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The Courts The Internet Technology

Supreme Court Allows Blind People To Sue Retailers If Their Websites Are Not Accessible (latimes.com) 196

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way Monday for blind people to sue retailers if their websites are not accessible to these people. "In a potentially far-reaching move, the justices turned down an appeal from Domino's and let stand a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that the Americans With Disabilities Act protects access not just to restaurants and stores, but also to the websites and apps of those businesses," reports Los Angeles Times. From the report: Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed suit in Los Angeles three years ago and complained he had been unable to order a pizza online because the Domino's website lacked the software that would allow him to communicate. He cited the ADA, which guarantees to persons with a disability "full and equal enjoyment the goods and services ... of any place of public accommodations." Lawyers for Domino's agreed this provision applied to its pizza stores, but not its website.

Last year, however, the 9th Circuit ruled for Robles and said the law applied to its online services as well as the store. "The ADA mandates that places of public accommodation, like Domino's, provide auxiliary aids and services to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind," the appeals court said in January. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business groups who said they represented 500,000 restaurants and 300,000 businesses joined in an appeal urging the high court to review the 9th Circuit's decision. They said they feared a "tsunami of litigation," and worried that judges nationwide would see the appeals court's decision as "imposing a nationwide website-accessibility mandate." But without comment or dissent on Monday, the high court said it would not hear the case of Domino's Pizza vs. Robles.

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Supreme Court Allows Blind People To Sue Retailers If Their Websites Are Not Accessible

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  • Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:47PM (#59281702) Homepage Journal

    Or at least, it makes more sense than forcing someone to expand their bathroom. It costs very little to make a website accessible, all you have to do is understand HTML and use best practices. If it's too hard for you, then you can get that functionality from a CMS.

    • by Anrego ( 830717 )

      Genuinely curious on the state of things with regards to accessibility tech.
      The last time I had any involvement with a web project (not _that_ long ago, but predates the current wave of bootstrap and all that), most screen reader software required you to make your website a throwback to the early 90s to have any chance of accessibility. This was well into the era where ajax was becoming the norm, and the web guys ended up basically just having a separate accessible version that looked like shit but could b

      • Browsers can actually mostly do it right now without violating competing interpretations of the standard. This was one of the big "hidden" features of the XHTML 1.0 Strict revamp along with the industry-wide push towards browsers that actually tried to support open standards rather than purposefully building in strategic incompatibilities.

        Now the trick is finding web coders who know how to make it happen, after 2+ decades of drumming competence and ethics out of front-end coding departments.

        • Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

          by pilaftank ( 1096645 ) on Monday October 07, 2019 @09:27PM (#59281826) Homepage

          ...This was one of the big "hidden" features of the XHTML 1.0 Strict revamp...

          XHTML? Sorry, but HTML5 kicked that ugly thing to the curb.

          • XHTML? Sorry, but HTML5 kicked that ugly thing to the curb.

            HTML5 defines both an almost-but-not-quite-SGML syntax and an XML syntax that is largely compatible with XHTML 1 [whatwg.org]. It's not officially called XHTML5, but that's what it is.

          • Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

            by ShoulderOfOrion ( 646118 ) on Monday October 07, 2019 @10:47PM (#59282016)

            Sorry. XHTML was a great attempt to bring sanity to web development by enforcing the least restrictive of best practices, for example, actually requiring closing element tags to accompany opening tags, in the correct order. The problem is that that concept was too deep for web 'developers' who preferred to just throw tag soup at the screen until a page half-assed worked in their browser of choice. Hence, why browsers today are some of the most bloated, complicated and bug-prone software applications in existence.

            Now I see the same lazy thinking from the web 'designers' in these comments, rueing the fact they might actually have to put in the slight bit of extra effort needed to add readable text to their mangled-Javascript image repositories they call pages so that the visually-impaired can actually use them.

            If you can't see it in Lynx and Mutt, it's not real.

            • It's not the developers, it's the data entry. You can be as perfect and diligent as you like, your perfect CMS has to be used by people who know a handful of tags and don't care. You don't have the time nor was the project budgeted for some amazing editor that ensures compliance with every input, you were paid just enough for a database backed form entry. So every time one of those people makes a typo, fails to close a tag, copy/pastes a latin-1 character into a utf-8 document, that page will just outright

        • Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:26AM (#59282196) Homepage

          I tried converting one of my open source projects to use accessibility standards and failed.

          The problem is that accessibility standards are confusingly written for somebody not already deeply entrenched in the field and information on them is scarce and lacking. Beyond that it is very hard to test without spending lots of money on hardware and software that uses the standards and in general will negatively affect usability of non-standard UI components for people who don't need accessibility features.

          I'd like to try again if I can find the time, but making even a simple project accessible is not just a matter of adding tweaking HTML.

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Which project was it? Do you have a link to the repo? It would be interesting to take a look at what is involved in your specific case.

