
Colleges improve website accessibility as they are defendants in lawsuits - ohjeez
https://www.ithacajournal.com/story/news/local/2019/06/13/colleges-improve-websites-they-subjects-lawsuits/1302352001/
======
save_ferris
I work on a product for higher-ed clients, and this has deeply impacted my
team over the last two years. The process has been really tedious and painful
for everyone involved: developers, product folks, management, and the users.

University admins send us automated third party a11y reports constantly,
demanding that we make all of the recommended fixes immediately. We learned
really quickly that several of these reports are very opinionated about how to
implement ARIA tags, sometimes in ways that contradict the documentation. It
can be hard to explain this to a customer trying to protect themselves
legally.

In addition, screenreader apps are implemented inconsistently, and
reproducing/debugging the screenreader bug in your app can be really
infuriating. I felt truly horrible for people who use them on a daily basis
because it's an utterly prehistoric experience compared to using the web
normally.

The last thing is that we've had issues with getting a11y right with our front
end frameworks at times to address these screenreader bugs.

Ultimately, a11y is so painful and costly for us to get right that it takes up
a major chunk of our development efforts these days, and we all hate working
on them.

The state of developing and maintaining accessible web applications feels like
a sad joke given the industry's mantra to make the world a better, more
connected place.

~~~
klenwell
I empathize. My last job was with a university that got tagged with a lawsuit
threat around the time I started. Accessibility stories eventually dominated
our backlog. I appreciated being able to improve accessibility. But the lack
of consistent standards and the legal department's lazy and inflexible
response to the issue were demoralizing.

One of the first things I did in my next position was to bring on a Site
Accessibility Engineer (I think I made that term up) to get out in front of
issues like this. She was a graduate of a developer bootcamp with past
experience assisting people with real-world accessibility issues. She's been
invaluable.

~~~
jerf
"She was a graduate of a developer bootcamp with past experience assisting
people with real-world accessibility issues."

That's one of the best "boot camp" use cases I've ever heard. An accessibility
engineer like that doesn't necessarily need to be able to actually code up a
backend with a database, etc, but is going to be greatly handicapped if they
literally know nothing about the web and can't even show off a prototyped-up
page with the new markup they are proposing. They don't need a full "computer
science" education, a boot camp is a perfect bootstrap. (I'd still say there's
things yet to learn, but when isn't that true?)

~~~
pmiller2
Sure, but where do they get their second tech job? Site accessibility engineer
is not a common job title/position that I know of. Without some of those
skills you mention, if not the corresponding formal education, that seems like
this person is set up to fail soon, unless companies really start taking
accessibility seriously in the next few years.

~~~
belenos46
I dunno; if they're like most developers I know, they'll end up picking up a
hodgepodge of skills that they missed in the bootcamp, which will let them
plump out their resume.

If they can't figure out how to write their resume after they've had the
experience, I don't feel too bad for them.

------
Torgo
As a contractor I used to construct special websites for both universities and
government agencies. I would bring up in meetings "this site is required by
law to be accessible" and invariably I was told "accessibility's not in the
list of requirements". So in my opinion, they've had this coming for a long
time.

~~~
ashooner
While it's easy to say the site must legally be 'accessible', the problem I've
encountered is that there is apparently no legal standard for 'accessible'.
Section 508, WCAG, etc. do not have US caselaw behind them that actually
identifies them as such.

From a practitioner's viewpoint, it might make perfect sense to target WCAG,
and possibly consider anything less 'unaccessible'. However, from a legal
viewpoint - which typically doesn't acknowledge any obligation or liability
without precedent - it's a very different situation.

I'm curious if these tort cases can set that precedent, and clarify things for
the lawyers.

~~~
bluGill
In general courts look at standards IF you point the judge to it. The judge
will look at the standard, and if it looks reasonable will accept it, thus
creating precedent. If your website obeys a standard the other side needs to
prove the standard isn't enough to meet the law. That is if you meet WCAG the
judge will probably default to considering it a bug in the screen reader -
putting the burden the screen reader to show that the standard is not enough
for ADA, not only is this a higher bar, but the judge will generally cut you
some slack for trying.

The above assumes there is only one standard. Standards bodies (ANSI, ECMA,
ISO) often accept multiple competing standards. This happens when they are not
aware of the other standard, or when they believe the standards can compete
(C++ doesn't prevent you from creating an ISO standard for a different
programming language).

