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Comment by cookingmyserver | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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