
Do protections for people with disabilities apply online? Domino’s asks SCOTUS - jimktrains2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/do-protections-for-people-with-disabilities-apply-online-dominos-asks-high-court/2019/07/20/984c685e-a7fd-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html
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SEOinSeattle
This would be an excellent project for the United States Digital Service.
Define what accessible means, in reasonably achievable terms, then provide
code and specs for government agencies that can also be used, freely, by
businesses. Oh, wait: [https://www.section508.gov/create/web-
content](https://www.section508.gov/create/web-content)

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joelx
I own a website development company with 180 employees and sadly the ADA has
been very abused by ambulance chasing attorneys. I have had several of my
customers receive scammy demand letters for missing minor alt tags and things
like that.

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api
It should not be enforced through the civil court, or at least not at first.
This is actually a case where a new bureaucracy may be needed to handle
reports of non compliance in a standardized way.

The civil courts should pretty much never be society's "first line tech
support" for the reason you cite as well as high cost and lack of consistency.

Of course this would never happen because of regulatory capture in the US by
lawyers in this case. The US is far more corrupt than most people think.

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siruncledrew
I agree that it would be less-ambulance-chase-y if there was a compliance
agency (such as the FTC or some other bureau) where websites could be
"neutrally audited" for ADA compliance and then presented with a list of
priority action items to fix. I believe it would be possible to mostly
automate audit-report generation as well, since there are already ADA-checker
browser extensions and tools.

A "one-strike, warning-first" system is less punitive-focused than the current
system, and less likely to be abused by law firms for the goal of a quick cash
grab. Personally, I would prefer to be informed and given a chance to fix
something before being punished and branded as someone who hates the disabled
by a law firm. How many of their websites are 100% ADA-compliant?

Obviously, it's important to be considerate about providing usable online
experiences for the disabled. That should be a common goal. However, I've seen
ADA lawsuit letters as ridiculous as the DCMA Youtube ones. There's an entire
shitty industry centered around mailing out thousands of these letters per
week hoping to collect back enough bribes to not go to court. These law firms
are just like other corporations looking for a revenue stream to pad their
bottomline. Contrary to their ads, they are not fighting for others or
pursuing justice for society, they are trying to get rich.

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DanBC
We tried self regulation. We saw it being ignored widely.

See for example universities not making their material accessible.

People on HN lost their minds when video material was taken down for violating
accessibility standards. What people failed to realise was that the
universities imposed a condition (that the videos had to be accessible); they
provided advice and help to make the video accessible; they asked professors
to sign off that the videos were accessible; and those professors lied and
said "yep no problems" even when no work had been done on accessibility.

The courts are the only way to drive change.

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leggomylibro
Even if we ignore the glaringly obvious answer (yes), hasn't this sort of
thing already been litigated in the courts?

Like, when Netflix got sued for not providing closed-captioning on some of
their content?

[https://www.3playmedia.com/2015/07/23/nad-v-netflix-ada-
laws...](https://www.3playmedia.com/2015/07/23/nad-v-netflix-ada-lawsuit-
requires-closed-captioning-on-streaming-video/)

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tyingq
_" It’s important to note that the ruling in NAD v. Netflix was a
Massachusetts district court decision, not a US Supreme Court decision."_

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molticrystal
While I do believe that access should be granted when possible, to demonstrate
that this is not as simple a question as it appears on the the surface, we can
ask a couple related questions.

Are there online activities that an able body can do that should be prohibited
because it is difficult or impossible to implement an equivalent functionality
or experience for a disabled person ?

If there are activities that exist, where is the line drawn?

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xenospn
I honestly can't believe Dominos would spend millions on litigating instead of
spending thousands on making their website and app more accessible.

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mistersquid
Unequivocally, yes.

The disabled should be able to access online resources in a way that is
functionally equivalent to an able-bodied person’s experience.

And yes, such accessibility should be protected by law.

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Misdicorl
I agree with you in theory, but I think this gets hairy pretty quick.