Companies will often try to get their internal process encoded into a standard
for this reason: it documents something that can be brought to court with more
weight than something they came up with: if you sue latter the judge will ask
if you care so much why didn't you get involved with the standards process
when the company created their standard. Since part of becoming a standard is
you have to take input from others this is somewhat reasonable.

The above is a US perspective from not a lawyer. Other countries have
different rules. Talk to a local lawyer if you need legal advice.

~~~
nradov
In general US civil court judges will cut you some slack if you can
demonstrate that you acted in good faith and made reasonable efforts to comply
with the law, even if you are technically violating some rules. This applies
to most sections of civil law, not just web accessibility.

------
Panino
Accessible websites are higher quality websites. The article mentions
SiteImprove, a commercial service that can be used to assess website
accessibility. But that's not appropriate for everyone. Want to improve yours
but don't know where to start? Here are a few options:

* WAVE add-on for Firefox (free): [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wave-accessib...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wave-accessibility-tool/)

* Google LightHouse (free, part of Chrome): Developer Tools -> Audits

* HTML Validator: [https://html5.validator.nu/](https://html5.validator.nu/)

The HTML validator isn't specifically aimed at accessibility issues but it
does highlight some low-lying fruit. All 3 of these are free and easy to use.
WAVE is the most helpful IMO.

~~~
threezero
Why are accessible websites higher quality? If someone spends a good portion
of their time making their site more usable for non-blind users, wouldn’t it
be more likely that the less accessible site would be higher quality?

~~~
ghaff
Because they can work better for users on small screens, low bandwidth
connections, who just want to find some information they need, etc.

I was at a conference that had a theme of accessibility about a year ago and
one of the repeated points was that accessibility (not just visual) tends to
improve access for people under lots of circumstances. (Think closed
captioning in a noisy environment or for viewers who aren't fully fluent or
have trouble with strong accents.)

~~~
teddyh
This is known as the “Curb cut effect”.

~~~
ghaff
Yes, that's a great example. It turns out having ramps widely available is
really handy even if someone is just temporarily incapacitated--or is pushing
a stroller or a shopping basket. Captions is another.

------
challenger22
The expected steady-state outcome of this situation is that all website-owning
educational companies will be targeted for lawsuits, many of which are valid,
and many of which are not. The net effect of these lawsuits will primarily be
a massive loss of productivity. It is very technically challenging and labor
intensive to make websites accessible to the blind or otherly disabled, and
doing so is to the benefit of a very small population, who will continue to
primarily use other communication platforms anyway. Net effect: For every hour
of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent
by others. A saner society would choose a different path.

I wish I could see actual statistics on this, I admit this is wild speculation
on my part.

~~~
dgacmu
You're thinking short term. And you're probably right, short term. But we had
the same set of concerns raised about many other ADA issues in the past, such
as wheelchair-accessible ramps and doors. Over time, the standard practices
(and what we'd think of as tooling and common design patterns) for new
construction evolved. ADA lawsuits about websites create a similar incentive
for long-term change.

and, hopefully, just as we've realized that ADA compliance benefits all of us,
whether it's in the form of getting old or pushing strollers or nursing a
sprained ankle, we'll get to the point where the improved information
availability from ADA compliance becomes an intrinsic part of the power of the
web.

~~~
threezero
Yet there are still scammy lawyers who file ADA lawsuits against small
businesses. Here’s a great example of what I consider a typical ADA lawyer:
[http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prenda_law_attorney_w...](http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prenda_law_attorney_who_switched_to_ada_suits_is_suspended_says_hell_contin)

~~~
dgacmu
There are bad actors in every domain, but cherrypicking one doesn't tell us
much about the overall balance. (Heck, for every scummy lawyer who uses the
ADA as their club of choice, there are probably 100 who specialize in
extracting money using questionable torts claims. Prenda Law was infamous for
being a pile of snakes, enough so that they justify their own wikipedia
article [0]).

