Proposed ADA Requirements May Affect Public Internet Use 420
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press is reporting on federal officials who want to expand the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to require accommodations by public websites, call centers, and technology providers. Hearings are scheduled in Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. New rules could be implemented as soon as 2012. 'For more than a decade, the Justice Department has interpreted the ADA to apply to websites that offer goods and services. But now that idea could be clarified, and timetables for compliance could be set. ... The Justice Department is considering making it clear that some personal, noncommercial content would not be affected.'"
Some businesses will buck any change... (Score:4, Interesting)
...but I don't think most businesses (or most people, generally) have anything to object to here. What's likely to make people anxious about changes to the ADA is uncertainty over what those changes will involve.
As a web developer, my main concern is just knowing what I'll have to do or do differently. It would be helpful if articles like this -- or their summaries -- provided links to the proposed guidelines. Personally, I'd prefer to get a head start on this so that my clients and I don't end up rushing to implement changes as the last moment.
'Bout time? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked on a number of projects where we were explicitly ordered not to "waste our time" with anything that would help the disabled to use our web sites. There wasn't much we could do other than sneak in things that we thought the management wouldn't notice.
Maybe it's time that people with more clout than us mere developers let the managers know that something a bit more, uh, civilised is expected of them.
We can't do it on our own, even if we want to.
(Actually, I'm currently doing some pro bono work for some nonprofits that involves making their web sites more accessible. A curious part of this is that they've mostly been persuaded by the growing number of people carrying a "smart phone", and it's getting through their heads that web pages forced to width=1200 or requiring javascript are limiting their audience. While we're at it, maybe we can sneak in even more stuff that helps the visually impaired, etc.)
Important, but not new to /. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:'Bout time? (Score:5, Interesting)
A curious part of this is that they've mostly been persuaded by the growing number of people carrying a "smart phone", and it's getting through their heads that web pages forced to width=1200 or requiring javascript are limiting their audience
Amen, brother! I keep scratching my head over why certain Web sites are willing to shell out the cash to make a whole parallel "mobile" version, when what they really need is just a couple of different style sheets and some good engineering. That whole idea of separating content from layout, that seemed so quaint and idealistic back in 1995, actually makes sense in today's marketplace.
Re:Fine with me (Score:5, Interesting)
Only problem I have is that I have to buy a license for JAWS so I can test out my stuff on it; otherwise i use NVDA (open source & free download) just to make sure it's basically good.
Did ADA trolls run out of brick and mortar targets (Score:3, Interesting)
Im all for equal access and equal opportunity but something really needs to be done about the damn ADA Trolls and the lawyers that feed their "pursuit" of money in the name of equality. I have known of 3 small businesses here in my area that have been basically attacked over non compliance even though there really isn't any real guidance provided in how to comply. Two of the businesses just decided to shut down rather than deal with the legal fees, the other is still fighting after 3 years over non-compliance issues he wasn't even aware of until being sued. I don't think many intentionally want to be seen as discriminatory and most would go out of their way to accommodate as they could afford to but the way the ADA is presented now does nothing but create hostility along with compliance, if half the time and effort put into litigation and enforcement was put into education and assistance for smaller businesses to get compliant it would go along way to giving both sides of the issue what they need without the animosity.
Re:What's next? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actual reason for braile on drive up ATMs: it's cheaper to make one model of ATM buttons and have some that don't get fully used than to make two molds for ATM keys, one without braille. To use the analogy backwards from how I originally heard it, it's like male nipples. Nipples start developing before sex determination, and it's simpler just to leave them there but unused than to come up with a system to remove them in males.
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Interesting)
So what you're saying is that compliance will be difficult for any site that was designed before the new rules (which will come out in a year or two) go into effect.
You can't ignore what doesn't currently exist, you can only ignore it after it exists.
If any of the sites I run falls under these requirements, they will probably have to come down, since I don't have time to go back and redo everything that has already been done. That means that people who can't currently get to my content still won't be able to, and those who can will lose it. That sounds like a lose-lose situation to me.
Re:Fine with me (Score:2, Interesting)
So what you're saying is that compliance will be difficult for any site that was designed before the new rules (which will come out in a year or two) go into effect.
You can't ignore what doesn't currently exist, you can only ignore it after it exists.
If any of the sites I run falls under these requirements, they will probably have to come down, since I don't have time to go back and redo everything that has already been done. That means that people who can't currently get to my content still won't be able to, and those who can will lose it. That sounds like a lose-lose situation to me.
