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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

Online spaces are spaces of public accommodation. Companies should be taking reasonable steps to allow access by the disabled.

I'm not informed enough to comment on whether the particular ruling made sense in light of the law, but the "this is obviously a horrible decision!" vibe of the article is confusing, and leads me not to trust their conclusions about it.

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Actually it is not entirely clear if online spaces "are" considered public accommodation. Some circuits have ruled that virtual spaces are, others have said this only applies to physical space. The third line of thought has been the ADA applies to an internet site that is a gateway to a brick-and motor-store. This new judgement that Netflix "is" a public accommodation is just further fuel behind that idea, but I don't think it's accurate to assume that everything is. Right now it depends on your own circuits ruling.

I wasn't addressing the legality of it, I was addressing the facts of the matter. Whether online spaces are considered to be such by the courts is a matter of the facts in part, but also law and precedent of which I'm not particularly well acquainted.

Define "reasonable".

Because anything less doesn't translate down into actionable items that you can hand to designers/developers/IT/monkeys/nephews. We're also going to need some way to test it that doesn't break the bank.

This is going to be a mess. There are no established standards that one can point to in a court of law and everyone has a different opinion about what constitutes reasonable effort.

The only people that will clean up here will be lawyers and so-called consultants.

This is a fantastic argument against using my comment as law or judicial precedent.

> Online spaces are spaces of public accommodation.

All online spaces?

I was not speaking quite that precisely. Online spaces that are offering services to the public I would think are clearly spaces of public accommodation; there might be exceptions but they would be exceptional.

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