          • Beyond that it is very hard to test without spending lots of money on hardware and software...

            All the major browsers offer native support for the accessibility APIs of the common platforms. I admittedly have no idea what the state of screen readers, etc. on Linux is, but I know they used to exist and I'm sure they don't cost "lots of money". On Windows and Mac, they're built in - have been for ages - and there are also (free) tools that let you directly inspect the accessibility tree to see why the screen

        • You're thinking of ARIA, which was an extension for both HTML and XHTML. HTML5 embraced a lot of the ARIA semantics and built them into the core element set (e.g., the tag), but the rest is still supported by HTML5.

      • Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday October 07, 2019 @09:53PM (#59281904) Homepage Journal

        All you really have to do that you might not do otherwise is to put alt tags on all the images used for navigation, and make good descriptive links, and have transcripts for videos. But here is a quick reference [w3.org]. It really does boil down to just making a proper website, and not some whizbang javascript shitshow.

        • by Anrego ( 830717 )

          That was the argument back in the day, but back then it equated to "anything added/altered by js after the page is loaded won't work". Like I said I do have to assume that since this is now so prevalent that software has improved somewhat, but the cynic in my wouldn't be chocked to find out that it hasn't.

          some whizbang javascript shitshow

          .
          Agree that a lot of the web goes overboard, but I wouldn't want to go back to the days where every interaction required a full page reload. There's lots of cases where it makes perfect sense for a websit

        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          If an image consists of a line graph plot of time series data from a sensor or database, such as inflation-adjusted price of a 2-topping medium pizza over time, extracting the relevant trends in order to construct alternate text could get very tricky very fast. If an image or video is uploaded by a user, creating descriptive text or a transcript would require expensive AI or expensive humans.

          • If an image consists of a line graph plot of time series data from a sensor or database, such as inflation-adjusted price of a 2-topping medium pizza over time, extracting the relevant trends in order to construct alternate text could get very tricky very fast.

            Only if you trick yourself. You use the same data used to create the graph, but present it as a table.

      • Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @01:25AM (#59282312)

        This legal result is not the sort of "oh golly, we didn't know which way it would go" that the news makes it out to be.

        There was no good argument, given the text of the ADA, that websites don't have to comply. People have known for many years that this was a requirement, and many sites became compliant long ago.

        And it was a great thing, not only for disabled but for the few anti-remote-scripting nerds who understood the issue. Basically, it goes like this: you have to make the site work normally without javascript when the CSS is turned off, but then you add back all the JS bullshit with the CSS.

        So for example, if you surf without JS and you visit a news site, you probably only see a blank window. Instead of turning JS on, just turn the stylesheet off instead! POW! Your news article now loads, 90s style. You're welcome. So few people bother that they barely notice.

        On the dev side, frameworks have no trouble making things work well this way. It doesn't really even change the cost, unless you have keyword billing, because the same ability to work without the bullshit is used by the testing frameworks for other reasons. ;)

        • Exactly. This problem only started popping up with the big brands again because they're outsourcing to a country that doesn't even know what Section 508 is.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        You make one website for the sighted and another sub-website a simplified version of the other web site for the blind, text based everything no images required, really quite simple and linking to the same details, price, menu, ingredients. All it needs is an invisible to the sighted link on the base web site to the website for the blind.

        • Do websites not already often include alternate renderings for, eg., print versions ?

          It woudl be good to see some alternative solutions for screen hardware that would bring a better experience to the blind and partialy sighted than just having the text read in a monotone.

    • Not arguing whether or not its a good idea, but I'm surprised its inexpensive. A lot may depend on what functionality needs to be accessible. Any site that sells products based on images of those products may have to put significant effort into providing text descriptions.

      Large companies may already do this, but there may be a lot of small business websites that don't follow good practices.

    • That's a huge assumption. Not all web pages are the equivalent of a fancy slide show or word document. There's an inherent sacrifice that comes with "best practices". You can't always achieve the best of both worlds. If you limit a website to be more accessible you can reduce its function for those that don't have any disability.

      I'd say still virtually all government and major public services should be accessible. That ranges from doing your taxes to buying train tickets. Even in those cases there will b
    • Someone, somewhere will still find fault in it and you'll end up in court.
    • It is also easier than ever with the modern tools available. I use the Google Wave plugin for Chrome; it will highlight errors in your page, suggest fixes, and explain why fixing something is important. Incredibly useful! If you don't like google, numerous other websites and plugins provide similar functionality. Same for other issues like evaluating for color blindness and readability; there are tools that will analyze and make suggestions. For any reasonably large organization there really isn't a good ex

  • by varrock ( 6296812 ) on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:47PM (#59281704)
    Just like civil engineers build elevators and ramps for their buildings, software engineers should be held to the same standard for the accessibility of their websites to account for all users.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:50PM (#59281714)

      Yeah, we probably shouldn't be called software engineers when we lack a formal engineering degree.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by blindseer ( 891256 )

        Yeah, we probably shouldn't be called software engineers when we lack a formal engineering degree.

