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Blind User Sues Southwest Over Web Site, Cites ADA
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Oct 06, 2002 08:22 PM
from the welcome-to-quebec dept.
from the welcome-to-quebec dept.
scubacuda writes "According to Law.com, Robert Gumson, a blind man who uses a program that converts website content into speech, is suing Southwest Airlines (with the help of Miami Beach, FL-based Access Now) for its website being incompatible with his screen-reader program. The case has been filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act under the untested legal theory that ADA provisions on the accessibility of public accommodations to the disabled apply to Internet Web sites just as they do to brick-and-mortar facilities like movie theaters and department stores. There have been previous lawsuits alleging that the ADA applies to the Internet, but all have settled without a ruling on the merits: 1999 the National Federation of the Blind sued AOL alleging its service was inaccessible to blind users (AOL agreed to make its sites compatible with screen reader technology);
over the past two years, Access Now has sued Barnes & Noble and Claire's Stores for maintaining Web sites that allegedly violated the ADA (both settled)."
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i have a question (Score:4, Funny)
Legal wrangling (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Legal wrangling (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Doesn't answer the question (Score:5, Funny)
"VISOR AT 3 OCLOCK."
"SARGE RUNS BEHIND THE WALL."
"VISOR SWITCHES TO RAILGUN."
"YOU SHOULD TURN LEFT AND SHOOT NOW."
"SARGE SHOOTS YOU IN THE NUTS WITH THE SHOTGUN."
"TOO LATE."
I think you can see my point.
Parent
Re:Legal wrangling (Score:5, Insightful)
There basically is no threshold for size if the court simply rules the ADA applies as it does in the physical realm. Virtually all commercial businesses (including non-profits) with a physical presence must follow the ADA.
If the court says the ADA applies to websites...*unless* the court stipulates traffic parameters, revenues, etc...every commercial website would then have to be ADA accessible, and worse could be just as easily sued for ADA violations as businesses with physical facilities already are now!
In short if the court rules that ADA applies to websites, unless the court is very specific to how it applies, all commercial websites regardless of size would be subject to the ruling...ouch!!! Talk about a legal nightmare!!
Ron Bennett
Parent
Re:Legal wrangling (Score:5, Informative)
That would suit me fine. Those features on a website that are most likely to break screen readers tend to be the exact same features that are the most annoying, unnecessary and browser incompatible.
Parent
Re:isn't this covered under this... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a bonus, you make your site accessible via Lynx so it wouldn't just be a benefit to the blind.
I don't know who did the SW airlines site but they weren't served very well.
Parent
I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many people think suing is the answer to everything.
This would be like me walking into Target (or any other store) and suing them because they don't sell XL-Tall shirts that will fit me.
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
I do agree with you remark about Target.
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you're XL-Tall doesn't mean you're disabled. You can still get in the store, find your way around, and purchase things at the cash register. You might not be able to find a shirt that fits you, but at least you can *find* shirts.
This guy is suing because they won't let him in the store (effectively). It's like he's walking to the front door and somebody says to him, "I'm sorry sir, but you can't come in the store."
Granted, this guy might be money-hungry. However, previous cases show that the companies that were sued (AOL in particular) settle by making their site accessbile to screen readers. In all likely hood, that is all this guy wants. That's all any blind person wants.
They just want in the store.
Who are you to compare their blindness to your big and tallness?
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Informative)
The ADA doesn't allow for any monetary damages. Under the ADA, you can only sue to force compliance.
Parent
Who's fault, another spin (Score:5, Insightful)
This is fairly stongly worded. You might want to s/denied/not able to attain, because there is no active attempt to disallow entry to the site. The company hasn't made provisions for this special group
But, you could also spin it off the be the fault of the screen-reader. One could state that the company designing the screen-reader product did not make it work with the increasing graphic standard, perhaps by adding an advanced OCR, etc. Maybe a brail-reader based on color depth.
It's fine to say that disabled individuals are not able to use this site and are losing out. But this could set a bad precedent making all companies with graphical type sites liable. How many major sites now use flash, can the screen reader translate that? It would also suck if this set a precedent so that even my little site had at to conform to blind-compatible standards (I do, however, try to use text when possible for lynx compatibility etc)
The major point is, while much information is being presented in a textual format, the internet is moving towards towards a more visually stimulating form of presentation. People with vision impairment are going to lose out a lot from this, but not everybody will think to account for all such special cases, especially when gearing towards a more flashy and potentially better selling presentation.
Can we really expect that text-based support is going to be around forever? In a decade, will an increasingly visual medium be forced to retain non-visual support?
