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.'"
Fine with me (Score:3, Insightful)
I use a content management system which, if it does not already implement alt tags for all images, can be easily coaxed to do so. And I use (so far as I am able) standards-compliant markup, so this is not going to affect me.
It's even long been possible to have accessible flash. So what's the problem exactly? It's not like the web would lose anything but dead weight...
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That it takes a LOOOOOOOOOT more than a few alt tags, standard compliant markup and Flash that can be screen scraped to be ADA compliant. Its a freagin nightmare, and a lot of people who think they are compliant, are not, unless their web site is EXTREMELY simple.
For all practical purpose, its impossible to ACTUALLY be compliant. They're just a bit soft over it...
Re:Fine with me (Score:4, Insightful)
For all practical purpose, its impossible to ACTUALLY be compliant. They're just a bit soft over it...
How hard is it to use HTML and CSS the way they were meant to be used, and to provide alternative content? Sorry, not buying this one at all.
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How hard is it to use HTML and CSS the way they were meant to be used
It's really easy. Problem is, they weren't designed with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in mind.
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HTML and CSS can not accomplish what the ADA is demanding.
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.
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 t
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If enforced to the letter, this serves only to drive most product advertising and support services off the web, shut down thousands of hobby sites, and shutter eCommerce.
I think it's more likely to push most of it (at least the product advertising and support, and ecommerce -- hobby sites are probably screwed) to shell companies and hosting solutions overseas.
Re:Fine with me (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML and CSS can not accomplish what the ADA is demanding.
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.
So, people will be encouraged to stop making needlessly overcomplicated sites. It sounds like nothing of value will be lost.
They are crap.
Assuming you mean the sites that don't work well when spoken, then yes. Assuming you mean the readers, then I disagree.
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 do you serve music to the deaf? Hmmm mmmm dum de dumm ta ta de da mmmm de mmmm?
And how do you serve online game content to the guy typing with his one hand, or his feet.
If you think this is easy, why don't you try it. The tools don't yet exist to do this in any economical way. If enforced to the letter, this serves only to drive most product advertising and support services off the web, shut down thousands of hobby sites, and shutter eCommerce.
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. You serve music to the deaf the same way you do everybody else. They just won't listen to it. Wall-Mart sells music on CD's. Deaf people are allowed to buy them. WalMart doesn't have to have employees to interpretive dance on command for deaf people who want to buy a CD but can't hear it. How do you serve content to the guy with one hand? Same way as everybody else. He'll probably just suck at league play against people who can push more buttons faster.
ADA compliance isn't about making every cripple get to win the Super Bowl, and every blind person win an Academy award for cinematography. It's about making minimal reasonable accommodations so that a person can live their life to the extent that is sensible. The government is involved, so there will probably be a few inane edge cases, but the basic principle here seems sound.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fine with me (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a very large difference between wanting to shove the "undesirables" (your word, not mine) under the rug, and wanting to be able to have an ad-supported internet venture without getting fined by the feds.
As someone who had a father who died of a degenerative muscle disease, and who benefited from ADA-won societal improvements for the 12 years he was wheelchair bound, I'm not going to trash the ADA.
But that same father also believed that there are limits as to how far you can go to accommodate people with disabilities. Forcing businesses to be generally handicap-accessible is one thing. Forcing them to be accessible to all handicaps, no matter what the disability, is quite another. Putting in a wheelchair ramp has wide reaching benefits to people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, and the elderly. Forcing a website to be 100% compliant with a standalone text reader benefits the vanishingly few people who are both blind and who visit that specific site.
The long and the short of it is, sometimes shit happens, and people just have to work with the hand they're dealt. I went to a college that had set itself up as a disability-friendly campus. I saw all kinds of disabilities there, and not all of them could be reasonably accommodated. I expect there to be curb cuts and grade-level entries to benefit the large number of people with wheelchairs, walkers, and canes. I do not expect there to be robotic assistance arms in every aisle of a store to benefit the tiny number of people who were born without limbs. This proposal would push onto internet vendors and hosts the same level of absurdity as would be required to push robotic assistance arms on brick and mortar stores.
TFA says exceptions will be made for some *personal* web sites. It doesn't say anything about non-profit or organizational web sites. Presumably this means I'm going to have to make my car club's web site (a public organization that is incorporated as a non-profit) accessible to the blind, despite the fact that the car club doesn't have any blind people in it. That is monumentally stupid.