Countering anecdote with anecdote, here's an example of the importance of ADA
lawsuits:

[https://www.peds.org/campaigns/sidewalk-maintenance/curb-
ram...](https://www.peds.org/campaigns/sidewalk-maintenance/curb-rampsl/)

Atlanta has been awful about keeping their pedestrian infrastructure working.
And this wasn't a profit-seeking lawsuit -- it was the DoJ.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law)

------
sequoia
My suspicion is that a major aspect of this is the proliferation of SPAs built
with tools that make accessibility seriously difficult. If you have an old-
fashioned web application that spits out HTML only, congratulations, your site
is already 90% of the way to compliance! Most of the a11y issues arise not
from omitting some special step, but from _breaking behaviour the browser
already provides by default_.

Tabstops: browsers have these but if you mix up forms with crazy CSS they
don't work well. Focus states: there by default, frequently removed by CSS.
Font sizes & contrast: high contrast & adequately large (and scalable!) by
default.

Semantic HTML, alt tags, and a "skip to content" link are up to you, combine
those with not breaking the browser's behaviour and you're 90% there, maybe
100%.

In the process of reinventing the web UI wheel, a lot of the a11y features of
the browser were forgotten.

------
mncharity
Much of the discussion here is about commercially viable sites. Some budget
and staffing exists to make progress, and some chunk of that will be
redirected to a11y.

I deal also with science research and education outreach content. There's
often no budget. No staff. Crufty pages put up by graduate students. Or zombie
sites left up long after their funding is gone. It's severely bottlenecked on
overworked people finding a bit of time to volunteer on something that helps
the world and largely doesn't help them. Even having a working web server is a
challenge. It's profoundly marginal, and every tweak of barrier energy
directly throttles how much of it occurs.

High-stakes a11y could be a disaster for this area. The liability exposure,
associated administrative hassle, and simple bare technical cost, might have
severe impact.

When Berkeley took down years of youtube lectures in response to DoJ ADA
concerns, they had already stopped making new ones pubic. So while dramatic
negative impact on the scale of large projects is a thing, I'm more worried
about the smaller-scale but systemic stuff.

For marginal efforts, an "if it's public, there are requirements and risks"
has a straightforward impact - it won't be public, it won't exist. At least
not there.*

And if a11y requirements aren't grandfathered, then as standards rise, the
long tail of pages that persist long after their authors have moved on,
retired, or died, that persist until a host name changes or a disk dies, will
likely be intentionally cut off. Like corporate email retention minimization,
but for human knowledge on the web.

Having watched copyright compliance dramatically slow open education content
creation at a range of scales, and HIPAA kill off promising work on patient-
created orientation content, and now hearing of "high-stakes" a11y... I worry
that we don't fully appreciate just how large a price in retarded progress
we're choosing to pay, since it's hard-to-see "that which might now exist...
doesn't; those we might have helped... weren't".

*Or... maybe small-scale content will simply be shifted off university sites, onto personal ones? And google and archive.org can fill in the gaps? There's already a trend of research groups having two sites; an institutional one, and a second more extensive one under the personal control of the professor who might move elsewhere. And graduate students having their own, describing their own work. So perhaps "high-stakes" a11y will merely accelerate this?

~~~
shakna
Small scale educational and research sites tend to already be accessible.

The default behaviours of HTML and default CSS are accessible to a reasonable
degree. PDFs that aren't scans are accessible.

It tends to be when one overrides behaviour that you start to become
inaccessible.

JS is awful for breaking a site for a screen reader as the purpose and
contents can change after or during it being read.

Scientists and researchers, in my experience, don't tend to futz with the
markup, because it's just the delivery tool, not their purpose.

------
iwasakabukiman
I work in government and this is a major issue right now. We've basically
pulled any and all content that wasn't required to be online from our website
until it has been "certified accessible" by a third party.

It's not the government I work for, but a nearby sheriff's office took their
website completely offline and replaced it with a simple text based site[1].
The cost to make their old site accessible and the liability of leaving it up
was too high.

That said and as others have mentioned in their comments, all of these
institutions know that accessibility is mandated by law and they've just kind
of ignored it.

[1] [https://www.alachuasheriff.org](https://www.alachuasheriff.org)

~~~
inferiorhuman
That's not a "simple text based site", it's simply a landing page. A "simple
text based site" would probably be easier for everyone involved.

~~~
iwasakabukiman
Is a landing page not a subset of simple text based site?

