web devs to help standardize and push the web forward.

There are a number of proposals already, but it’s arguable that some controls, especially existing ones, need much more flexibility in their specification to make them easier to style and override to match a theme. https://open-ui.org/ has what they’re working on, a long list in the menu (hidden away on mobile).

As I write this I recognize there is a lot more to web accessibility and usability than simply using custom controls, but browser makers ultimately want to innovate and solve these challenges within the HTML spec as it will help their own efforts in building for the web.

Back in the day we thought it was meaningful semantic HTML when we picked an em (emphasis) tag over an italic tag, or strong over bold. Now, we should try to use dialog instead of divs and who knows, in the future, we might use an infscroll tag instead of an ordered or unordered list.

Innovation always happens faster than standardization, but just because we’re upset with the lack of functionality in a textarea does not mean we should be satisfied with our progress reinventing the wheel. We should finish the job and contribute back to HTML the custom controls we value most as standards for the benefit of future web developers and designers, including ourselves.

In my 20+ years of professional web-based software development, mostly in the commercial space, accessibility was never made a requirement. This spanned more than a half dozen clients/companies and more than a dozen projects/teams. Fast forward to last year when I re-platformed my personal blog [1]. During that effort, I decided to make it accessible. It was my first time every really delving into the a11y space.

Despite the time warranted, I found that effort to be interesting, challenging, and worthwhile. And I think it was/is the right thing to do. This despite my blog getting a low amount of traffic and nobody ever requesting that I make it accessible.

As an online creator, I have the ability and privilege to make my (small) online corner of the world a better place. For me to simply ignore the needs of those who are less able seems wrong.

[1] - https://michaelscepaniak.com/

Hell yea baby, now you don't need to find a take-out joint with sink that's mounted too high to file a lawsuit.

Just when the patent trolls were starting to be contained, yet another fine way our government makes sure to get more lawyers wealthy.

Cool, website doesn't work in Safari.

Works fine for me.

Google is using canvas for Google Docs. They can also activate using HTML elements for screen readers. Nobody in open source component development should be discouraged from building the canvas side of things so web app/site developers can do the same thing. It's up to the web app/site developer to make sure there's always an alternative to canvas components. Where practical, the canvas component should provide the accessible alternative, but sometimes the is better done by external component(s). https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

I think this is actually a great example on the potential pit-falls of going with this approach. This isn't really accessible and shows how even a large company with a lot of resources can miss the mark.

For example, if I try to have VoiceOver (control + option + w) read the word I am currently on in Google Docs, it doesn't work, Using VoiceOver's search (control + option + f in Safari) doesn't work, basically nothing actually seems to work from what I can tell. A visual user can easily scan a document and find a heading, where a VoiceOver user might search to jump to it instead.

While they do provide some keyboard shortcuts to help navigate a document easier, this is not a valid substitute for supporting the screenreader the way users know how to use / are proficient with.

While a user of a screenreader could technically use it, it isn't usable (or accessible) in any real sense of the word. If you were to translate this to a visual user experience, imagine you could only see one letter at a time and can go forwards/backwards one character.

It seems like they are using an `aria-live` region to speak where you are rather than having a separate DOM representation of the content and syncing the state (which can be an engineering effort most companies / libraries cannot afford invest enough to get completely right).

Disclaimer: I am not a primarily a screenreader user, though I do have some experience using them.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Google, though not on Docs.

Did you enable the screen reader features? apparently they are behind a kb shortcut:

https://imgur.com/pSLYLcd

(btw: I got this a11y tree view by enabling a new experiment in the devtools)

Yep, I enabled it. The rest of the UI is fine as it seems to use regular HTML so it will show up in the accessibility tree. The problem is the text editing area itself which uses canvas.

Did you turn on screen reader mode or braille mode in Google Docs? IIUC, braille mode exposes more UI content and structure to a screen reader, as opposed to simply feeding it text to speak. Not sure why braille mode isn't the only screen reader mode; maybe it's slower.

Concerning the inaccessibility of the <canvas> element, I've done a lot of work with my JS canvas library[1] to try and make canvas-based infographics, animations, etc more accessible[2]. I've also written up a lesson on how to build an accessible canvas scene which some might find useful[3].

[1] - Obligatory link to Scrawl-canvas library (on GitHub): https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas

[2] - Sadly I don't have any evidence that my library's solutions help people with accessibility needs in the real world, because nobody seems interested in using it. I live in hope that this may change one day.

[3] - Accessible canvas lesson: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/learn/eleventh-lesson

Most websites are completely unusable on smartphones. If it's not a stupid cookie questionnaire then it's begging and pleading to like, subscribe share, ring the notification bell, upgrade to premium, sign up for a mailing list, invite your friends, our live agents are standing by to text message... there's no room left for content. Every cooking recipe leads with 75% fluff. I miss bulletin boards.

Link to the guidelines: https://beta.ada.gov/web-guidance/

If you'd like to test your current sites with a screen reader, give NVDA a try. It's open source and free. I package a portable version with PortableApps.com and have used it for testing software for quite a few years now.

Also worth testing out your apps with high contrast themes enabled at the user level on various devices. And through color blindness filters.