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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. T
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provide alternative content
that can be fucking expensive
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Well, as a GWT developer, I don't write much of any HTML or CSS. I do my best to keep most of those details abstracted away from me. But I know most of it isn't HTML at all, but is done by editing DOM objects. So I don't really know if I'm using anything "as it was intended to be used".
Every browser that you add support for adds cost, and the less mainstream, the worse it is. Hell, just supporting all of the IE versions is a huge pain in the ass. You really think it's cheap to cater to screen readers?
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Being a web Accessibility expert myself. It is a lot more work then people think for certain multimedia content. However everything else is not as difficult as many make it out to be. But, it does take time and understanding. It also means you have to do things correct.
Always provide alternative content for media that is not purely decoration. This means stupid little hacks like placing text into a background is a incorrect. you can get around this by using a invisible pixel with the correct alternative lan
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How hard is it to use HTML and CSS the way they were meant to be used, and to provide alternative content? Sorry, not buying this one at all.
Kid, I started doing this HTML stuff when there was no such thing as CSS, and HTML pages were built in a text editor and optimized for 14k modem connections.
Yes, in those times it was easy, since the content was largely linear.
Today, I have tabbed websites which exchange the content of their tabs on-demand through AJAX calls. I have no friggin idea what a screenreader will do with that, and if they all behave the same way. Yes, I could find out. No, I don't see it as my responsibility to do so. How about ma
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.
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I deal with image data. Pictures. Automatically taken, from many places many times a day. If I have to "add a document" describing each picture I would have no time to eat or sleep anymore.
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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 an
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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]
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Not to
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They said the same thing about forcing places to allow blacks and whites to eat at the same counter, or put in ramps in every public building. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true when you say it.
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Go rent the standard version of the most recent Star Trek movie (it's one I know has it off the top of my head, and I know many others have it). Try looking at the language options on DVDs from the last few years.
It seems impossible to appreciate the work without actually seeing it.
Asserting your incorrect opinion as fa
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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 were
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Here's the quick ref for WCAG 2.0 [w3.org]. I'm helping a client to become conformant. It's a pain just to read through the quick ref. It's a lot more than just alt tags.
Re:Not Fine with me (Score:2)
This is a huge project, and in many cases from what I've seen, even sites that are compliant are not that useable. It's not that you shouldn't make your site accessible, more customers = more money, right? It's that the "experts" that write these regulations are lawyers and bureaucrats that typically know fuck all about the industry they are regulating from a practical point of view, and are often driven by experts who have skin in the game.
I also take issue with some of the points in the article.:
Firstly
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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.
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Not to mention the possibility of large fines when my (commercial) websites aren't compliant with some obscure requirement in the new guidelines. And the cost involved in me dropping the 10 other things I'm doing to read the guidelines, check all my websites, make sure they're compliant or if they're not, spend time and money to fix them.
So, no, my anxiety is not just about "uncertaint
Patent trolls -- now ADA enforcement trolls? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention the possibility of large fines when my (commercial) websites aren't compliant with some obscure requirement in the new guidelines.
As the fines and penalties becomes stiffer and the rules become more complex and difficult, will we end up with ADA trolls who find ADA issues and then either offer "remediation consulting services" or an anonymous phone call to whoever enforces the ADA?
Re:Some businesses will buck any change... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, and this will make it worse.
Having more government regulations is great for big businesses. Making their website compliant (or following most other regulations) costs money, but that amount of money is peanuts compared to the overall profits of the business. Meanwhile, any small businesses that want to compete find themselves having to pay a sum of money that is a good chunk of (or even more than) their profit in order to ensure compliance. Net result: big business wins. The conservatives are actually opposing big business here.
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...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.
Here you go: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ [w3.org] WCAG 2.0 is what the upcoming revision to Section 508 is being based on.
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you know.. im all for.... (Score:2, Insightful)
if store X does not want to cater to group Y (for whatever reason, infrastructure costs to accommodate group Y or simple dislike for group Y It should be the store owners prerogative.
In this day and age, if people are THAT upset about it, they can organize boycotts until store X either changes, or goes under.
here is a perfect example in NY
smoking indoors is banned.... NOW I believe the store should have a right to dictate whether or n
Re:you know.. im all for.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The market will always decide for whatever's cheaper, and will bias itself to cheaper now even if that costs it money over the long run. Unless the question is "How do I maximize to reduce costs to the lowest level" where cost is a single variable of money, using a market based solution is NEVER the right answer.
