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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely do not understand how they can sleep at night. Thanks for pushing back.

It's no different from not having curb cuts on your sidewalk. Culturally tech companies have gotten away with selling non-compliant products and websites, and feel like it's unacceptable to be required to follow regulations because everyone has level-set their expectations around not doing that.

A competent regulatory scheme would have had the government enforcing this from the beginning, instead of depending on private action that seldom happens, but here we are. Uber ignores taxi regulations, AirBnB ignores zoning regulations, and everyone ignores accessibility regulations.

> If people followed the law, they wouldn't get sued.

non sequitur

Great point, and I just edited that out on re-read because I realized it's simply not true. In fact, it's the core problem with using private action as an enforcement mechanism. You pass a specialized regulatory problem to a generic court and waste everyone's time with cases like this one where the companies may in fact be perfectly compliant - but first you need to spend money teaching the judge what the facts are.

> A competent regulatory scheme would have had the government enforcing this from the beginning

If there was a regulatory scheme (competent can't really be defined) at the beginning of the internet we would all still be using aol dial up at best, there would be 3 content creating entities at most, and we would be paying for monthly "bundles" of web sites.

On the contrary, we could have accessibility by design and accesstech industry enabling it at low cost. Every business deterred by the effort required to make interfaces accessible would inevitably be replaced by those who think they can still earn a lot of money (we are talking about trillion dollar industry here, people are ready to kill for much less).

Ahh yes, the ol' "only wealthy people may start a business" plan

It's the ol' "only people willing to be members of society and follow the rules that protect people may start a business" plan. You don't get to flush toxic waste down the drain, put poison in your pills, and ignore disability accommodations.

It sounds like you think there should be no disability accommodations. Is that the root of the disagreement?

Accessibility is effort, not money. It’s not rocket science, it’s not building pyramids, every hard working and intellectually capable person should be able to do it.

> Accessibility is effort, not money.

I've been paid to implement accessibility. I made a lot of money.

So what (not a question).

A curb cut on a sidewalk is a pretty well defined piece of civil engineering.

So are captions for video content?

curb cuts on sidewalks are the classic example of an obvious, commonplace accessibility accommodation that is standard now, but was initially only gained via unauthorized direct action

For the non Americans:

A "sidewalk" is a footpath adjacent to a road.

A "curb cut" is ramp from footpath to road.

"If it were wrong it would be illegal."

It is illegal, that's why they sued.

Discriminating on disability is not cool, and it also happens to be illegal. If people on HN can complain about how some websites are unusable with Javascript disabled (by choice), I think those who depend on screen readers[1] have a more cogent case, as they don't have options.

For all the hate the "bloated" web frameworks get, the one thing they usually have out of the box is accessibility.

1. Or other assistive tech.

We often assume that most people have empathy / conscience. It's simply not true.

In their minds they are just chasing alpha to sleep at all. They have probably been burned along the way and just passing the trauma forward. Everyone has to save themselves.

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