~~~
wtallis
No. You don't make a building accessible by putting a sign on the front saying
"wheelchairs not welcome", and you shouldn't make a web site "accessible" by
gutting it of all content and functionality that isn't already accidentally
accessible. This is at best a case of malicious compliance.

~~~
iwasakabukiman
I never said it was accessible. I said it was a text based site, which it is.
I feel like you're misunderstanding on purpose just to argue.

I also never said that it was okay for them to do that. But it meets the
minimum requirements of the law and is legally compliant (or so their lawyer
says).

In fact, my point was that they should _not_ do that. They did it to avoid
getting sued. Now any functionality they could have offered, such as online
crime reporting or crime stat lookups, are not even options.

~~~
wtallis
It's rather uselessly pedantic to claim that a single page placeholder
qualifies as a simple text-based web site for the purposes of a discussion
like this.

------
camjohnson26
Web Developers need to start designing accessibility in from the start. Adding
WCAG compliance after the fact is much more difficult.

I wonder if part of the problem is that we still don’t have an official way to
develop “blueprints” for websites the way building designers do. As the
industry matures, having inaccessible websites could be as taboo as having
inaccessible buildings is today.

~~~
organsnyder
In my experience, too many websites are created design-first, content later.
When your first consideration is visual appeal, it's much harder to go back
and add meaning to the content that was never really intended to stand by
itself without its surrounding visual context.

~~~
Ill_ban_myself
Design drives sales online. Entirely. If brick and mortar stores had to design
their entire storefront and display area around wheelchair accessibility first
to the detriment of 5-10% or more of recurring revenue we'd instantly have a
small city worth of lobbyists to reverse it.

~~~
tylerrobinson
But don't brick and mortar stores indeed comply with accessibility laws
through building codes?

~~~
organsnyder
In the US, the ADA does indeed mandate many things (reserved parking spaces,
door widths, ramps/elevators, etc.). Though to continue the analogy, I think
we'd need to extend it to how the merchandise itself is displayed/marketed—for
example, requiring all products to be accessible by someone in a wheelchair,
braille on all packaging, etc.

~~~
robocat
Notice the usage of "Undue Burden" from the official ADA documentation: "The
rules are also flexible for communicating effectively with customers who are
blind or have low vision. A sales clerk can find items and read their
labels..."

See joebubna's comment in this topic for more depth:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20226398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20226398)

------
josefresco
I've done WCAG / ADA work over the last two years and it's been a wake up call
for government funded organizations and even small businesses, not to mention
designers, developers and staff who manage content.

From my experience, most of these lawsuits are "predatory" in nature. Law firm
finds a sympathetic case, sues as many orgs as they can, and collects massive
fees along the way while the web developers get thrown under the bus, or also
collect massive fees (yay?!?). The same can be said for "workshops" that teach
people about compliance.

Passing automated WCAG tests, vs actually following the "spirit" of compliance
are two completely different things. I've spent countless hours attempting to
get my code to pass automated tests, just so when I pass back to the client
they don't throw it back in my lap, despite my code being fully compliant and
accessible.

We also do design work, and work with external designers with no concept of
accessibility. Often (most) times, clients dictate the design and often make
decisions that violate accessibility rules. Color contrast, "wiz bang"
features are the two most common violators. Full accessibility limits design
freedom considerably.

I met with a 100% government funded org just last week and told them their
(hundred + page) site (no CMS) was not in any way compliant. You should have
seen the look on their faces. They then proceeded to show me websites they
like, to inspire a redesign project and NONE of them were even remotely
compliant despite all the examples also being gov funded.

20-30% in the cost increase to make a new website project fully compliant.
Retrofitting an old website? The cost could easily exceed the initial
development.

To be clear, I'm not saying websites should not be compliant, just that ...
it's messy and the guidelines aren't always clear. Aggressive law firms are
only making things worse.

Final note: The accessibility capabilities of social networks are ... not
good. Where do you post transcriptions of your Facebook video? Where do you
specify alt tags, or "long descriptions"? The list is extensive.

Final final note: Once your web developer is "done". Your staff who blogs and
the content creators that fuel this work can ruin everything. Staff training
is often overlooked.

~~~
roel_v
"Aggressive law firms are only making things worse."