Should the requirement apply to a personal blog? What if that person is
associated with something important and publishes interesting/useful
information on their blog? What if they sell things? What if they only sell
things by mail order and the site is just an ad? What if they have ads?

Level headed enforcement is one important aspect, but I feel like good
legislation is really hard here.

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liability
Nobody has made me install a ramp to my front door, because I don't operate a
business open to the public out of my home. So I'm not too concerned.

(That said, I would sooner make my blog accessible to the vision impaired than
make my home wheelchair friendly. Web accessibility is trivial unless you go
out of your way to do fancy shit with style sheets and JavaScript, or unless
you do dumb shit like put important text in images with no alt-text (just...
why??))

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Misdicorl
But the line between 'the business' and personal is often blurry. Must Elon
Musk's tweets satisfy these requirements? What about a senior software
engineer's blog which goes into some detail on a Google cloud outage?

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Misdicorl
To really drive the point home- what if both the engineer and Google earn
money from the blog because it runs AdWords?

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liability
The de-adification of non-commercial websites would be a great outcome!

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curiousgal
Although I sympathize with the blind person, going as far as suing the company
is, to me, an asshole move.

To be fair, no one has stopped the man from ordering from a store. This is
akin to a person with no smartphone suing a company for not making an app for
his "dumb" phone.

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michaelmrose
The settlement will likely be a rounding error on profit and is absolutely the
only way to establish precedent that this is required for companies that do
business here.

Lawsuits or lost profits due to bad PR are the only way corporate America
changes policies. It's not an asshole move its just the way business is done.
Those who don't understand how business is done are simply trampled.

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remote_phone
If the “award” went to charity instead of lawyers and “victims” it would
eliminate a lot of the lawsuits. The incentives are entirely wrong in these
lawsuits.

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liability
Yes, making it so only the rich could hope to afford _winning_ a court case
(let alone losing one) is a great way to reduce the number of people using the
legal system; excellent insight...

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gowld
Small claims court is free.

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ajross
This is _literally_ about a case before (OK, strictly a request to) the
supreme court of the united states, having been through multiple previous
courts already. How do you propose elevating such a case from... a small
claims court?

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dbg31415
It'd be smart for Dominoes, or anyone, to just use Lighthouse as part of the
build process. Any new code that's written, or old code that's modified, has
to score an 80 or better on Lighthouse's accessibility audit in order to pass
code review.

Often if comes down to just building with the right front-end framework, and
doing minuscule things that lead to a better end product... but those things
have to be done from the start. Retrofitting a site after it has been built
(poorly) is crazy expensive.

Once you add Lighthouse, increase the target score every 6 months, until
you're at 95s across the board. And build in WCAG audits as well.
Accessibility tends to help with cross-browser / cross-screen issues, helps
with SEO, and gets people out of the dated mindset that designs have to be
pixel-perfect.

Don't expect an agency vendor to come in and win the work at the lowest bid
and actually care about doing it right. The number of clients who have any
idea about accessibility is painfully low. That's what's so nice about
Lighthouse; it gives non-technical staff a way to verify the work is done
right.

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jimktrains2
Edit: op edited their post to remove these sections.

> Private businesses... let the business decide if it wants to support those
> customers.

Should businesses also decide if they want to serve black, Latino, Asian, or
mixed race folk? These arguments have been had and settled: it's no ok to have
a business that is open to the public and to also discriminate against anyone.

> Also... and let me just harp a bit here. ADA standards went a bit overboard.
> I think they should apply to government, and likely businesses, but not my
> own house. Building code that says all the thermostats have to be waist-
> high... ugh, come on. I don't want to have to stoop over to reach the damn
> things. (= But that's our building code now. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Can't
> we have them taller and just mandate that they all have to connect to a
> smart phone?

I'm very confused as to what you're saying. The ada doesn't apply to
residential buildings, even new construction. I'm not very familiar with
residential building codes, but I've been in a lot of new construction since
the passing of the ada and have never encountered what you're describing.