A lot of people will probably be tempted to say "I'm sorry, I understand your loss but why should it also be mine." It's in a way a selfish attitude, but it's also somewhat logical in current society.
Well, time to go back to text-based internet - phorm
Parent
Re:Who's fault, another spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Has the plaintiff never heard of the telephone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting back to the plaintiff described in the article, I'd think an easier solution would be to call 1 800 555-1212, get Southwest's toll-free number from them, and then call that number. I'd think the same information is available that way as is available through their website (probably more info, in fact, such as information on what flights are on time/delayed/etc.). This has to be easier than filing yet another lawsuit. Then again, I suppose the ambulance chasers wouldn't make any money off of such a common-sense solution.
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Funny)
I believe some other companies have experimented with similiar systems, which they've dubbed 'call centres'.
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
The WWW is a digitial medium. It has large purely visual aspects, as well as auditory (surely you've been to a website and had music start playing.) But the base of the web is human language, and that can be equally communicated through auditory and visual means (in the case of the web, we do have a bias towards visual, as it's encoded as text, but text to speech has largely been solved.) The HTML is not and was not designed to be a visual layout language; it was designed to hold information.
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:4, Insightful)
But wait, that business would go out of business real quick because a large number of people are under seven feet tall. The difference with the blind is that they make up a smaller segment of the population, and so an inaccessible business won't be effected by a small backlash from a minority group. Majority groups are always insulated from these issues, but minority groups rarely are.
I agree that suing probably isn't the answer. Instead, whatever documents that enable a business to operate should be temporarially suspended until that business comes into alignment with federal law.
F-bacher
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are in a wheelchair, this is a problem--and this is what the ADA addresses.
I believe this is one of those few instances where government regulation is a _good thing_.
(Besides, I'd LOVE to be able to turn off graphics and buy tickets, transfer funds, etc.)
Parent
Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
F-bacher
Parent
standards (Score:5, Informative)
I have a disability... (Score:5, Interesting)
2. A disadvantage or deficiency,
3. Something that hinders or incapacitates.
Why can we not accept that there are things that we cannot do and not sue others while pretending it is someone else's fault that we have a disability.
Are these (the ADA) the people that made it so that there is Brail on Drive up ATM machines?
Only in Lake Wobiegon (sp?) is everyone above average...
Re:I have a disability... (Score:5, Insightful)
After having witnessed this in use the other day, I agree with it.
Two women drive up to the ATM. The passenger gets out, walks around to the machine, starts punching buttons. Gets her money.
And then I realize she is blind. Walks around the car and gets in. They drive away. No problem.
Without Braille on the buttons, she would have had to give her card, and PIN, to the driver to do the transaction. It's not just drivers that use those machines.
Parent
Re: Sorry elitist, it's *you* who are wrong! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's as ludicrous as saying every author writing a book needs to have it translated and published into every foreign language in common use, so those not speaking English are ensured "equal access" to it!
The fact is, many sites right now are quite browser-dependent, even if they opt not to touch any additional "plug-in" technologies such as Shockwave or RealAudio. If we didn't have Javascript, web sites would be much less useful. (As just one example, I recently found a site that calculated your speedometer error based upon changing your car's tires out with different sizes. If this had to be presented as pure HTML, I suppose we'd be reduced to looking through a huge list or table of every combination, to find relevant data for our particular car and situation. How is that a *better* way to build the site?)
Sure, some of the ".bomb'ers" are out there drawing up poor quality sites, and don't deserve a job designing web pages. That's not what this discussion is really about, however. This is a question of whether we want to let government dictate requirements for every site we build. If this becomes law, many people will take down sites completely rather than pay to do major revamping to meet ADA requirements, and then *nobody* benefits.
Parent
This is getting ridiculous! (Score:5, Funny)
er....
Oh wait, nevermind.
Human Rights (Score:5, Insightful)
This strikes me as a matter of simple human rights. Does anyone have the right to force a company to spend money on a minority, or accept customers they wouldn't otherwise accept? I don't believe they do.
If the minority (in this case, the blind) are sufficiently profitable as customers, it's likely the company will spend the time and money to cater for them. Or, perhaps, the owner(s) of the company feel that their public image would be best served by catering to the minority. Or maybe they respect the effort many blind people make to achieve their goals, and decide to assist them.
Either way, it's the choice of the company - what right has any individual or group (including the State) to force a company to accept customers they don't want?
Re:Human Rights (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think there are enough blind people or disabled people to make it profitable for most companies to accomodate them. That's why the law was put in place, as a measure of human decency that allows these people to function normally in society.