Are they? Would you, or the one writing the cheque, care without them?

~~~
josefresco
_I care_ about WCAG, PCI, GDPR and things like privacy policies, security and
accessibility. However, I work for clients who simply want an inexpensive (as
possible) website that they like the looks of. My competitors sell
increasingly inexpensive solutions that lack these considerations, further
driving down the expectations of price by the client (race to the bottom).
Convincing them to care AND pay more is difficult. The lawsuits have made them
afraid, and in some cases frantic. I don't believe FUD is the most effective
way to improving accessibility. Maybe the ends justifies the means, but I
cringe thinking we're lining the pockets of law firms for only marginal
improvement.

------
miguelmota
If you want to make a website accessible without much effort then don't add
shitty animations that hide content, don't use divs for buttons and links,
don't use modals for everything, don't make text that's barely readable, etc,
keep it simple and stick to semantic HTML. I made a checklist years ago
[https://github.com/miguelmota/web-
accessibility](https://github.com/miguelmota/web-accessibility)

------
jmenn
My university went through an accessibility remediation process recently, and
it was a rather nightmarish undertaking. Many universities have multiple
(thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a
time, and I've always wondered if these would be targeted by people looking to
bring a complaint.

Our HTML was more or less fine (though we found and fixed a few bugs), but the
unbelievable number of PDFs and un-captioned videos nearly broke us. The
culture shift has been difficult, particularly with people who want to post
videos or PDFs but don't have the resources or training to make those pieces
of content accessible.

~~~
wastedhours
> Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that
> are largely untouched for years at a time

Wholeheartedly agree with this. I once hosted a microsite on my personal
server for a group at the university I was a web flunkey for as it needed to
get up quickly, and well, corporate IT wasn't the fastest thing there, and it
took them _years_ to ask for changes after I'd left.

It's usually pretty easy for universities to update their main public facing
pages, but as you mention, it's the _thousands_ of other, quite often slightly
bespoke (as this Professional or that Dr wants their own, custom slice) that's
the breaker.

------
cujic9
Isn't this the ADA working as designed?

My understanding is that the ADA is enforced specifically by citizens filing
complaints which turn into lawsuits.

It's great that these lawsuits actually carry enough weight to make the
universities take action.

In other cases, companies repeatedly get fined for some violation (pollution
comes to mind) and simply see it as a cost of doing business.

------
Shivetya
One news story [1] has a copy of the suit within the article. Suit [2]

No word on exact amounts being sued for over and beyond compliance
enforcement. I am all for compliance but there needs to be safeguards against
excessive lawyer fees and actual damages at most could only be applicable to
one defendant. It is clear from previous cases that they are claiming damages

The fact so many state colleges have not complied should be an embarrassment
to the states which this is true and if wider spread should be an absolute
requirement before federal funds are given to any state college to include
providing backing to student loans.

 __ __Compensatory and damages in an amount to be determined by proof,
including all applicable statutory and punitive damages and fines, to
Plaintiff and the proposed class for violations of their civil rights under
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, New York State Human Rights Law and City Law;
f.

Pre- and post-judgment interest; g.

An award of costs and expenses of this action together with reasonable
attorneys’ and expert fees; and

-31- h.

Such other and further relief as this Court deems just and proper ____

[1][https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Colleges-
including-S...](https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Colleges-including-
Saint-Rose-hit-with-mass-13442769.php)

[2] [https://www.scribd.com/document/394914375/Camacho-v-St-
Rose#...](https://www.scribd.com/document/394914375/Camacho-v-St-
Rose#from_embed)

------
JamesBarney
While I want the web to be maximally accessible to all individuals it seems
like these lawsuit have had a chilling effect on things like opencourseware
and open access to university courses.

------
nradov
It's a shame that it takes lawsuits to force colleges to do something they
should have done voluntarily years ago.

~~~
president
It's like how most companies treat information security:

1\. Assess the cost of implementing proper security vs cost of doing damage
control in the event of a breach

2\. If former is less than latter, implement proper security. If not, ignore
the problem until a breach happens

Just replace "security" with "accessibility" and "breach" with "lawsuit"

~~~
nradov
College IT department managers aren't financially sophisticated enough to
calculate explicit trade offs between accessibility compliance versus lawsuit
costs.

~~~
jldugger
They probably are but a) lack the data they need and b) realize that breaking
the law is not a 'and you get to keep your government job' career move.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Surely if they don't have the data then their set up is, by definition, not
sophisticated enough to address the balance point for payoff in costs of non-
mandated accessibility work?

~~~
jldugger
Mostly, but sometimes 'financially sophisticated' is interpreted as 'does not
know / cannot derive the formulas involved.'

