Ask HN: Are Cities Violating ADA?

5 points·tmaly··3 comments

I was going to a city council meeting in the city I live. The agenda was on the cities website.

It was a 300MB file of electronic documents re-scanned as pictures.

It was tough to open on my phone. I have to wonder if this format would prevent screen readers from functioning.

Is this a violation of the ADA? Does your city do the same thing with meeting agendas?

The government is not tech savvy. Do you think the average engineer is going to want to work for the government when they can work for industry?

I wouldn't ask if they are violating the ADA, but would ask if they are resource starved or even know it's a problem.

I imagine this is the type of thing you might be able to get addressed with e-mail since it is a problem probably best described by ignorance rather than neglect.

The goverment is us.

You might be right about ignorance. These documents start in electronic form.

The person doing the scanning likely is an elder clerk that has no idea on how to use Acrobat.

The Internet is still lacking a great amount for ADA and government compliancy, despite the fact that they have an entiire department dedicated to it, cannot possibly keep up with ensuring ADA guidelines are met. And unfortunately, there is a lot of real-world paperwork that no one wants to spend money on paying someone to type up and its just easier to scan a document and get it on the Internet. Owning multiple properties with HOA, they scan a lot of their documents within a PDF. I'd think that it would actually be those PDF readers/browsers that need to figure out how to make things more ADA compatible since organizations can't be held responsible for what technology is incapable of doing.

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