        Speak for yourself, I have an engineering degree.

        This frustrated me to no end at university seeing people take computer science in the hopes to become a "software engineer".

        Computer science is, well, a science. If you want to be a mechanical engineer then you don't major in physics. If you want to be a chemical engineer then you don't major in chemistry. If you want to be a computer engineer then you don't major in computer science. While software engineering is becoming distinct from computer engineeri

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The engineers kind of know what a ramp is. What "elevators" are.
      What should websites do? Full text? Text everywhere?
      More?
  • Not trying to troll here but what kind of 'software' is this person demanding?
    I can understand that visually impaired people can be helped with large fonts, contrast and an alternative layout,
    but how does a blind person access a website?

  • by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Monday October 07, 2019 @09:05PM (#59281760) Homepage

    There are no legal guidelines for what constitutes an ADA compliant website or online service.

    The Supreme Court should have taken this case and forced congress to write some laws that extend ADA to the online world, instead we are now stuck applying handicap access ramps to websites.

    This makes no sense and will allow parasite lawyers to continue to shakedown people and companies who create actual wealth.
    https://www.latimes.com/busine... [latimes.com]

    FTA
    "No formal government standards exist for private businesses to follow to ensure their websites comply with the ADA, although a consortium of web innovators has created guidelines, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, to make websites more accessible to disabled people. Government websites already follow those guidelines, but private business websites, which are typically loaded with images and video, tend to be more difficult to overhaul to meet the guidelines, experts say."

    There are disabled people and lawyers that have nothing better to do all day than collaborate and sue people A-Z.

    Only in America.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      There are no legal guidelines for what constitutes an ADA compliant website or online service.

      There are no legal guidelines, but there are broadly accepted standards [w3.org] and any website developed by the basically competent is most of the way to compliance. The only atypical item is transcriptions of video-only content, which can be done in software easily enough. If you make a website out of HTML and CSS, and you put alt tags on your images (especially any used for navigation) then you're most of the way there already.

      There are disabled people and lawyers that have nothing better to do all day than collaborate and sue people A-Z.
      Only in America.

      People who only know America always say things like that [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you make a website out of HTML and CSS, and you put alt tags on your images (especially any used for navigation) then you're most of the way there already.

        alt tags, text, and audio cues are what was just ruled an ADA violation.

        Go look at https://www.dominos.com/ [dominos.com]

        (Hopefully slashdot won't munge this)
        <img src="https://cache.dominos.com/olo/6_2_3/assets/build/market/US/_en/images/promo/2018-side-perfect-combo-desktop.jpg" class="promo__image " alt="2 Medium 1-Topping Pizzas, 16-piece Parmesan Bread Bites, 8 Piece Cinnamon Twists and a 2 Liter of Coke for $19.99." data-quid="">

        Every image has an ALT tag. The wayback machine only goes back to 2015 but those

    • They have nothing better to do than try to live in the world like everyone else.

    • by xlsior ( 524145 )
      The US government requires all federal sites to follow WCAG 2.0 compliance for accessibility purposes. In all likelihood that'll be the standard everyone should aim for. /spoiler: many CMS systems aren't, out of the box.
    • There are no ADA guidelines. There is an HTTP guideline. You simply add an alt text field [psu.edu] to all your pictures [w3.org]. That's really all blind people need to navigate most image-heavy sites. They rely on a device which reads the text of a website aloud, or converts it into braille. But obviously this doesn't work if the site's images, navigation buttons, and menu fields are all just pictures without any alt text.

      I can understand a personal website not including alt text. But a professionally created websit
      • In this instance the complaint goes further than alt tags. They have to have textual descriptions of the images, an alt tag with "pineapple and ham pizza" isn't enough. For more complex products that would necessitate a long list of contents and options, I doubt anyone would be pleased if you put it all in an alt tag so there has to be a semantic markup that indicates what goes with what in descending order of importance. The semantic properties of plain HTML are only valid for simple article based pages, e
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Companies want everything to be online because it's cheaper for them. No rent or staffing for physical shops/offices, no call centres, just do it all online or via their app.

      It's no wonder the number of lawsuits is rising if people with disabilities are unable to access those sites.

      The lack of a standard is a red herring. What do you want, a law that says the site must pass the W3C validator? Actually, that wouldn't be so bad... No, my point was that being legally required to use one specific technology is

      • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Welcome to the online. Where new, very skilled staff will have to create the correct web site...
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The majority of sites run on a CMS these days, Wordpress being the most popular. Most of the work to support this stuff is done by the CMS developers and some by the theme developers.