------
umvi
Ugh, implementing a11y correctly is onerous... I feel like screen readers need
to get better, not the other way around

~~~
simion314
Do you have an example of an improvement?

I mean if you use ad iv or img instead of a button how will the reader know
that is a button?

Do you use the reader mode in Firefox or similar extensions? Have you seen
webpages where it does not work or instead of grabbing only the content it
grabs a lot of the advertising and other garbage? Accessible webpage would
help people that use reader mode too.

~~~
infamia
Even when using semantic markup as you describe, there are still accessibility
gotchas waiting to pounce.

[https://www.rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2019/06/04/grid-
cont...](https://www.rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2019/06/04/grid-content-re-
ordering-and-accessibility/)

------
dillonmckay
I find some of these comments quite bizarre.

Section 508 has been around, for what, 20 years?

And using lynx to see how a document is rendered was used quite a bit, for
both some accessibility assessment, and also SEO.

I can definitely see how difficult this can be as an after-thought, but
higher-ed should know better.

This is not a new requirement.

~~~
talmand
I always understood that Section 508 applied only to US Federal agencies and
any third-party products they make use of.

~~~
dillonmckay
If they are receiving federal monies (student loans and grants), they must
comply.

------
SamuelAdams
Mods, can you update this article to have (2018) in the title? The original
article [1] was published on December 4, 2018, nearly 6 months ago. The
lawsuit was filed on November 17, 2018 [2].

[1]: [https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Colleges-
including-S...](https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Colleges-including-
Saint-Rose-hit-with-mass-13442769.php)

[2]:[https://www.scribd.com/document/394914375/Camacho-v-St-
Rose#...](https://www.scribd.com/document/394914375/Camacho-v-St-
Rose#from_embed)

------
evunveot
Would the plaintiff still have a case if the defendants staffed a phone line
with someone available to navigate the websites by verbal instruction and made
the availability of that service obvious? (I believe phone companies already
provide speech <-> text services for people who can't speak and/or hear.)
Seems like a decent compromise.

~~~
reaperducer
I've seen some web sites recently that have small text at the bottom reading
something like, "Need help reading this web site? Call 800-xxx-xxx for
assistance."

I don't know if that stands up in a court of law, but it's an interesting way
to handle the problem.

------
i_rawr_u
I used to do Help Desk while attending University and often times people would
have trouble using JAWS (screen reader) on Blackboard/Canvas pages. Almost
made finishing school work impossible and those companies didn't seem to be
putting in any effort accessibility wise.

------
leepowers
Accessibility is hard. It's not just a technical problem. It informs every
stage of conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a web site.
Accessibility is end-to-end.

For instance WCAG 2.1 requires a minmum text color contrast ratio of 4.5:1. If
a web designer and other stakeholders haven't taken this on board there's a
risk they'll select an inaccessible color palette. And that's just one
requirement.

Designs that appeal to management and other stakeholders are more often
hostile to accessibility than not.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#contrast-
minimum](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#contrast-minimum)

------
nrjewknbgkr
Why aren't we designing the web to be "accessible first" instead of "mobile
first". It's gotta be exponentially more difficult to retrofit accessibility
on top of a site designed for sighted users instead of vice-versa.

Isn't that the same premise behind why the web started designing "mobile
first"?

------
PaulHoule
This was a priority at Cornell until the Peoplesoft/Duffield Hall disaster
happened and at that point anybody in IT had a target on their back.

The most used web page at Cornell has been the weather report for the longest
time, but CIT didn't know and shut it off out of ignorance. Then all of a
sudden they get hundreds of calls.

IT at Cornell was a center of excellence in the past, but since Lehman left,
it as seem as a cost center that gets in the way of hiring more academics.