The DOJ site has some accessibility problems:

- links don't meet WCAG AAA contract guidelines

- focus is not communicated with a reasonable amount of distinction in many cases. Ex: https://imgur.com/a/bcrScWg

Maybe someone should sue them.

> links don't meet WCAG AAA contract guidelines

WCAG AA is fully sufficient from legal perspective.

the problem isn't the accessibility standards, that is reasonable.

the problem are the insane hacks and shoddy coding that devs were forced to do because the money wanted pretty interfaces instead of reasonable ones that could handle screen readers and the like.

This is great, in theory. But I spent an entire day this week trying to verify my identity so I could log into the IRS website. The usability is that awful for technical people without disabilities. So I'm not optimistic.

If I can't understand my writing when using a screen reader, it's probably not worth your time.

I know that audio navigation tools are far more sophisticated than simple text to speech, but I just try to keep it simple.

The site fails to load content with as content blockers turned on.

This is overall a good thing for the industry as a whole, even though I'm sure it will be met with plenty of resistance initially. This will force prioritize accessibility across the industry as the lawsuits mount with big companies that don't follow best practices here, which will lift the entirety of the industry up along with it.

This really sounds like you should have several layouts available.

Right, that is what I've always wondered - why do we try to shoehorn what usually amounts to accessibility for low visibility users into the visual format of a webpage? Wouldn't it be easier and better to offer a completely different, tailored experience for low-vis users? Even just an alternate layout that makes it more likely for screen readers to work naturally. e.g. www.cnn.com vs lite.cnn.com

Reminds me of pre-smartphone mobile web.

Because very few companies will maintain that alternate site to ensure it provides the same functionality and content. And accessibility is more than just screen reader compatibility.

Isn't that the state we're already in? Very few sites actually test for accessibility before pushing production changes. It is already a second class citizen.

Except, that’s exactly how html originally started: “oh it’s a nice, machine-readable way of structuring a document, where users can plug in their preferred reader and use it however they like!”

lite.cnn.com just starts that process all over again:

“Lifehack: you can access websites by lite.<domain> and you’ll get a less hostile experience because it’s intended to be accessible.”

“Lifehack: Use the extension LiteBrowse, which automatically goes to the light version of a site and then prettifies it for you.”

‘Oh my! Our analytics say most users are going to the light version! Let’s spice that up and do a UX revamp on it, help improve engagement and get ad clicks.’

‘Oh, wow, someone make a framework to churn out these really profession lite versions of a page, and wow, they’re so eye-popping and let you incorporate JavaScript…’

Earlier thread on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961

Except your point ignores the reality of the situation.

Whatever HTML was intended to be-- it isn't now.

And whatever lite.domain is intended to be, it won’t be after a few years if you don’t make the change in practices that led to html’s fate.

> The principles of universality of access irrespective of hardware or software platform, network infrastructure, language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental impairment are core values in Web design

Tim Berners-Lee https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture.html (1998)

The real issue is that screenreaders suck. It's not my problem that your screen reader can't read your screen.

IMO the contrast is the hardest thing to get right. I’m not sure if that’s built into the minimum standards or not but it’s going to seriously mess with peoples designs.

This kind of gets me. Isn’t a design meant to be “human centered” and usable for I dunno…users?

How many people do you know that have some form of color blindness or other vision impairment? Now think about how many of your users might be subject to those differences.

What is the point of an appealing design if a pretty huge market is ignore because “our brand colors are white text on a light colored cyan background!”?

You’re not wrong, but honestly until I had somebody on my team who was color blind I had no clue how to build with it in mind.

That’s definitely a fair point and I’d be lying if I said I paid attention to accessibility from day one.

Took me seeing a coupon on a billion dollar retailer’s, where the alternative text did not include the coupon code, that I took it a little more seriously.

Dunno why, but I imagined myself having to pay 20% more than everyone else due to something I can’t control.

I wonder if somewhere out there on the web there's an architect forum where architects are whining about wheelchair ramps like the webdevs in these discussions always seem to.

Yes: https://archinect.com/forum/thread/150034303/has-the-ada-gon...

Exactly this. I'd like to think architects take pride in building elegant structures that are inviting and accomodating to everyone. Where is our professional pride?

Agreed, it's very unbecoming.

There absolutely is. I used to work for a general contractor and they hate the Americans with disabilities act, OSHA, etc. The suits just see it as overhead, and the grunts just see it as more work they have to do before they can go to the bar.

Reading through the comments here I can’t believe the amount of abelism here on HN. In the web development industry accessibility is taken seriously. If you read the literature (e.g. on A list apart or Smashing Magazine) there is no shortage on articles about the importance of accessibility. If you go to a conference there will at least be 3 talks about accessibility. The web docs on MDN usually have a paragraph or two about accessibility issues and how to patch them for different elements and APIs. If you take a course in Web Development accessibility will be one of the first thing you’ll learn.

The comments here act as if this is not already a part of the industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every professional web developer thinks about making their web site accessible. If they don’t, they are not acting according to industry standards, and they should probably be liable for that. No different then a bad carpenter that doesn’t build according to standards.

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