32
votes
A blind man couldn't order pizza from Domino's. The company wants the US Supreme Court to say websites don't have to be accessible.
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- Authors
- Tucker Higgins
- Published
- Jul 25 2019
- Word count
- 754 words
I have extremely mixed feelings about this. In a way, this is somewhat akin to GDPR, for the internet. I don't think everyone can do this.
If you're a big business (like dominos), I think you should, where reasonably possible, try to make your websites accessible. I mean, it only makes your site and business accessible to more people. However, if you're a tiny artist or one-man show, must you comply with accessibility laws, GDPR, or this new 3rd law that's only in effect on Tuesdays? I don't know! I don't think so! Why can't you just be a small and scrappy content creator that just creates things on the internet?
Where does the gradient lie? Do we make a law to force Dominos to do something, that also hurts some other small-class internet artist, cause they don't know how to handle aria stuff, or have a lawyer write them a privacy policy to be GDPR compliant?
I don't think any of these decisions are bad, per se, but...they need to be applied effectively.
If you're that small...you're most likely using Etsy or Shopify or one of a hundred other similar platforms.
If you're a tiny artist or one-man show, and you want to write your own e-commerce platform to sell your products, first you'll have to deal with PCI-DSS compliance in order to accept credit cards. Once that's out of the way, making your website accessible should be an absolute cakewalk in comparison.
This is basically settled law in an offline context, this lawsuit is just trying to apply it to online. If your passion is making pizza and serving it to people, the ADA doesn't allow you to claim "but all I really care about is making pizza! that's my one singular passion, and I don't want to be bothered with questions like "can people in wheelchairs use the bathroom of my pizza restaurant?" that distract from my pizza-making"
Or, more insidiously: "All I want to do is sell health insurance. I can't be bothered with making sure that my potential clients don't need climb to a specialized office up 4 flights of stairs in order to apply for the low-premium plan." (This actually used to happen BTW).
This is the law in Europe. Has been for years. All websites have to be accessible. This is easy. Modern screen readers for blind people, OCR, high contrast programs for those with rare colorblindness or poor eyesight, are really good at what they do.
You won't ever notice a difference between a US or an EU airline trying to order an airline ticket online until you try with a screen reader.
Then you'll see the truly staggering discrimination American disabled people face compared to their European peers. This isn't wheelchair access, we're talking access to basically every service online or even being able to find a phone number to get help when you can't use their website.
Making a useable website in 2019 isn't rocket science, doesn't require an[y] knowledge of programming, and is just as easy to do fully accessible.
Fundamentally the basic interaction patterns on a website involve reading text, seeing images, and allowing people to click on things or to input alphanumeric characters. All of these are achievable with reasonable accommodations. It's never 100%, but people can get around well enough to get by using specialized tools. Most of the tools disabled people use to navigate the internet, however, rely on sites working based on some generally understood standards and leveraging normal browser functionality.
Where it fails is when you load up your website with a bunch of scripting that breaks the browser's ability to function normally. So when you break the back button, for instance, you can screw up people's ability to navigate. Text-to-speech, as another example, needs your text to be actual text rather than images of weird, illegible fonts. Unusual interface doodads, like sliders, are hard for people to use if their hands don't work well so they benefit from just being able to input numbers by entering text. Inclusiveness for colorblind people might be a bit tough. Lots of visualizations depend on being able to parse minute variations in color to make sense of them, but the ADA has some "reasonable accommodation" standards. And tinkering around with colors is, on balance, pretty simple compared to other structural issues one would need to change.
This is really one of those cases where designing things with the disabled in mind ends up being useful for everyone. (Kind of like how curb cuts in sidewalks meant for folks on wheelchairs are also really handy if you're ever moving around with logger, a cart, or a stroller). Most of the web design inanities that are annoying for me make navigation impossible for the impaired. Make it workable for the impaired and, as far as I'm concerned, it will only make things faster and easier for me. And, as far as imposing costs, I think this is actually much much easier to comply with than most other provisions the ADA originally imposed on people.
This is a hugely important concept. Thank you for bringing it up. For anyone interested, it's called "universal design," and has specific applications in a lot of different fields. It can seem fundamentally impractical in a lot of ways, but when executed well it can be quite elegant and beneficial beyond those who need it. For example, I'm not hard of hearing nor do I have an auditory processing issue, but I greatly appreciate the availability of closed-captioning and watch nearly all of my visual media with subtitles. While it's not a necessity for me, it increases my comfort and is another good example of the unexpected and often unaccounted for benefits that come with designing for all.
Furthermore, if I can soapbox for a moment (this is NOT aimed at you @NaraVara, I'm just using my reply to you here as a broader platform), I think a piece of the conversation that's often missing regarding disability is that it often gets seen by able-bodied people as an "other" category, with a focus on congenital conditions impacting people since birth. A common rebuttal to the idea of increasing screen-reader accessibility is that congenitally blind people, for example, make up a very small percentage of the population. While this is certainly true, I think otherizing disability overlooks the truth that it is something that can happen to anyone at any time. All it takes is one wreckless driver, for example, to fundamentally change an able-bodied individual into someone with a severe disability, through no forewarning, or fault of the affected individual. One of my coworkers developed a sudden and unexpected issue in her eye that took her months to resolve, during which time she had to contend with the reality that she might lose most of her vision. We often take our abilities for granted, but there is no guarantee that they will persist.
Furthermore, disability is a spectrum with many different axes, and as we age and our bodies wear down, we invariably start moving, along some of them, from the able side toward the disabled side. I have no trouble using chopsticks to pick up single grains of rice, for example, while my grandmother has difficulty using a fork due to arthritis and a loss of fine motor control. It's not that she was always like this, it's that the mileage on her body has taken its toll, and she moved further across the disability spectrum as a result.