Equality is something that is not broken down into mere money. So a market based solution will never address it. That's why we have government- to protect those who don't have the power to do so themselves (in this case, the handicapped). That's what's called "civilization". And yes, it takes a government to enforce it.
I do hope that they do this the right way though. Businesses under a certain size should be exempted, perhaps on a sliding scale due to the costs of implementing this. Also, mere presence of an ad or two should not make it commercial, unless those ads bring in sufficient revenue. Large organizations like Amazon, Google, WalMart, Target, etc should absolutely be required to be accessible. Small sites like my local pizza joint likely can't afford it.
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That's why we have government- to protect those who don't have the power to do so themselves (in this case, the handicapped).
This is so depressingly true.
Simply put.. it's not worth it financially to make your site accessible unless you are very large or sell certain niche products. For the vast majority of sites, the costs of making a site accessible (especially if you are required to rigidly follow some standard that you _know_ is gonna really suck and probably be counter to the purpose) are going to far outweigh any profits you reap from the handful of new visitors you bring in.
It doesn't help that most technologies designed t
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Unfortunately you really do need a government to come in and say "ok, we know you're gonna take it in the shorts financially.. but you live in a civilized society and you have to suck it up and do what's right".
That is not what's going to happen at all. In the long run you will make owning and operating a small business so onerous that few will decide to do it. Only the largest corporations can afford to comply with laws like this. They will then use their leverage to ship your job to China, India, or Bangladesh. You will have your "civilized society," but no money or future.
There are already many accessibility laws that affect small businesses. The most expensive must be building codes, and these have been around for years. Do you think it costs more to add some text-to-speech helper tags to a website than to build a ramp next to a stairway or to add a wheelchair accessible stall to the bathroom? Please.
Furthermore, many small businesses provide local services that are not possible to offshore. Requiring wheelchair ramps and website tags will not cause the local muffler sh
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Requiring wheelchair ramps and website tags will not cause the local muffler shop to move to Bangladesh.
But it could well be the extra regulatory cost that leaves said local muffler shop unable to compete with the national chain shop next door which outsources all non-customer-facing work to Bangladesh, thereby pushing the local shop out of business.
This is why big business _LOVES_ this kind of regulation, they can easily afford to comply where small business can't. The funny part is that the kind of person who has the hots for this kind of regulation is usually also the kind of person who hates big business.
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The market will always decide for whatever's cheaper, and will bias itself to cheaper now even if that costs it money over the long run.
No, it will bias towards what's more profitable. If they were biased toward cheaper, Ferrari would be making 900cc tricycles, not V12 supercars.
And, in this case, few companies lose enough money to people who can't access their web sites to cover the cost of the time taken to support them.
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That's a terribly analogy.
Which part of "The market will always decide for whatever's cheaper, and will bias itself to cheaper now even if that costs it money over the long run" is proving hard for you to understand? While I would agree that it's not the best example of the English language ever committed to the Internet, clearly the market does not _ALWAYS_ go for the cheap option, as even you seem to agree.
And again, even Hyundai doesn't sell 900cc tricycles in North America even though they'd be cheaper than an Accent.
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Sure it does. Millions of hondas, GMs, toyotas, nissans, etc sold to a handful of Porsche, and Ferrari. And even fewer Bugattis.
The fact that a niche market can still exist does not mean that the market didn't decide the cheaper car wins. It did, by a thousandfold.
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Large organizations like Amazon, Google, WalMart, Target, etc should absolutely be required to be accessible. Small sites like my local pizza joint likely can't afford it.
Those small businesses most certainly can afford it. Your local pizza joint already has to comply with ADA laws at their physical presence (wheelchair accessible restrooms, etc.). Compared with the time and cost of complying with ADA at a physical location, altering the website of a local joint for ADA compliance is rather trivial.
Re:you know.. im all for.... (Score:5, Insightful)
ADA is itself a messed up system that doesn't make anything any better for most people, only adds to the cost of doing business often to the point of driving people out of business.
Locally there is a lawyer and a "disabled" person who do nothing but sue anyone for anything that is not ADA compliant. Wheel chair ramp off by 1% ?? Rail bar off by 1", door not exactly right ... anything.
All the guy does is drive around town suing people. It doesn't help the "disabled" it only helps the one guy, the and his own pocketbook. Meanwhile the cost he's adding to the businesses has put several out of business. Nice huh?
And not one disabled person complained, not one had problems getting service because THAT is not the issue, the issue is "legal compliance" and getting whatever fixed doesn't stop the lawsuit, because it isn't a "fixit" type thing. So they sue, and get their pound of flesh. It is a racket.