Parent
Some sites on Web accessibility (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is something that site designers should be aware of, so here are a few links to pages that discuss Web accessibility.
I hope that helps those of you who are interested.
Why this isn't a joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, how many handicapped parking places does the mall need?
What people who think that this is a joke fail to consider, however, is the fact that without the ADA in place, businesses can and will discriminate against handicapped people.
Consider for a second your state's major university. We'll use the University of Texas for an example, because I'm familiar with it. Most of the buildings were constructed in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the multi-story buildings have elevators, but not all of them. During class-time, the elevators are so full that if you want to get to class on time, you have to use the stairs. Remember that Austin is very hilly. There are stairs everywhere, even for one-story buildings.
Now lets assume that you were in a car wreck with a drunk driver and lost the use of your legs. Despite your new disability you are a smart individual who can get a job that does not require the use of your legs.
Without all those nice wheelchair ramps and wheelchair accessable elevators at the university, you are shit out of luck for actually getting to class... to say nothing of managing to cross the stage when you actually manage to earn your diploma.
We look at wheelchair ramps and other disability accomodations as commonplace. The truth is that very few businesses and schools had them before the ADA forced them to. It may be unthinkable now to descriminate against someone because he's deaf, blind, or crippled, but before the ADA went into effect, nobody thought twice about descriminating against people like that.
The ADA is not a joke.
Re:No, but it's also a weapon (Score:5, Informative)
What did it take? We ordered a few signs that had braile on them, made sure the aisleways were wide enough to accomodate a wheel chair and got a few tables that were articulating to accomidate the wheelchairs to get under them. Computer terminals were made it be sure that they had the standard ADA compliant software on them (Windows and Macs come with most of this and most of these folks know how to activate them if they ask).
Get the problem fixed before hand and you won't have to worry about someone suing you. All in all, it cost me about a grand for the extra equipment AND a disabilities advocate was able to meet with me to make sure we were in compliance as much as possible for free. Since doing this 3 years ago, I've had to accomodate 2 people. Were they worth the $500 a piece that it cost me? Probably not from a profit centered notion, BUT it was money well spent.
Get the shit done and don't put it off as something to do later, and you won't get sued. If you do and you are sued later, you've made a good faith effort to try to be accomodating. You can't please everyone and you can't expect every situation to be convered but you can try your best.
clif
Parent
Try Surfing the web blind... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then come back to Slashdot, Highlight this whole discussion and listen...
They also forbid browsing,linking, spidering, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
In their terms and conditions [iflyswa.com] "Southwest Airlines" also state that they forbid "deep linking", using robots to spider their site, or just using any program to get their pages.
In fact, their license seems to forbids the use of any HTTP user agent to "acquire" some of their pages. Beware, by browsing their site you are risking to get sued =).
About time (Score:5, Interesting)
It amazing me at the lack of professionalism in the web developer community for not addressesing this issue w/o legal being required to. It takes all of 15 minutes to run your site through bobby and the learning curve for meeting the W3C WAI guidelines is low. To not take the little time out of your unimpaired life to make life easier for others amazes me. Especially when 70% of it is just following good web coding practices (eg non-visual cues, alt tags, not using/requiring javascript/flash, using aural spreadsheets, etc etc). People seem to think that you can't design a site not using these items or that their site will be ugly / not satisfy the client. Both are wrong. Often you can use nice visual ques AND provide a seperate or alternate site for visually impaired people. Or just layout your site so even without visual ques, it is still usable. They aren't asking for amazing aural sites, they are asking for FUNCTIONAL aural sites. As for extra cost and time you spend designing these feature, bet that time is a hell of a lot cheaper that the multimillion dollar lawsuit you can/might get slapped with.
Trying surfing the net with lynx for an entire day, see usable it is. After thinking how bad that is, try downloading / buying your favorite aural browser for a real eye opener. Its not pretty. Now try doing that your whole life.
Different technologies for different skill sets (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone's blind, it would seem only fair that southwest has the option of providing them with a dedicated, live concierge to help them with all their questions. That's why they can CALL 1-800-IFLYSWA.
The ADA is intended to make sure that people are not disenfranchised by their disability, and in this case the person is not, since they cn accomplish the same task via a means that SWA has provided for them that is compatable with their abilities. The *only* caveat I would make is that if they show they are blind, they should be able to get the double-points and internet-only fares afforded to those who frequent the site.
This particular lawsuit is as ridiculous as a person in a wheelchair suing for there not being a stair-climing inclinator when there's an elevator down the hall.
