
Deaf, Blind Sue Over Web Shopping - jalanco
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324373204578374483679498140.html#.UU2rRQQ5XuU.hackernews
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socalnate1
This has the potential to destroy online commerce in the US, and severely
damage one area where mom n' pop stores can still thrive in America.

Amazon and other giant retailers could still survive, even if they where made
to comply with all of these requests (although it would slow innovation
considerably). Small online stores couldn't afford it and would simply shut
down. This is bad for everyone.

This reminds me of what happened in Julian, CA - a small mountain town. An
overzealous lawyer decided to start suing everyone with steps into their tiny
bookstores and coffee shops as a means to extort money out of them. Several
just shut down.

[http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060729/news_1n29pinnoc...](http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060729/news_1n29pinnock.html)

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rpedroso
I think some are overstating the potential difficulties of making the ADA
apply to American websites. A large part of compliance is just utilizing the
accessibility tools built into HTML: semantic markup, proper use of alt and
title tags, etc.

I do still see the possibility of predatory litigation. To protect small
businesses, maybe the burden should shift to the web developers that they
hire. Much like we expect contractors to know the ins-and-outs of building
codes, we should come to expect web development agencies to understand their
clients' legal obligations.

~~~
obviouslygreen
Absolutely not. There is a huge difference between something like plumbing
where you do one or a few sets of well regulated activities and building
infrastructure for businesses across many industries. Web programmers have a
lot to be aware of just to do their own work, suggesting they should be
responsible for their employers' or clients' legal obligations is completely
unreasonable.

~~~
rpedroso
Who should be responsible then? If you shift the burden onto small business
owners, that seems pretty unreasonable to me.

Imagine a small business owner asking their web developers if they used alt or
title attributes properly? Absurd, right? I can't name a single plumbing
instrument other than a plunger, and I don't have to because there is a
division of labor. If my toilet gets backed up and it's not as simple as
making sure the ball in the tank didn't get jammed, I call a plumber.

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jt2190
The intent of this is to help people access web content and applications, but
it hasn't worked very well in the past, and it won't work very well now,
because "accessibility" is very hard to define in concrete terms that a
programmer can work with. Most organizations cheat and limit the definition to
"can be read by a screen reader" and perhaps "can be navigated with a
keyboard." Few if any address other accessibility problems, because it's just
too damn hard to test for them all. (Reading comprehension, for example.)

A much better approach IMHO is to encourage companies to create or open their
APIs, and to encourage those who need better accessibility or their advocates
to create alternate interfaces to their services. Think of it like a
"marketplace of user interfaces".

Perhaps instead of passing a law to force existing UI's to change, the
government should work with private industry to encourage open APIs.

~~~
bgruber
As a sighted individual i totally agree with you regarding APIs as the best
course. Screenreaders are always going to be, at best, a kludge to let those
with visual disabilities use a system expressly designed around the ability to
see it. Different means of interaction can provide a much better experience.

However, in my interactions with people with visual disabilities, I've come to
understand that for many of them, the ability to use the same technology as
everyone else is actually quite important. Everybody else uses Windows, why
shouldn't they be able to? Everybody else shops on the Amazon website, why not
them? To say they should use a separate interface is tantamount to telling
them to go to the special grocery store for the blind people.

I don't really know that this is a constructive way of thinking, but it's
important to consider.

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jt2190

      > However, in my interactions with people with visual 
      > disabilities, I've come to understand that for many 
      > of them, the ability to use the same technology as 
      > everyone else is actually quite important.
    

Well of course. Computers are one (if not the) most important tools of our
era, and everyone who wants to participate in our technological society needs
to use computers in one form or another. But we shouldn't conflate putting
computers to work for us with the user interfaces we use to control them.

The good news is that as more and more web applications introduce APIs,
they're making it easier to change the interface but still use the tool.
Companies could be encouraged to focus more their time and energy on
supporting those in the community who want to build alternative interfaces for
their applications, instead of using that time and energy to defend themselves
from lawsuits.

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arbuge
This rubs me wrong. It would be impossible for small businesses operating
websites to comply with these directives unless they're made really simple to
implement, which I doubt is realistic.

My father was blind for 30 years until he died but never tried to impose on
society in any way in that period - I can't imagine him ever agreeing in the
slightest with the proponents of these ideas.