WCAG 2.0 has been out for two years. The revision to Section 508 will be based on it. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ [w3.org]
Re:Let the Market Decide (Score:5, Interesting)
If you knew anything about how the technology works, you would know that closed captioning at theaters is a matter of installing a LED projector at the back of the theater and providing the viewers with a plexiglass reflector that they stick into their cup holder. It is not a question of retrofitting every seat. The tech is dirt cheap.
And even as cheap as it is, in the greater metro Seattle area, there are only 4 theaters that have it. And not 4 theater complexes. Literally 4 theaters. For example, the 11-screen complex in Pacific Place has a single theater equipped with it. And most the time, the complex choses not to present movies with captions in that particular theater, and pretty much never does so on weekends. If the theaters equipped more movies with the captioning devices, I would go to the movies more often. But the fact is that the market power of deaf and hard of hearing people isn't big enough to warrant it.
Mandating companies to take reasonable measures to accommodate the needs of disabled patrons when the market can't is part of belonging to a civilized society.
Re:What's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do blind people know how to find the braille signs? Is there a standard for where they'll be placed, or do they just have to walk down the hallway running their hands against the wall until they find one?
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention that if they did make reasonable accommodations today, new regulations wouldn't have been needed. Arguably, the new regulations aren't even new, just a clarification of what accommodations need to be done for the very old ADA.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)
The one blind person I once tutored at my university completely ignored all those signs -- she had no way of knowing they were there, and she didn't spend time groping the walls looking for signs that might or might not be there. Elevator buttons and such yes, but random wall signs no.
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't be expected to develop a site prior to the requirements coming out that's perfectly within them, however a lot of those sites weren't even making a good faith effort at being accessible in the first place. Anything that uses Flash as the only method of navigating the site is definitely not accessible, never was and probably never will be.
Re:you know.. im all for.... (Score:1, Interesting)
So, you really want the federal government to legislate the HTML structure of the pages on Amazon.com? Complete with fines and penalties for non-compliance? Seriously?
Re:Fine with me (Score:2, Interesting)
The concern is the small sites like mine. I run a business and make my own simple website. I do not maintain it daily, there is no subordinate assigned to keep it up. One alt tag is missing and I will be sued out of existence. I spend most of my time running other portions of the business, like the real work I actually get paid to do for people.
Businesses are being closed daily through ADA lawsuits. It is one thing to suggest compliance to a list of good design points, but to make sites open to lawsuits is just another way to make the US uncompetitive. We must at least get a "You lose, you pay." tort system.
Maybe I do not wish to assist the blind in my business (IT). I actually had a blind client and he was a lot of trouble. He lost his sight, had all the tools, but was very angry at the world. He often took it out on me and one day I had enough and walked out. I didn't stop serving him because he was blind, but that he was an ass. I see helping the blind to be very difficult for all the technology is useless unless the people choose to use it. For all my efforts, I cannot make the blind see.
My wife is deaf and I find assisting the deaf as something I can do quite well. However, with the ADA, I can no longer pick my customers. If I help the deaf, but feel I cannot help the blind, will I be sued? So, when I end up closing my business due to a blind person being dissatisfied with my ADA efforts, the whole community will lose another resource, including the deaf.
Finally, I look at this as an infringement of my freedom of speech. They are in effect telling me how to communicate and with whom.
Re:you know.. im all for.... (Score:5, Interesting)
San Francisco?
In Architecture studio, they made us go around campus in a wheelchair for a day. It takes about 10 minutes to realize that there are stupid barriers put up that people with full mobility don't see every day. A 36" wide library aisle was a great lesson, after all the gawdawful ramps people put it, and one of my favorites, the curb cuts on the sidewalk that point into the center of an intersection.
While the population in wheelchairs might (clearly doesn't) justify many of these measures, some of them make the world a better place-- gentle ramps make it easier with strollers and rolling luggage, wider aisles make it easier to see books/merchandise, and I am a fan of having the toilet an extra couple inches off the ground, and a little bit of elbow room in the stall.
Other things make less sense or transfer hazards. The truncated domes on crosswalks pose a hazard to women in heels; many places are forced to dedicate too much parking to "universal access" stalls; and our society has developed an unnatural addiction to elevators. Small establishments (under 2,000 square feet) have a number of hurdles to overcome.
Not quite sure NYC's "with assistance" solution is the right way to go, but there is room in the middle.
