23 votes

Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if their websites are not accessible

4 comments

  1. [4]
    Nivlak
    Link
    Can someone smarter (anyone on tildes) than me explain what the implications might be for this?

    Can someone smarter (anyone on tildes) than me explain what the implications might be for this?

    2 votes
    1. [2]
      userexec
      Link Parent
      So from a development standpoint, you have to ensure that your site meets an accessibility standard like WCAG 2.0. This effectively boils down to having good development practices on your front...
      • Exemplary

      So from a development standpoint, you have to ensure that your site meets an accessibility standard like WCAG 2.0. This effectively boils down to having good development practices on your front end like checking your color contrast to ensure those with visual impairments and color blindnesses can easily see text, using semantic, structured HTML so blind users can navigate your site with an audio screen reader, and not doing generally stupid things like making your site impossible to control or navigate unless you can manage unusually fine mouse movements or hear audio cues. If you have an image, it needs to have associated descriptive text, and you want to avoid things like embedding text within images a la 1998 flashing banner ads because screen readers can't magically read text-shaped blobs of pixels.

      So long as you have a dedicated development team and a small group of content managers this is by no means an unreasonable standard to meet. It only gets truly complicated when you have vast numbers of content managers who aren't "web" people. The organization I work for, for example, has hundreds of people editing website content with basically zero web qualifications other than what we can teach them and attempt to enforce, so web accessibility is something of an ongoing nightmare for my team. We try to limit their options and rein them into pre-made accessible content formats, but every now and then someone gets creative in an open entry WYSIWYG field and pops in some fun highlighting or posts a scan of a flyer with no supporting text. With a quarter of a million pages to check, it can be missed for quite some time, but when we find it we take it seriously, fix it, and try to educate the content author on why and how we changed it.

      For a site like Dominos where there are only certain workflows and not an encyclopedic volume of content with somewhat unqualified editors, it would ideally be standard practice to design everything in an accessible way by default, and it wouldn't be difficult to keep it that way after the initial design.

      14 votes
      1. NaraVara
        Link Parent
        Wait! Is this the weapon that will finally let us kill “sign up for our newsletter” lightboxes once and for all?

        not doing generally stupid things like making your site impossible to control or navigate unless you can manage unusually fine mouse movements or hear audio cues.

        Wait! Is this the weapon that will finally let us kill “sign up for our newsletter” lightboxes once and for all?

        1 vote
    2. spit-evil-olive-tips
      Link Parent
      Previous discussion (from when Domino's submitted their cert petition to the Supreme Court): https://tild.es/fxs The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, set out a whole bunch of legal...

      Previous discussion (from when Domino's submitted their cert petition to the Supreme Court): https://tild.es/fxs

      The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, set out a whole bunch of legal requirements that businesses have to follow to accommodate people with disabilities.

      For example, you've probably seen public restrooms where one stall is larger than the others, and the door swings outward instead of inward? That's there to accommodate people who use wheelchairs. Without the ADA, that extra-large stall with the door that swings outward probably wouldn't exist.

      If you use a wheelchair, before the ADA, whole chunks of society were closed off to you. Wherever you work, maybe they don't have a bathroom that can fit a wheelchair? What are you supposed to do, run home on your lunch break to pee?

      The implementation of the ADA has a fair number of flaws, probably the biggest of which is the cottage industry of lawyers who make a living by coming up with lawsuits related to ADA compliance. Rather than have a "disability inspector" who can fine businesses that aren't in compliance, as we do with things like food safety, the enforcement of the ADA has largely been privatized and placed in the hands of rent-seeking lawyers. But overall it's been a hugely beneficial law in the US.

      The current Supreme Court ruling just took a decision from the 9th Circuit Court and said "they got it right, we don't need to review it". That decision from the 9th Circuit more or less said that "but it's a website and making a website accessible is like, really hard, much harder than building an extra-large bathroom stall" was not a sufficient excuse to get out of the requirements of the ADA.

      8 votes