I'm all for blind readability on sites without an alternative, but if it's a service operation where you can accomplish tasks via phone, then I believe that that is a solution to the mandated requirements.
Good god -- (Score:5, Insightful)
Before people flame the ADA and access to the web for the blind, they should remember that they too could become blind someday.
The web and HTML were created to make information _more_ accessible to people, not less. Good coding for the web is supposed to ensure that people with _any_ type of browser can get your content, not just people with IE+flash. It's not very hard to make your sight accessible for the blind -- just use well-formed HTML or the new flash accessibility extensions.
The more accessible the web is for all of us, the better we all are.
That's not all... (Score:4, Funny)
I am a blind computer user (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, let me throw in my two cents both from the perspective of a blind web surfer and a blind website designer. I actually am a user of the technology mentioned in the article, and yes, some web sites can be extreemly difficult to surf. /. itself isn't the easiest in its default state, although it is usable and making some customizations in user preferences does help a lot. From my experience on the whole, if a web site sticks rather strictly to HTML, CSS and the other standards, they're OK. Problem is, very few sites do. An even worse problem is many web designers design their sites using Dreamweaver or some other graphical tool. This seperates them from the HTML itself, and many times they don't know what's going on under the hood. The common mantra among web designers I've noticed is "if it looks right, its right." It is very frustrating running into one of these sites, and the unfortunate thing is, there are many of them.
Now that I've addressed the technical issues, let's move on to some of the other things that I've been reading about in this thread. I tend to aggree with the common conseption around here that lawsuites are way over used, and many people tend to be way too sue happy, thinking that will solve their problems. But let me ask, in a situation like this, what would you have done? I'm sure this blind person did try to contact the web designer. In fact, as blind people we are instructed to do just that right away when we encounter an inaccessible site. Problem is, very few web designers listen to us. I'm not sure if its intentional, but many of them just do not understand how we surf the web, and are probably under the impression that they have to go way out of their way to modify their pages for a screen reader. Refer to what I said above, that if a page is designed properly, nine times out of ten it will work just fine. OK, so contacting the web designer yeilds no response, so what next? Sometimes there is no other way to get a business to listen other than through its wallet. Very sad, dispicable, but true.
So, again what is he to do? Assuming this person had contacted Southwest's webmasters (which as I said they should have,) what would you do next? And don't say just not use there services. There aren't enough blind people who have access to the internet in the first place to make it make a difference, and that's just like saying that blacks should just not frequent the businesses that discriminate against them. We all have a right to make use of public services, be them brick and morder or online. And considering how relatively little modification it takes to make a web site accessible (following standards is not hard,) I think that this person may very well have a case against Southwest.
Re:I am a blind computer user (Score:4, Insightful)
Use the phone. It's great that you can post to
Parent
Everyone is missing the boat (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe the ADA has done a great deal of good in this country. It has allowed individuals with disabilities a degree of freedom to live that has never been enjoyed in the past. However, the ADA was not brought into the world to ensure "EXACT" abilities between healthy and disabled individuals. This lawsuit makes a real mockery of the ADA and should die a quick death.
The Downfall of this Society (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways. The clear answers to this blind persons problem is that instead of suing a company for not supporting their method of access, use your power as a member of a capitalistic society, and send a message with your money.
Find another company that supports you better, and spend your money with them.
Why does common logic like this escape so many people?
This "primarily visual" web people write about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Haven't spent to much time on that web, myself. The web I use tends to be composed of information, usually in the form of little magnetic bits aligned in one direction or another. As I'm unable to access info directly from magnetic media, I prefer to get that info in the form of written words. But this web I use isn't inherently visual- I could get the same information aurally, just not as quickly. A SQL query on a database to retrieve a ticket price-- nothing inherently visual about that, except the purely personal aspect of me reading the results rather than hearing them.
But then until 1997 or so I did most of my web browsing in Lynx, and I'd be happy enough to be able to do so again. When I want a pure reading experience, all the "inherently visual" aspects of the web get in the way: text is quick to download, unlike all the gifs and flash bouncing advertisements. So I'm not unhappy about people pushing for ADA and accessability standards for web pages: what makes for better access for the blind also makes for an easier, faster, and less stupid-blinking-ads experience for me.
Just to mention it again - Section 508 (Score:4, Informative)
Companies that want to make their sites more accessible, but don't want to build their own standards could always adopt the 508 standards and perhaps pick up some legal cover in the process.
Most of the rules are basic. It does hamstring you out of some of the more sexy things (flash is difficult) but it also keeps you true (you tend not to waste taxpayer's $$$ having to make silly flash intros).