~~~
driverdan
Your post assumes readers have a significant amount of knowledge about
Cornell. Most of us have no idea what the "Peoplesoft/Duffield Hall disaster"
was, what CIT stands for, or who Lehman is.

~~~
PaulHoule
CIT == Cornell Information Technology, the central IT organization.

The Peoplesoft/Duffield Hall disaster was two connected scandals.

David Duffield (the Peoplesoft founder) donated money to build Duffield hall,
which houses a national nanotechnology center. That nanotechnology also
received startup funds from the NSF, which required that Cornell raise
matching funds from some source that wasn't the NSF. When they demanded
documentation, Cornell said that was impossible (paperwork is SNAFU), the NSF
said "This is an eligibility requirement, not a reporting requirement".
Cornell was informed it wouldn't be getting any more funding from the NSF if
it didn't correct the situation.

Around the same time Cornell attempted a Peoplesoft implementation that went
at least $50 million over budget while implementing only 20% of the original
scope.

The first project manager they hired said there was no way they could do the
project with the budget they wanted, they fired him and hired a Yes Man. The
rest is history.

Jeff Lehman was president of Cornell for about a year. He announced his
resignation at Alumni week, shocking people. The cause of his resignation was
kept secret, but I can't help but believe that he took office when the above
mentioned scandals hit. (These certainly were not his fault because the
situations started before his watch)

What I do know is that there was a severe money pinch, which caused a series
of cascading failures, and also that everything at Cornell that was unique and
special had to fight for it's right to exist, while they kept chasing the same
fads as all the other Ivys.

Was this why Lehman quit? I don't know. But I do know if he stayed he would
have been cleaning up an awful mess instead of leading new initiatives.

~~~
ineedasername
Cornell has an endowment in excess of $7 billion dollars, why wouldn't some of
that have been used to ensure the "unique & special" didn't die? Politics?

------
DesertShadow
Plenty of water was flowing through Taughannock Falls on Tuesday

------
steelframe
> using the web normally

Perhaps one way to approach the issue is for people who build web frameworks
to reconsider their anchor of "normal."

~~~
ng12
My question is why use the web at all? Surely there's an easier way for a
blind person to access an information or send data to an API than through an
HTML web page.

~~~
SilasX
HTML _was_ that way! "Hey, look, it's a spec where any computer can send a
request, and you get a nice, structured text document back that's machine-
parseable. It even words for the blind, who can just plug their own preferred
reader into the doc! Problem solved."

Oh wait, except most of the audience isn't blind, and starts using clients
that can do ever-zanier things with the UI. Designers want to appeal to this
market. The beautiful, parseable structure of HTML gets forgotten about, and
it's no longer usable by the blind.

So you want content providers to support an api endpoint that works like HTML
used to? Okay, but what stops that exact process from happening all over
again?

Or, maybe you mean that every provider in existence will support two versions
of every endpoint: the meth-addled zany design, and the standards-compliant,
usable one. Okay, that could work, but it seems a lot harder than just having
one version that makes a small effort to make itself more machine parseable.

~~~
ng12
So is it easier just to provide static web pages for accessibility?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I'd be ok with that, personally. I'd set my browser to use that version of a
site by default.

~~~
SilasX
That’s what “reader mode” effectively is.

------
itsaidpens
As an aside, I do not think Apple gets nearly enough credit for designing iOS,
WatchOS and MacOS with the needs of the blind and disabled in mind. It's truly
a beautiful thing.

------
yostrovs
Like cars, soon all the websites will look nearly identical. Building your
own, your choice will be the background color to use and one of a number of
approved fonts you can select from.

Cars have regulations about the size, color, brightness of all the external
lights, airbags, emissions, noise levels, etc., that when you put all these
together, you get a Chevy Impala. Or a Toyota Camry.

Compare the SUVs, for example. I just bought one and I constantly turn my head
when an SUV passes on the street thinking it's the same as mine. But turns out
it's from a different maker altogether. Designed on a different continent by
very different people.

~~~
sterkekoffie
I'm not sure if you've ever been in a building, but in case you haven't, I can
assure you there's a lot that goes into their design and identity beyond the
presence of a wheelchair ramp. Cars look identical because of consumer
expectations, not because of the ozone resistance of their brake hoses.

~~~
Ill_ban_myself
Websites, however, can experience drastic swings in recurring revenue, brand
loyalty, all from the addition or removal of a seemingly minor visual
interface element. Design = Sales online. If compliance for brick and mortar
stores moved out of the entryway and into the mandated height of display
cases, counters, signage for colorblind patrons, and mandatory gluten free
options there would be a deluge of lobbyists to stop it.

~~~
lexicality
All of those (except for the gluten) are already covered by the ADA though?

~~~
Ill_ban_myself
To some degree, where its followed at all, where its enforced at all, and when
its not convenient exceptions get made. That's kind of my point... If this
becomes a crackdown there will be an equally large backlash.