I want to live in a world that enables those with disabilities to easily engage in everyday tasks not just because it's beneficial to them and affords them greater independence and dignity but also because I don't know what the future will hold for me. Something could happen to me tomorrow that impacts one of my senses or my motor skills. If not tomorrow, maybe a few years from now. Even if no specific event transpires, I know that I cannot avoid the decline of aging, and eventually I'm likely to benefit from universal design principles once I'm older. Designing for all isn't just catering to a minority--it's designing for the uncertain future of accidents or illnesses and the certain future of aging.
All privacy policies are already made by lawyers. Small and scrappy content creators are using Wordpress or other mostly premade toolsets which can be changed to comply with the ADA if they aren't already, and the end result for the user will not be much different.
If there are loopholes written into the law to not enforce it on certain groups, someone will take advantage of it.
On the other side, there are people who can't use what is now the single most common tool for social interaction, work and commerce because companies are ignoring (what may be) the law.
Primary source: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-1539/102950/20190613153319483_DominosPetition.pdf
The essence of Domino's legal argument here is that the Americans with Disabilities Act, as written, only applies to physical places, and not websites or apps or other virtual spaces. And therefore, there's no hard legal requirements under the ADA on anything related to providing accessibility online.
By the current makeup of the Supreme Court, I think this argument seems likely to succeed - John Roberts would be happy to write a ruling saying that it's not his bailiwick to figure out how websites should be regulated, that's up to Congress to pass legislation to do that, if they want to. Of course, Roberts, if you asked him privately, knows there's absolutely zero chance that Congress in 2019 would ever be able to pass an ADA 2.0.
The conservative / "originalist" position (that you have to interpret a law exactly as it was understood by the people who wrote it) strikes again as a very convenient way to dress up opposition to government adapting to changes in society.
The provisions the ADA made for hearing/speech impaired individuals in telecommunications suggest otherwise. It's pretty clear "original intent" behind the law was to make general participation in society/the economy open for people with disabilities and wasn't just restricted to physical spaces. Accessibility in websites today is even more fundamental to that goal than teletype was in its time and websites are arguably even more analogous to physical spaces, in terms of their role in society, than phones were.
From the 9th circuit case: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/17-55504.pdf
They have since added an accessible phone number on their website, and even added a website chatbot which hopefully has been section 503 tested.
Looks like 9th circuit punted on the question if having a phone ordering alternative to the website and app is ADA compliant.
All for making websites more accessible, but in this specific case, couldn't he have just called in? It's not like he was discriminated against from ordering a custom pizza entirely, it's just that he couldn't do it from their website. You don't get to claim discrimination from your wheelchair at the foot of the stairs because you'd rather not use the ramp. Now if the local Domino's refused to take a custom order over the phone or wouldn't honor an online deal, that's another issue entirely because then he's actually missing out on something by not being able to use the website. Not trying to be snarky or dismissive of the struggles of disabled folks, but is there any legal reason they're entitled to using a website if the service it provides is freely available via other means? Domino's is kind of the dick in this situation, but I do think there's more nuance to it than that.
The article mentions another website, Beyonce's, being targeted. That makes perfect sense to me because it's information that could potentially only exist on the website. If that's Beyonce's brand's official means of communicating with fans, selling tickets, listing tour dates, etc. it needs to be accessible entirely.
If you have difficulty communicating verbally (i.e. a speech impediment), a website is your only option without going to the store and pointing at a menu or writing your answers on paper (and if you have a mobility impairment or your car is in the shop, you probably need delivery). I've seen online-only discounts for other pizza places to get people to use their websites, so I wouldn't be surprised if Domino's did the same.
And it's not like making their website accessible would require temporarily closing for expensive renovations, they could've built their website to be accessible from the start or rolled out accessibility improvements over time. There are numerous guides on how to make your website accessible, so I have little sympathy for a large corporation like Domino's.
Edit: There certainly are some cases where accessibility would be impractical (e.g. games where response time matters probably can't be made accessible for the blind), but a pizza builder should absolutely be possible, and if they can't figure out how to make it accessible, they probably need to go back to the drawing board.
From my reading of @nic's comment, it sounds like until the suit was filed there wasn't a phone number on the website that the man could access.
In Florida, there have been a number of suits against local governments (county and municipal) for not having 100% accessible websites available on demand. It’s scared local governments into basically taking a ton of information offline to minimize liability.
It’s usually from people who don’t even live in the county they are suing. They’ll make a minimal document request, and when it isn’t provided in a 100% accessible way, they’ll sue the local government in hopes of a quick settlement. It’s basically a quick cash grab.
A couple of governments are paying millions of dollars to make their sites ADA compliant.
These cases, however, seem to be more than that. The person suing Dominoes seems to have a legitimate complaint here, at least they do if the court does rule that the ADA applies to websites.
How does one make a website accessible to the blind? I'm probably missing a point somewhere, but it seems silly to make a graphic interface accessible to those that can't see it while there's a perfectly good alternative. Wouldn't a phone be the easier ordering option?
Blind users will generally use screen readers which allow you to interface with websites fairly well, as long as those don't do really weird shit.
Domino's probably does really weird shit.
Well they have a fairly complex pizza builder interface which uses a graphical UI. It allows things like assigning ingredients to specific pizza halves and setting quantities. It also accepts various coupons as templates (eg. code for two large pizzas).
I don't know if it's built on the DOM or a canvas, but tabbing through such a system would probably be pretty difficult. So there's definitely more to it than just slapping some aria labels on there.
They also have an app for voice assistants. They could probably have a button for that or just a chat window and make that bit accessible.
Some resources:
MDN
Google Developers
A11Y Project