Re:Fine with me (Score:2, Interesting)
I doubt you'll actually get many complaints for lack of advertising, especially considering that isn't really your "content." I've never heard of an ADA case where a blind person complained that they couldn't read a posted advertising flyer on a bulletin board in a store. If it does mean that the horrible chain of dozens of domains and layers of Javascript for ads has to go away so you just serve your ads yourself, meh. I'm still having trouble finding a lot of problems with this.
The girlfriend is classified as learning disabled (despite being a semester off of a bachelors degree now) and has a hard time reading. She uses a screen reading program that I know has internet reading capabilities, but I never checked it out for myself. I was a bit surprised by this topic (from what I remember of working with Dreamweaver a few years back, you could set it up to yell at you if you weren't complying with some accessibility standards) so I asked her how her experience goes in using it on the internet. She told me that sometimes she gets all of the website, sometimes all she gets is the title, and other times somewhere in between. When she asked me why I wanted to know, I briefly described what I was reading here.
First thing she responds with is "Oh please no." Somewhat long rant made short, her prediction is that if they put these stronger regulations and compliance dates into play, those ads will be read, and she will end up having to hear them in the middle of the stuff she wants to actually hear. The example she gave me was of a website she was looking at with a advertisement in the content of the page: "...out door recreation tummy tuck" would be produced from her headphones.
So I'm thinking that things could be made better, or so much worse depending on the website designer with this regulation in play... and occasionally entertaining.
Re:Fine with me (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about screen reader technology for the blind. Today even the best of these can not even handle a mildly complex page. I've tried them out at a friends house. They are crap.
Is it due to page size or page complexity? If it's complexity, CSS allows nowadays to have a rather linear HTML, and leave all intricacies of layout in the CSS.
If on the other hand it's size, then the responsibility of solving this lies within the reader. Some readers just linearly read the page, without a possibility of skipping or in-page navigation. Well, reader authors: just fricking add skipping!
But it doesn't stop at your content. You are also responsible for all the advertising on your site, even when you don't create that advertising. Why should you serve a page without advertising to the blind? If that's how you make money for your site, you need to serve the ads to everyone.
How would serving an ad-less page to the blind be worse than not serving a page at all? The blind may not become a revenue source, but they will speak positively about the page, that you didn't annoy them with pointless flash or other barriers, and their positive opinion might convince some of their sighted friends to visit the page, who will see the ads.
How do you serve music to the deaf? Hmmm mmmm dum de dumm ta ta de da mmmm de mmmm?
Obviously some content is not useful for everybody. But don't use that as an excuse to deliberately block access to content. A deaf person may not be able to hear music, but he might still want to buy tickets for a concert. Maybe he's buying them for his kids. Or maybe he's feeling the bass. Or maybe the performance is as much visual than auditory. Or maybe he's just enjoying the crowd.
Yes, ticketpod.nl, that means you!
And how do you serve online game content to the guy typing with his one hand, or his feet.
Same as above. Not all content may be useful to everybody. But please don't force people to play games just in order to be able to navigate your site.
The tools don't yet exist to do this in any economical way.
HTML and CSS have been existing for ages.
Re:Fine with me (Score:3, Interesting)
I appreciate your rant. However, this sentence is the core of the issue. The article makes it clear that there isn't a consensus. That the issues haven't been hammered out. That they are proposed changes.
And we have people picking out one or two details they don't like, focusing on those, and declaring that the cripples should just go elsewhere.
Apparently there are lot of people that hate the ADA. They don't want it applied anywhere. They are arguing against it here, not because it's a bad idea to apply a law evenly across different areas of life, but because they don't like the ADA in the first place. But to claim that the ADA helps many people and then turn around and pick one detail from a non-existent regulation and declare it bad because of that seems silly. To require that people have access for disabled people to drive to a store, park at the store, enter the store, call the store, shop at the store in person, and all that but then declare that shopping online isn't protected under the ADA and shouldn't be seems backwards. We are working to move more online, and to declare that those who are least capable should have greater roadblocks added, especially for someone that supports the ADA in principal seems logically inconsistent.
If someone thinks the ADA is bad (many of whom also declare that the civil rights movement was bad, since it's government interference in private business), then they are at least consistent. But to like the ADA and want to block the ADA from applying online seems very inconsistent. Especially when ADA compliance should be default on all web pages (if the rules and the pages are both written sanely).