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Comment by NavinF | Hacker News Reader

Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind people? Serious question.

Every website accessible to the public has some responsibility to accommodate the disabled.

https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

There are a lot of opportunistic/good hearted compassionate lawyers making a good business of shaking down smaller website operators for ADA compliance.

Damn patent trolls are missing out on this good lord.

I think a recent court decision in CA determined that unless the website is a front for a brick & mortar real world place, they're not subject to the CA version of those laws (Unruh). How that would play with the ADA rules, I don't know, but this article mentions both. I'm not sure this issue is at all settled nationwide, but my take is bringing that lawsuit in CA won't get you very far.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-court-appeal...

Kind of a shame, because it was my first thought too--losing the accessibility team and then removing all the accessible clients definitely won't make Musk many friends among disability advocates.

I do wonder, as a late afterthought, though, whether the legal principle behind making your accessibility worse via negligence or deprioritization (the internal team) or lack of due diligence (these apps) could be different than whether the government could require you to include it in the first place.

Not really social media, but Netflix lost (settled) an ADA suit because they weren't providing subtitles consistently:

https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/nad-v-netflix/

I believe just meta has encountered many dozens of ADA related lawsuits for everything from their use of disability information for ad targeting to web accessibility -- both government instantiated and civil cases.

I am fairly sure much of their accessibility work was instantiated by these lawsuits and settlements.

https://www.facebook.com/help/273947702950567

Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind people?

Social media? Not to my knowledge.

But not having a website that's usable by the blind cost Target $6 million: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/target-settl...

When is a good time to start holding them accountable?

It would be mind blowing to me and completely unexpected if twitter was not already under many active settlements related to accessibility lawsuits each with their own ongoing obligations.

There are very few large entities that have not been impacted by ADA lawsuits at this point -- even ones that had accessibility as a core value before the lawsuits.

Youtube to this day allows uploaders to disable automatic captions for some reason.

Because sometimes the automatic captions brutally butcher the text and can change the presenters meaning.

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