Guess what, being disabled sucks. We should try to help people as best we can, but when asshats like the one lawyer and the "disabled" guy he sues for come knocking on your door, don't come complaining to me.
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.
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Let the market decide
The problem with letting the market decide is that the market does not decide responsibly.
We have an FDA for a reason. Ever read The Jungle? You want to go back to eating floor sweepings in your sausage?
The market is going to decide on what is cheapest and most profitable. If the market can get away with throwing together some tarpaper shack and calling it a storefront, it will. And then that shack falls on top of somebody because there were no building codes or safety regulations. And now somebody is
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hmm.. I wasn't aware that Christianity taught that you are your brothers keeper. Perhaps you could show me where it's in the bible? The closest thing I can find is where God asked Cain where Able was and he snarked back, "Am I my brothers Keeper?
Perhaps your just confused in all your rush to make a comment about the rand fan and tea bagger? I do know you got the concept of the bill of rights wrong. It wasn't to stop a tyranny of the majority, it was to make certain that government couldn't take certain righ
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IF bars could still offer smokers an option, i would wager that the bars that DO offer it would increase their revenues fairly quickly because people like me would go there and not to the place we cant smoke.
One of the reasons why British pubs are closing at record rates is because most people who used to go to pubs smoked, and all those non-smoking drinkers who were supposedly so eager to go to non-smoking pubs failed to suddenly materialise after smoking was banned.
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Fair enough, I was looking at health effects based on activities inside the bar (smoking, drinking, etc), not their wider ramifications. When you start saying "x affects y affects z, z is bad, so let's BAN x" then you are basically living in a nanny state.
The problem is that nobody intends to drive drunk. By the time they make that decision, they are already impaired. You may call it a nanny state. I say that a nanny is quite the appropriate thing for people who aren't able to handle themselves. I'm all for treating adults like adults, but someone heavily intoxicated is much closer to a young kid in mental capacity. The problem is that he still has the body and the car keys of an adult. How do you propose to solve that dilemma?
And here's the thing. Indirect regulation is just as harmful as direct regulation. It's like if you don't make possession of alcohol illegal, but the transportation, production, consumption, and distribution of alcohol are illegal, then say "but we didn't actually ban alcohol!!" It's the same thing. If it turns out that smoking is an activity that is so prevalent in the business of running a pub that banning smoking results in most pubs losing money and shutting down, then banning smoking in pubs is the same thing as outright banning pubs.
The two examples seem similiar,
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It also sucks if you want to avoid smoke, but you can't afford to quit your job and find a smoke-free workplace to get hired at.
If you don't like smoke, then perhaps, just perhaps, you should have picked a career where most of your customers don't smoke.
Just an idea.
Re:you know.. im all for.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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even if that were true, someone in the "oppressed" group would be able to open their own store XX, and they would have ALL the business from the "oppressed" group, one man gets to move up in life, and the group can continue buying their products.
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I know this is slashdot and all, but have we truly forgotten how to shop for things without them being presented on a web page? I mean, my local grocery store doesn't HAVE a web page, and they certainly aren't going to "band together" with anyone to keep peop
It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
There are too many flashy (pun intended) websites without any secondary way of seeing them. A proper public website should be navigable with a screen reader. As "Web 2.0" has marched on, it has only gotten worse. Some are even so user hostile that even those wanting a bit of privacy without Flash or javascript enabled are simply locked out.
Exceptions should be made for personal pages, but for organizations, governments, and commerce sites that deal with the public, there shouldn't be any excuse.
--
BMO
Re:It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I kind of see the point of those who say the government shouldn't force private businesses to run their business a certain way. But I also see that that is the same argument of the manager who refused to serve black customers at the Woolworth's lunch counter.
It boils down to the age-old questions: the conservative asks "what kind of government can we tolerate?" and the liberal asks "what kind of society do we want to be?"
So I think you're going too far to say "there shouldn't be any excuse --" private property rights and general freedom from government interference are strong and valid arguments. On the other hand I don't want to turn back the clock to 1963, either. Life is better with civil rights legislation. It's easier to be proud to be an American. So I'm inclined to take your side and say to Web site operators, "suck it up, follow the law."
I also think the government should be the first to implement its own usability requirements... stating with the Web site of the court that handed down this decision.
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I'd settle for getting rid of websites that insist you use internet explorer version 6 or above. I mean, sure we all know how much better IE6 or above is than any other browser out there, and how if you use anything other than internet explorer, you're asking for identity theft...
