Blind Sue AOL for ADA Non-Compliance

Aaron M. Renn writes "A group is filing a lawsuit against AOL claiming that site is not accessible to the blind. If successful, this lawsuit could subject almost every website (and certainly every commercial one) to massive government regulation for disability access." The ADA only applies to businesses, so there's no chance you'll have to make your personal site accessible if you don't want to. Rules requiring government agencies to make their websites accessible are now being drafted as well... Good website design generally suggests that it should be accessible to as many people as possible; why can't AOL use ALT tags?

A hardcore believer in being sane

Never mind "Political Correctness", or whatever, let's look at the -real- issues here.

The blind, and (for that matter) the sighted are being bombarded with web-pages which are over-graphical and for which there is NO alternative. This puts a strain on the networks as well as our eyes, and therefore on our pockets.

(Who pays for the Internet? Not the corporations, but the end-users. The fatter the pipe they need, the more comes out of your pockets, in corporate tax. Not directly, but through other products you use. You'll never be able to trace it.)

The totally blind use speech synthesisers. Not a problem, where ALT tags are used, and text pages are available.

The partially-sighted may use speech synthesisers, but probably just use larger default fonts. Not a problem, if the page doesn't grab control and use microscopic text on a clashing background.

The "average"-sighted can see the page "clearly", except when it's green text on a yellow background.

"So, avoid those who don't use good designs!" you say. Not so easy. In an increasingly digital world, you can't even pay your bills by going to the store anymore! It's all centralised. (A bit stupid, as computers allow decentralisation! But, that's what you get for living in a world full of idiots.)

So, the only realistic way to pay is by post or computer. Post is unreliable - missing, stolen or fire-bombed mail is not unusual, and berserk postal workers aren't merely an urban legend.

That leaves computer. So, you go to the website for your phone company, or the IRS, or whoever. Their site is utterly illegible, badly organised, and impossible to follow. You can't pick and choose who you pay - it's not like you get to use the services and then opt to give your money to someone else.

If the sites aren't usable by the blind, near-blind, or even sighted, those companies can make it =very= difficult to use services we should be able to take for granted. In the colder parts of the world (eg: the mid US, northern England, Scandanavia), heating isn't an option. It's either there, or you're dead. No if's or but's.

Whilst we're not (yet) at the point where electronic payments are mandatory for services, that WILL happen. Maybe not this year, but within 5-10 years, cheques will be extinct, and all major transactions will be online.

If ANY segment of society is excluded, by the time that happens, that segment of society can write it's collective will. It'll be extinct or nomadic (such as the Travellers) within a year of such a switch.

Give me a break.

Ironic choice... O'Reilly does have books on CD, which are probably more amenable to
being used with a speech synthesizer. Most other publishers don;t do this.

Books, unlike websites, can by and large be scanned and read aloud by equipment
available to the blind. So, your analogy is bogus.

The issue here, as the issue is with architecture, is that changes to accommodate the disabled
are worth the hassle so that they can be included. People are just too lazy to do it. Unlike physical buildings, it's not a big deal to rearrange a web site after its built. The issue is not a few ALT tags though. Try browsing with Lynx, and image if you could only read the page,
top to bottom. However, *some* effort should be put into making a web site accessible to the visually impared, when that site is as central as AOL, or Amazon, or other major commercial sites.

And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the ./ people who are
whining about Political Correctness. We're not talking about some pointless argument over
semantics. We're talking about locking out a portion of our community, a portion of the
community that is already excluded from so much in our society, from the explosive growth
in our economy and society taking place on the Internet. For a group of people who whine
so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this
attitude is utter hypocrisy!

Sue Prentice-Hall and O'Reilly

They don't have a braille version of every book they publish. It's blatant discrimination.

Choice

It's AOL's choice as to which consumers they support

That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice." Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.

This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out. I'm surprised it took this long for a lawsuit.

Re:Blinded by the Light

Slashdot's homepage is ALMOST accessible. The Center for Applied Special Technology has a web service called Bobby (which can also be run as a standalone application) designed to evaluate the accessibility of web sites to people with disabilities.

Bobby is at http://www.cast.org/bobby/ [cast.org]

According to Bobby, the slashdot page is missing one ALT attribute on one IMG tag. Here's a link to the Bobby analysis of slashdot [cast.org].

For comparison, here's the same type of analysis for cnn.com. [cast.org]

--Kynn

Web inacessible to the blind

I don't think this is simply a case about somebody suing AOL. I admit not having read the NYTimes article, since I didn't want to register to enter their site. I have read several comments here though, and in my opinon a lot of people here lack respect for people with disabilities. Comments like "this medium wasn't built for them", "it's a graphical medium", etc, etc are more or less plain b*llsh**.

For starters, there's Lynx. That browser have been with us for a looooooong time. It also gives a good representation of what a web site looks to a person with a braille-enabled browser, or a browser that uses speech synthesis. You also get a quick indication of how your site will "look" when a search engine's robot comes by. If site authors used Lynx more they'd probably figure out what all this fuzz is about.

There's also several resources available regarding accessibility on the web. The HTML 4.0 spec has quite a lot of information regarding how to make your site accessible [w3.org] for everyone, not only those with a graphical browser. With CSS level 2 [w3.org] you have "aural style sheets" which enables you to suggest presentational information for users with speech-synthesis. Add to that the Web Accessibility Intiative [w3.org] and Jacob Nielsen's Accessible Design for users with disabilities [useit.com].

Usability for other people than those with graphical browsers has been around for years (that Nielsen-article is old). But when you look at people's attitude there's no wonder why sites look like they do. Nobody gives a damn anyway... I think that's scary.