~~~
nonamegiven
Like all things, there's a balance, and like all good balances it should be
flexible.

"No" is not acceptable, at least not to me. I have no disabilites, but I think
that there should be accommodation for disabilities in society. Perhaps below
a certain business income or traffic the requirements are reduced or go away,
and that's where we're not very good at balance.

As commerce, government and social interaction move online, it becomes
imperative (yes) that we make accommodations for disabilities. The more we
are, the better we are, so it's good for "the rest of us" as much as for
"them."

In the end, it's likely an "eat your spinach" issue as said in the article:
you bring more people and benefit in by your accommodation than the
accommodations cost. Where that falls down is the micro-operations, and that's
where I think we need some balance. Big ops can afford all this and more, but
you won't get _more_ big ops unless you let the small ops grow through that
stage.

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bdcravens
This applies to online shopping, but many ADA policies will end up affecting
startups. Just an example, think of a new AirBNB competitor: they facilitate
reservations like a travel agency or hotel lobby, businesses that are subject
to ADA regulations.

Of course, ADA takes a little additional time and care (not much, but hey, if
you're agile and running lean, your MVP can't let regulations get in the way,
right?) The government wants to regulate my site, but they just don't get it.
ADA is the result of a dying industry that don't apply to me because I'm
disrupting. DISRUPTING!

~~~
pyre
I could see it only applying once you reach a certain level. If you only have
100 customers, then it doesn't really matter, but once you reach 1 million
customers, it might start to matter.

~~~
bdcravens
The moment you start becoming inaccessible, then that's your starting point.
Various statistics point to 1 to 2% of the population being blind. So using
that example, 50-100 is where you need to become concerned about
accessibility.

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bionsuba
"That could mean websites will be required to include spoken descriptions of
photos and text boxes for the blind, as well as captions and transcriptions of
multimedia features for the deaf"

"Mr. Smith also advises companies to ensure that people with motor
disabilities can navigate websites without the use of a mouse"

As if I needed more reasons to not host my sites in the US.

~~~
rpedroso
I didn't take this quite as literally as Mr. Smith put it. He doesn't mean
websites might need to hire voice actors to read out your content.

What he means is that you must actually use HTML's alt and title attributes
properly so that screen-readers can produce these spoken descriptions.

That strikes me as a fairly reasonable burden.

~~~
whichdan
Not to mention, it's an easy way to improve SEO[1].

[1] [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-
alt...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-
attributes-smartly.html)

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potatolicious
In an interesting side note, the whole situation is getting worse in mobile-
land. On iOS the accessibility framework (which allows devs to label UI
elements for screenreaders, among other features) has been almost entirely co-
opted for use in automated testing.

Lacking a real way to trigger UI elements programmatically testing frameworks
have almost universally fallen back on hijacking the accessibility features of
the OS to do its work.

This makes me very concerned for _actual_ app accessibility, since not only
are we failing to implement accessible features (Apple's defaults are quite
good, though imperfect) but we're actively breaking it instead.

~~~
bdcravens
Can you explain further? How does using the Accessibility framework in a way
other than designed to facilitate testing (code that really shouldn't make its
way into the final app anyways) get in the way of Accessibility in the app
used by the end user? Are the internal hooks into the Accessibility framework
overridden at the API level?

~~~
potatolicious
None of the testing frameworks I'm aware of alter the Accessibility framework
itself - that's not the concern.

The problem is that we're corrupting the data being fed into the framework to
further our testing ends. Things like accessibilityLabel and
accessibilityValue which are supposed to power screen readers are now instead
filled with semantic data to facilitate testing.

UI elements that aren't (and shouldn't) be screen readable now have
accessibilityLabels attached to permit testing. UI elements that _should_ have
accessibilityLabels have their default values overridden so some test can have
visibility into internal state, etc.