'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.)
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.
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Yeah, well, I also keep pointing out to people that the original design of HTML was intended to make it easy to build documents that would be readable on a very wide range of screen sizes and shapes. This was done by "marking up" the document with hints to the rendering software about the structure of the document, so that the software could format it sensibly on whatever screen you had, or even with no screen for the visually impaired or for people (e.g., drivers and airplane pilots) whose eyes are busy e
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Oh god, please. I hate when sites look good at one and only one resolution (whether 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or any of the newer ones, though most coding to a specific size don't go above 1024x768). They are too narrow sometimes, and too wide others. Frames, tables, and everything else that ma
OK (Score:2, Insightful)
How is this not a first amendment violation? If person X, or lets say even company Y doesn't want to make their articles/website/cartoons/jokes available in specific format, what right does the government have to come in and do anything about it?
And why is this any sort of priority for the justice department? I have news for the feds, your airplane terrorist watchdogs are molesting children right now, find something more important to work on. Mkay?
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First off, you mixed apples and oranges. If person X wants to make a website that has a limited audience and exclude blind people, smart phones, etc. they may do so to a point. It sounds like this proposal takes that into account. However, if company Y wants to do the same thing, they can't. Companies do not get all the same rights as people. (And, in my opinion, this is a very good thing.) They have to abide by additional non-discrimination laws that include that they are not allowed to discriminate
Re:OK (Score:4, Insightful)
My employer is publicly traded. I'm unaware of any rule/law/etc that requires us to produce braille product literature.
Explain to me HOW a website with the same information is ANY different.
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It's not - there doesn't exist any rule/law/etc that requires websites to produce blind accessible information.
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Actually, your wrong. Person X could be the company Y in it's entirety. What stops them now as the company and the person is one in the same? In fact, the vast majority of companies out there have less then ten employees and less then 1/10 of them are even traded publicly.
I can see some severe constitutional issues here that go well beyond the concept of companies getting the same rights as people. This is because companies are little more then conglomerations of people acting in the same venture. They have
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The article mentioned this benefitting up to 40 million Americans. That's actually a pretty decent bump in potential customer base.
In which case, only a stupid company would put up a web site they can't buy from, and therefore it's not a problem, and there's no need for government to be interfering.
Right?
Important, but not new to /. (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash-only sites (Score:2)
Ada (Score:2)
I'm stupid, for a just a millisecond I thought they were going to talk about the programming language and how they adapted it for mission critical SERVERS!
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.
Sounds like it'll make some jobs (Score:2)
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Not just personal websites, but personal stuff on commercial websites may also not be affected (and should not either):
FTFA:
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Do note that key word:
Plus, of course, that other key word "considering".
Neither of those keywords give me a warm fuzzy about this....
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Unfortunately I think this kind of thing is necessary.
You can't rely on businesses to go out of their way to provide access to a relatively small group of people because, and I say this with no intended cruelty, they're probably not worth it. You can argue about PR and being "good guys" .. but at the end of the day, money is what makes the decision.
Unless you sell a very niche product, chances are the amount of business you do with disabled persons probably won't come close to covering the costs of providin
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Ok, here's the devil's advocate question: if none of my business is done with disabled folks, why should "the man" force me to produce web content suitable for them? They aren't coming to my website anyway. They don't care.
Someone said that flash is the bane of the disabled. Well, it's the bane for me, too, because I don't run an OS with a flash player. (One of my systems is so old
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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.
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who says my male, erogenous nipples go unused?
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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
That analogy just doesn't hold true on the internet. There are dozens of browsers, hundreds of protocols and underlying technologies that were designed to present information visually, often in a multimedia format. An ATM serves a single purpose -- even just the tiny section of the internet we call the web serves a nearly infinite number of purposes, and have so many competing technologies and layouts, ways of doing things, etc., that applying any kind of standard to it is largely a waste of time. The proto
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I always figured it was because the keys were mass-produced, and it's cheaper to just make a few more with braille still on them then to create special "Drive-through ATMs"
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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:What's next? (Score:4, Funny)
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I was on a cruise ship last month, and I came upon the most brilliant braille placement ever. It was on the underside of the hand rail of the staircases.
My braille is on the underside of my dick.
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.
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Drive-through fast-food menus in Braille?
Surely the next step will be to require Ford and GM to build cars which can be driven by blind people, and then we'll need drive-through fast food menus in braille.