If you have diehard GUI html designers in your shop, there are several plug-ins for Dreamweaver (and others) that force the code to be 508 compliant. Vi can write 508 code just fine.
Many COTS vendors now also have 508 compliant versions of their s/w, otherwise they can't sell to government.
To learn more, good place to start is the Section 508 [section508.gov] homepage.
blind versions of text and graphical mediums (Score:4, Insightful)
If a government service was available only on the web, then of course that web site must be accessible. But in general, a web site should only have to provide alternate means of access if they value the market they are locking out by not providing that access.
Similar to Playboy publishing a braille version (which it has). They don't have to do it, but when they want to sell to blind people, they realise that blind people probably don't get much out of their normal issue.
Why should Southwest.com be forced to provide an accessible web site? Does Southwest have to send out braille versions of all their newsletters? Sure, apply financial pressure with your business, but what in the world does the government have to do with whether or not Southwest values having blind customers able to visit their web site?
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
There might be a valid reason for it. You don't know that the display doesn't have the capability to adapt, or even output audio based on the person's identity or a special input. Also, with a brail pad, someone could help you read the screen without having to know your password.
It does seem awfully strange unless there is more to it than meets the eye.
Parent
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
San Francisco and Berkeley, I've seen dozens of ATM machines with audio jacks so that blind people can use them. If you have a cluster of 3 Wells Fargo ATMs for example, one of them will have an audio jack.
Not sure about San Francisco, but I know that Berkeley has one of the highest percentage of blind people in the US.
Parent
ATMs and the Legally Blind (Score:5, Informative)
There are various levels of visual impairment, from no vision at all from birth, to blindness caused by accident,medical condition, or age that allows some function (light, color perception). Some can see with the aid of magnifying utilities, others must use screen readers.
With ATMs, the auditory beep can serve as feedback, and REALLY big letters/numbers can be used. For example, Citibank touch-screen ATMs have been vision-disabled friendly for almost two decades. I know this because I accidentally enabled "blind person" mode one time about 10 years ago, which blanked out the screen, and turned the different corners of the screen into input controls. What kind of input controls, I have no idea, since I can't read braille. I had to wait for the ATM to time out, before it reverted back to a GUI.
Braille on the keypad (and usually on the machine - the instructions) are common because in this country we believe in making certain accomodations people with impairments, so they can be productive members of society. I guess the rationale is that life dealt them a shitty enough hand without them having to fend for themselves when doing basic daily chores. Given that using the web is starting to fall into the level of needed service (like electricity, water, sewer, telephone), I don't blame the guy for suing to make sure that businesses don't get lazy and decide to ignore that there are people who use the web as a non-visual medium.
BTW, the Citibank ATMs have also handled multiple languages for a LONG time. I used to think it was silly too, until I saw a string of Japanese tourists one summer, using the japanese language interface...
Parent
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
But it is much more fun to make a joke than to solve the puzzle, Alex.
Parent
Re:Better solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:All Sites (Score:5, Informative)
"Heh, we're so web-savvy, we just dumped 160Kb of unformatted crap on our website"
Parent
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever heard of this thing called "HTML"? If you use this "HTML" stuff to design your website, it will be able to be read by blind people. If on the other hand, you use flash, or put all your textual content in
In other words, you actually have to work to make a website that can't be read by blind people. Since these companies already put so much effort only to exclude people, they might as well put in a little more to fix the problem.
Parent
Re:All Sites (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that making a text-only version of a website is all that's needed to make a website accessible is a myth. Its the same myth that provokes other webdesigners to construct "Netscape" and "IE" duplicates of websites - its ludicrous and involves some serious overheads in keeping multiple versions of a website in synch and up-to-date. You can bet your bottom dollar that the text version of the site is the first to be left behind and overlooked when it comes to updating.
Creating an accessible website is not difficult. The recommendations and guidelines have been available on the web since 1999 - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [w3.org] is there for website authors to create accessible content. There's nothing in there that's remotely difficult.
I'm amazed at the level of complains from so-called "creative artists" about the Web and how they don't want to follow the standards path. Other artists in other media work within the constraints and boundaries of their chosen media and deliver work of high quality. And then they use the media to its full use.
But when it comes to websites, these so-called artists cannot understand the web beyond what they see in their browsers. They limit their imagination and scope and refuse to make their creations accessible in a public medium.
They are "so-called artists" since its clear they do not understand the breadth and depth of the World Wide Web. The ability to build accessible websites should be a mandatory skill requirement before embarking on a professional career in web design - its as important as the ability to write legibly.
Parent