You _can_ avoid this - by #ifdef'ing your codebase straight to hell to make
sure these don't make it into the shipping app, but I also don't see this
being done.

On the plus side it seems like TDD in general isn't a _thing_ in the iOS
development scene, though it's picking up, so most apps haven't messed with
accessibility yet.

~~~
bdcravens
So am I understanding correctly: the attributes assigned to UI elements can
have hints for accessibility sake, and the testing tools are filling those
attributes with tags to automate to act/assert an element? Info that's
valuable to the testing framework, but garbage for accessibility?

Sounds like the testing frameworks have an obligation to provide a tool that
can "clean" code for the final working version. Is there a way to do this in
XCode without #ifdef'ing? (such as a pre-compilation plugin?)

~~~
potatolicious
Pretty much, yes. The more complex the app the worse it tends to get.

Say you have a button that says "Send Email" - the default accessibility label
would have the screen reader just read the text, and that's great. And your
testing framework can layer on top of this and, say, make sure the button
works.

It gets a bit more complicated when you apply more rigor to testing - you need
the ability to query the state of your program in a way that isn't truly
necessary for usability, and forces developers to implement things in ways
that are far from intuitive.

Take an example, let's say you're building a Facebook app. Instead of "Like
This Post", you might have to label the button "Like joebob's post at
3/23/2012 2:17PM" just so the testing framework can uniquely identify one
button over another. And this brokenness is hidden, since the visible button
is still labeled "Like This Post".

Worse, say you want to test that a view changes size when interacted with. Now
you're literally embedding sizes and coordinates into accessibility
hints/values/labels to make this happen. This devolves very, very quickly.

There's been some promising progress on iOS automated testing - the fact that
it's happening represents a maturing of the platform and an embrace of quality
engineering rather than the seat-of-pants approach we've seen thus far. That
being said, the most popular frameworks are still woefully immature.

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jalanco
From the article:

"The U.S. Department of Justice is expected to issue new regulations on
website accessibility later this year that could take a broad view of the
ADA's jurisdiction over websites. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to
comment.

"That could mean websites will be required to include spoken descriptions of
photos and text boxes for the blind, as well as captions and transcriptions of
multimedia features for the deaf, said Jared Smith, associate director of
WebAIM, a nonprofit group that trains and evaluates companies on Web
accessibility.

"Mr. Smith also advises companies to ensure that people with motor
disabilities can navigate websites without the use of a mouse, and to use
plain language and a strong design to aid people with cognitive or
intellectual disabilities."

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redorb
If websites want their business they will use the alt and title tag
appropriately, I could be in the minority thinking we all ready have too many
laws.

~~~
rayiner
The ADA is a decades old law. What's changed is that the Internet has become a
critical too for people to live their lives, and not just something nerds use.
It's entirely appropriate that the ADA be applied online now. And let's face
it, putting up some alt tags and making things keyboard navigable is far less
expensive than making things compliant in the real world. Remember, this I'd
just for sites engaged in commerce.

And if this stifles "innovation" in web site design, well that would be
fucking fantastic. We really don't need more "innovation" by web site
designers--they've already done enough damage to the internet.

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manicbovine
Cherry-picking the article:

> .... and to use plain language and a strong design to aid people with
> cognitive or intellectual disabilities....

How is this measured? This is the most disconcerting part of the article to
me.

Taking it to an extreme, is Amazon liable when someone with cognitive
impairments accidentally buys $10,000 of stuff with one-click shopping for
failure to understand the concept?

Is ebay liable for inadequately explaining the concept of a bid at the level
of someone with a 70 IQ?

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jiggy2011
What about a marketplace for a solution to these problems? If I build a
website I can't tell how disabled friendly it is, the best I can do is follow
practises I find on some accessibility blog and maybe test it in a
screenreader.

It would be a value add service to have a disabled person test their use of my
site for various tasks and give me honest feedback.

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noonespecial
While I support the general cause of increased accessibility, I have a
philosophical problem with "perfect or none at all" legislation. When the laws
are passed, they are passed expecting lots of perfect making everyone shiny-
happy, but they often get a lot of "none at all" with a side of frustrated
resentment instead.