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Its also a typical case of mission creep. Every bureaucracy must justify their existence and continue to expand in order to justify more money and more people. These federal monsters need to be clawed back before the US faces European rates of taxation to pay for it all.
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Nobody is claiming for a perfect life for disabled people, just that companies pay their web developers a little more and stop using proprietary shitty formats. This move is good for both disabled and non-disabled people.
Also, I can't watch your video, I'm not in the US, you insensitive clod!
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I have food allergies. I expect an honest answer if I ask you a question about ingredients. If you don't know, tell me you don't know and I will go somewhere else.
I do NOT expect everybody on earth to remove all traces of soy from everything so that I don't get sick. That's ridiculous.
You want to know what's also ridiculous? I have seen parking spaces at busy malls that go unused for YEARS because they are handicapped spaces. Why are there so many spaces when there are so few handicapped people? I app
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You don't have to like it, but getting along with civilization is generally a good thing, especially when you don't have to worry about boycotts.
So people who are unable to use his site are going to punish him by refusing to buy from him?
Sounds like a plan.
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http://www.prestashop.com/bug_tracker/view/4826/ [prestashop.com]
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We should be moving towards a more semantic web anyway...
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Free Speech gives you the right to say what you want, but it does not give you the right to get a license to operate a business.
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.
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Re:Let the Market Decide (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for making sure handicapped people have access to necessary services... however *requiring* movie theaters to provide closed captioning devices at every seat is ridiculous. Watching a movie is is not a life necessity. If the demand is there, and the people that need it are willing to pay a price that makes business sense, then the theaters will have Closed captioning equipment. If it doesn't make business sense, then they won't.
I think another poster more knowledgeable as to the technology vis a vis the deaf punched a hole in that, so I'll defer to the expert there.
What the fuck is with the government wanting to tell *PRIVATE* business who they have to make non-mandatory (ie. entertainment) products available to?
Can you think of another minority to which a broad array of what you'd call non-essential services are denied? As an example, we'll take the on-demand service provided by my cable company. There is absolutely no way I can access that service through my set top box without having someone sighted present ... which translates, really, to "no way that I can access the service through my set top box". Unfortunately, "letting the market decide" there is a bit problematic, since a large chunk of that market, and a large chunk of various television providers, think that blind people don't watch TV. If I had to wait for the collective ignorance of a society that generally defecates themselves when faced with my condition, or generally finds my navigating our local public transit system to get to work of a morning "an inspiration", to catch up with reality, I'd be waiting a couple of centuries.
ADA is mostly bullshit anyways. Hey, let's also make sure we have a wheel chair ramp for bungee jumping, because you never know when some cripple with deteriorating bones might want to plunge down a hundred feet with only their legs attached to a giant rubber band.
Oh, wonderful comparison. I'll not spell out the differences between lack of access because of a safety issue (no one with bones that fragile should be bungee jumping) and lack of access because of an ignorance issue (But wait! That iPhone has a touch screen! Wouldn't you rather have a special phone for the blind?)
Why not require the same Closed captioning devices for normal theater (plays) as well? How about all sporting events too? Gotta have CC devices at the seats so you can hear the refs calls.
Why not?
Maybe we need to throw some braille street signs in there too, wouldn't want the blind to be discriminated against when driving a car, you know?
There needs to be an equivalent to "Godwin's Law" to describe the invocation of either blind people driving (impossible due to current technological limitations) or blind people watching TV (possible, but assumed to be impossible) when these discussions come up. Looking at this logically, which you've completely failed to do here, if there were a means for blind people to be able to drive (cf. Google's self-driving cars), wouldn't it be more cost-effective to use, say, existing GPS infrastructure, already established map providers, and other existing technology? The navigation system to mitigate the lack of ability to see street signs is already in place (it's what allows me to download a map, copy it to my phone, and travel anywhere I take a notion).
The bottom line is, if there is money to be made, some company *will* do it voluntarily. If the market can't support it, oh well, tough break, it doesn't happen.
Again, that presupposes that the site's creator even presumes that blind people can use the Web. I'd wager that, until about five seconds before you read these
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Why should someone who is disabled (most likely not caused by a choice) be given less access?
Also, you need to think things through a little. Requiring every company that does business with the public to have "blind software compatible web pages" or whatever will probably negatively impact a large number of people *without* improving the situation for handicapped. Let me give you an example:
My neighborhood pizza shop has a web menu. It's really basic, just some scanned jpegs of their actual menu. It's a convenience for me, and it probably costs the business like 30 bucks a year for a domain n
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