But, even though this has been a case for quite a while it doesn't mean I believe that the blind can sue AOL. As others have mentioned, if AOL hasn't gone out saying it's accessible to the blind they, in my opinion, don't have a case. They can ask AOL to create a site they can use, but they shouldn't be able to force AOL to do so. With the amount of publicity this gets AOL might feel it's good PR to create a site usable for the blind, maybe simply because they don't want to lose the case. In my opinion it's only the government and other official sites that should be required to be accessible to everyone.

The 'net is in my opinion well suited for being accessible for the blind. Provided they have the right aids mail, news, and to a certain extent, the web, is quite easy to use (since most of it is text). We shouldn't simply lock them out saying "this is a graphical medium, it wasn't ment for you" or anything like that.

The market can't solve everything

Face it, capitalism doesn't solve everything. The disabled are not a large enough market share to matter to someone like AOL, or a large number of other corporations either.

This, in fact, is what the government IS for.

We make a lot out of the fact that we don't want the government running our lives, telling us how to run our own business, etc. Fine. But it does have a place, and that's to protect those that need it. If the Internet is as big a part of the future as every /.er believes, then yes, the blind (and the deaf, and many other people with disabilities) have a right to be part of it.

But there's simply not enough of them to make noise with their dollars. Folks, money ain't everything. Sometimes there are things that should be required because it's the right thing to do. There are a number of situations where we MUST rely on the government -- pollution, for example.

So all you /.ers who think the market should solve it: Get real. The market is great for many, many problems, but there are times when society as a whole has to protect what it believes in. I believe in freedom for everyone.

Don't you?

Re:Give me a break.

• And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the ./ people who are whining about Political Correctness. We're not talking about some pointless argument over semantics. We're talking about locking out a portion of our community, a portion of the community that is already excluded from so much in our society, from the explosive growth in our economy and society taking place on the Internet. For a group of people who whine so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this attitude is utter hypocrisy!

I couldn't agree more.

I'm generally pretty conservative, but I just don't see the ADA as being a burden on society. The intent is that society will benefit by allowing handicapped people to function as productive members of society. Anybody have a problem with this?

Now, there are people who try to abuse it. Like the policeman who was fired because he couldn't make a comprehensible report and claimed to have "Disability of Written Expression" or the people who tried to claim that they were discriminated against because they couldn't perform certain jobs, like being a pilot, that required a certain standard of uncorrected vision.

The geeks whining about special accomodations or comparing this to something we might see in a "Harrison Bergeron" world are pretty clueless. I've known productive blind computer programmers. As others have mentioned, there are OCR devices that will read a computer screen.

I, for one, am disappointed that the Web is as much a visual medium as it's become. I like to think that the Web is best when it's a information, primarily written language, medium. I'm not looking forward to the day when high speed access turns it the Web into just Interactive TV.

In so far as the Web is written language based, simple accomodations, like ALT tags, and command-based systems so that people can navigate without the need for visual cues, are all that's needed. It wouldn't be hard to do and everyone could benefit. If more sites were Lynx accessible, we'd have a Web that was more useful to people with slow connections and simple character based systems, too.

There's a lot of hyperbole about all of this. From the link [usdoj.gov] in this story about the guidelines the Federal Government is adopting, you can find this document [usdoj.gov] that really explains what the Fed is doing. A particularly interesting extract is:

• 9) Are there any exemptions to the technology accessibility standards?

  A Federal agency does not have to comply with the accessibility standards if it would impose an undue burden to do so. This is consistent with language used in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other civil rights legislation, where the term 'undue burden' has been defined as "significant difficulty or expense." However, the agency must explain why meeting the standards would pose an undue burden for a given procurement action, and must still provide people with disabilities access to the information or data that is affected.

Is this too much to ask? That we make some effort to give people with disabilities access to information?

Someday, someday soon perhaps, the Internet will be a necessity. You may need it to apply for Government services or licenses. You might need it to access the future version of Libraries. Do we really want to make decisions now that closes the Internet off to people with disabilities?

Re:The market can't solve everything

As the maintainer of a government web site, I can only say how much I agree. Those repeatedly posting that the web is a visual medium are just flat wrong. The web (and to a greater extent and more importantly the internet) ain't about pretty pictures or fonts only the designer of them can read. It's about ideas. It's a mechanism for communicating those ideas. And anyone who says "They're blind! Let 'em eat cake!" is not only heartless but ignorant. It is simply unacceptable for society to take a group of people who "see" the world in a different way and shut them out. Isn't that what all the Hellmouth uproar has been about? Saying "Blind people? Fuck 'em!" is the moral equivalent of saying "Plays Doom? Put 'em in isolation!" Neither condition is a good reason to cut people off from the rest of the world. And folks, I believe that the 'net has reached a level of importance, of validity, and of ubiquity that cutting people off from the online world is nearly the equivalent of shutting them out of the physical world.

I know my blind users appreciate the fact that I'm not trying to win any design contests. I'm just trying to communicate. Just like any other Any Browser [anybrowser.org] proponent. :-)

As for the nuts and bolts, it's not all that hard to make sites useful to everyone. Check out the IRS web site [ustreas.gov] for a look at a huge site that works in text only mode. And if you're open to making the sites you design more useful, try the basic information available from the Department of Justice page on this topic. [usdoj.gov] There's even a fine page on the topic from the General Services Administration [gsa.gov]. Just because they're government sites doesn't mean they're bad.

On the flip side, of course, I think the folks filing this suit could have chosen a better place to try to make available for the blind than AOL. Suppose they get everything they ask for and AOL becomes totally accessible? What then? A whole new group of folks gets to look at the service and decide that it's crap?

:-)

Sorry. I couldn't resist the cheap shot.