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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

A friend raised what I consider a very valid point, that ad blockers are assistive technology for people with ADHD. They prevent the web from being an unusable mess of shiny distraction. And as such, in America, blocking ad blockers is a violation of the ADA.

I’m being completely serious here and so is he. I can barely use the web without ad blockers. They make it possible for me to participate in online life. Remove them and you largely remove me. An attack on ad blockers is a direct attack on even the slightly neurodivergent, and should be treated as such.

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Actually, the German copyright law explicitly allows people with limited vision or with limited reading ability (not defined precisely in the law) to use assistive technology in order to transfer a work into a more accessible version¹.

So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software. (IANAL)

¹) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__45b.html

Yeah, that's also the main warning from the blog: the reasoning here is that adjusting how the website code executes on your computer is copyright infringement. The effects of that would go way beyond just adblockers.

> adjusting how the website code executes on your computer is copyright infringement.

I would be interested in how German law works to make this so, IANAL but pretty sure USA copy right law does not work that way. Modification for personal use is normally going to be 100% acceptable under USA copyright law. The DMCA Anti-Circumvention is one exception I know to this but it was and is a big deal for being an exception.

Yes, in the US at least copyright is specifically about reproduction/distribution, not use. This goes to the core of things every HNer encounters like open source licenses vs EULAs for example. A copyright license only governs somebody's ability to legally make copies and reproduce/derive/distribute in turn, not to what use they put it to for themselves. Absent any other contractual agreement they're perfectly free to mark up/modify/cut up a book or painting or the like that they have acquired, and they can sell that specific copy too. But other then the exceptions of Fair Use they can't distribute that work or derivatives without a separate license. Granted, most proprietary software slaps on additional restrictions which sadly have been found legal despite the massive perversion of contract and society it has entailed, but that's not inherent.

One of the things that came out of several Blizzard anticheat/Warden lawsuits back in the day is that, technically, the act of running an executable is copyright infringement, because the data is being copied from disk into memory, into registers and into caches.

Running any software that then does anything with the same memory space (cheating software or, say, antivirus) is another, separate instance of copyright infringement on top of that.

If I own a book I can make as many personal copies of the book I want as long as I keep those copies personal. So it seems like there is more too this ruling than copying from disk to memory or it contradicts typical copyright low or maybe the ruling was about DMCA anti-circumvention?

I strongly agree with that point, too. The notion that you can legally force me to run a bit of arbitrary code you transmit to me is absolutely bonkers.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I am blocking your ads without your help.

So, running old browsers with no JS support it's illegal too? OTOH, there's even gopher://taz.de in Germany.

Why is it copyright infringement? How is this different from playing music with different settings (more bass, less bass) or playing it at different speeds?

While I am a huge fan of ad blockers, and as some one with ADHD I am very sympathetic to the argument, I suspect that your friend is not a lawyer, and/or is not very familiar with the limitations of the ADA.

He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups. What about blind people who pipe the output of a screen through text-to-speech? Or people with epilepsy who can’t use flashy screens? Or someone who needs to enlarge print or change its contrast? There are plenty of medical reasons to need to alter their browser presentations.

IANAL, but the critical thing to know is that the ADA doesn’t mean that every assistive technology is mandated / required. Wheelchair users would benefit from dedicated elevators where their face is not butt-level with strangers in tight spaces; the ADA doesn’t mean not mandate this accommodation.

Is there an alternative technology that allows people to use websites without flashing ads?

screen readers / text based browsers / etc.

I don’t want to use a “separate but equal” Internet. Screen readers support very specific situations that don’t apply to me. I see using them as the equivalent of tweaking my knee and having to sit in a wheelchair so that I can just use wheelchair accommodations and call it a day. Nah. I don’t want to use a wheelchair or a screen reader because those devices weren’t made for my own needs and don’t suit me.

Screen readers do not skip ads! If they're there, they still get in the way. There are commands you can use to make things more efficient to navigate, but if the ads take up most of the page, it's just going to be an exercise in ridiculousness!

That sounds awful, and it's something I hadn't really thought of before. I can empathize with not wanting to have to deal with that.

Understandable, but my point was that the ADA is not a “I get whatever I want” law. It has specific requirements. IANAL but I do not believe that just declaring something desirable for yourself and your needs makes it legally required under ADA.

Text based browsers are largely non functional on modern websites.

Yeah, I don't use one lol!

The Lagrange (or any Gemini client) browser with gemini://gemi.dev 's News Waffle service.

>He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups

But what ARE those legal protections? That's the really complicated bit isn't it? ADA does not simply mandate anything anyone could imagine at any price, and there still isn't a huge amount of caselaw when it comes to the web. FWIW in this specific case I think there is some basis, but it doesn't seem clearly established either. The natural starting point is the government ADA site's own guidance [0], and that in turn cites the W3's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as helpful. In turn, that has section 2.3 covering "Seizures and Physical Reactions". But that's specifically about physical effects, does mere distraction count, and at what threshold? Like, it says no more than 3 flashes per second, but if a site ensures it's just blinking once per second, you might still find that distracting but it's not clear there's any case under ADA unless you can point to some other precedent (or establish one yourself). Would offering a pay option that eliminates all ads be a reasonable accommodation or not? Did they make a good enough effort if they pick a major ad network that promises compliance? I don't know, but it doesn't seem cut and dry.

And all of that is about the website owner's responsibilities, not 3rd parties. Like, it doesn't seem clear to me there is any legal requirement for a given web browser to create/maintain APIs for ad blocking under ADA, and any such case would run into complex speech and other considerations particularly in the case of an open source browser (the same challenges also protect from the US government ever trying to ban them).

I think you have a decent moral/political argument which is important, but I guess just realize the legal aspects are complex. And that's before touching on the practical ones.

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

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#seizures-and-physical-reaction...

I think the arguments are even stronger in this case. I’m not asking the website owner to make any accommodations to me at all. I’m not asking them to change a single line of code or tweak a single setting. A physical business owner may not own the sidewalk in front of their business while still being legally obligated to maintain it, and I’m not even asking that.

I’m asking that they don’t go out of their way to take expensive and complex technical or legal steps that prevent me from bringing my own accommodations with me, ones that have zero effect on other visitors and cost the owner zero time, effort, and money.

Yes, I’m sure they’d prefer I watched the squares of pixels they sold to 3rd parties. I also bet they’d prefer not to have to pay to install a wheelchair ramp, but they don’t get to make that decision, either.

I agree with this in general, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is current law. Now, I will also say I am not a lawyer, and I can't say for certain its not, but having dealt with ADA claims and done a fair amount of research into it, I know that it is often a very misunderstood law. I believe that fighting to protect assistive technologies at all levels is a worthy fight.

If I wanted to, I could use reader mode for every page. I could try and find and/or generate an RSS feed for every page, but I would do most of the generating. It's just easier and faster to use an ad blocker on top of my browser, and screen reader.

I agree completely. And besides, I like looking at pretty websites and their colors and static images and fonts. I appreciate the visual design. I do not want to be assaulted with blinky animations siphoning off my concentration.

(Nor do I want to have to run malware in my browser, but I think that's a separate argument from the accessibility one.)

Sounds like images are illegal

You may find this story relevant and helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801718

I didn't have ADHD (or at least not diagnosed with it), but I tried to use Internet without adblocker and is unusable.

I suspect owners of those sites either don't visit them or use ad blocker themselves.

The best possible outcome, in that hypothetical, would be gaining the right to pay money to visit ad-free versions of websites. ADA can't compel anyone to provide services to the public for free; only to provide non-discriminatory, reasonable accommodations.

It does compel them to provide accessible entry to public spaces. You can't have a public store without allowing and supporting access to people with wheelchairs, for example.

They're assistive technology for me too, as a blind person. They make the modern web easier to navigate! I also use them for privacy reasons, of course!!

I concur, some websites are so unusable now with the tiny portion of content surrounded by adverts.

I feel like tools like screentime would fit that description better than adblockers.

How do you figure? If a website takes me 5 minutes to visit with an ad blocker and 10 without, then answer isn’t to timebox that visit to 5 minutes. That just means I only get to accomplish half my goal of visiting it.

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