          The people building individual web sites shouldn't have to worry about it too much, it should be mostly automatic.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Text. Text all the way down.
    • by jaseuk ( 217780 )

      You can't write a law to cover all the possible ways people with disabilities may need adaptions. It depends on the disability and the service provided..

      Accessibility of web sites is perhaps a more modern problem, because hand in hand with the decrease of accessibility (particularly through forced apps) has been coupled with a lack of phone contactable websites / services. If you could order your pizza by phoning at no cost and get a similar experience talking to someone as from the app, then this might n

    • I believe Section 508 [section508.gov] will fulfill the need adequately; all that this really means that a piece of legislation which previously applied only to government websites now must be extended to apply to commercial sites as well.
  • The courts did not always side with the ADA covering the web. Access Now, Inc. v. Southwest Airlines Co. [wikipedia.org] was probably the basis of Domino's lawyers claiming the ADA only applies to brick and mortar locations. In the case of Southwest Airlines, they had been providing web only deals. Anyone that was blind could not take advantage of the deals because Southwest refused to put text ALT tags on the majority of images that made up the navigation of the website. Southwest Airlines indicated it would be too c

  • All that's needed here is for another Circuit Court of Appeals to disagree with the renownly liberal Ninth Circuit Court and SCOTUS will be compelled to take up the case due to the split decisions.
    I'm sure that the next case will be filed in 5...4...3...2...1...

  • Just like businesses have special TTD numbers for the heating impaired, it's time to create a .blind TLD. I can just go to my normal website, select all, paste into notepad and upload it to a static HTML page on my .blind domain. Problem solved in 5 minutes.
  • If he wanted a pizza, he could call and order one. Why is it important to be able to order a pizza online? Can blind people order from a drive through (without the help of a sighted person?) Should they be able to?

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      If he wanted a pizza, he could call and order one. Why is it important to be able to order a pizza online?

      The website often offers lower prices than the phone service.

  • Not the responsibility of the website. Have a friend download an app that reads text... wtf
  • by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Monday October 07, 2019 @10:51PM (#59282032) Homepage
    Try making a site, in Canada, AODA compliant, and you'll notice it's impossible, not just hard, impossible. Two years ago we ran into a legitimate question about how to handle case X, we email and called the AODA and they couldn't tell us what to do, ending that call just as confused as we were. Our standards are a mess, they're all over the map and even the people who author the standards will admit that's true.

    As it stands now, we just gave up on supporting visual disabilities, and if you need to use a screen reader, just make sure it's not garbage. We routinely test with screen reading software, and it's hit or miss, but generally the better the software, the more accurate the outcome, so don't buy garbage, and you'll generally be okay.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Can you elaborate on this unsolvable case?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Sumguy2436 ( 6186944 )

      we email and called the AODA and they couldn't tell us what to do, ending that call just as confused as we were. Our standards are a mess, they're all over the map and even the people who author the standards will admit that's true.

      Take solace in the fact that that's how feelgood regulations work all around the world. These politicians come up with vague regulations that sound "good" but have no idea how someone would follow them. They don't care about the real world. It's all about the cause.

      When the GDPR was about to come into effect in the EU businesses had no idea how to comply. They asked lawyers who couldn't give any definitive answers either. So they went to government agencies who had no idea either and just said that would ha

  • Define accessible.
    And there are plenty more disabilities that could be helped by some degree of accessibility planning etc.

    • Prior case law points to the answer: Government accessibility regulations became the legal definition quite a while ago so then they apply to you as well - until a court accepts something else that is all you have to be sure can be used to argue you are accessible.

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:37AM (#59282226) Journal

    The problem is that there are no clear-cut standards. Existing recommendations are based off of weird contradictory armchair theories that have lots of holes if you stop to think about them in practice.

    Sure, you could make a really basic website that will pass ADA muster, but Dilbertian PHB's always want to decorate it with fancy shit to pump their egos and ask IT to find a way for their eye-candy to "fit ADA guidelines". Thus, you have to stretch the limits, and the limits are fuzzy.

    They ask why "the rules" are fuzzy, but don't have the attention span to listen to or read the long explanation; or think you are bullshitting them. "Git outta my pointy hair and just do it!"

    • The best standard is: Make your site accessible where easy. If it gets too hard, make a separate accessible view, test it yourself with a screen reader.
  • I wrote my website completely by hand, by myself, without having any knowledge of modern web development. I don't have the money to hire someone else to work on my website, and even if I did I've got better things to spend it on.
    Sorry but I don't care if my website isn't accessible to blind people. Just use a screen reader or something
    • Does your website offer good or services to the public? If so, you have no right to bitch if you get sued. If you don't get sued then you're not important enough to notice and don't matter anyway.

  • CSS has a full set of properties for audio browsers.
    HTML explicitely states that you should never write it while relying on any form of presentation!

    I always tested my sites in Lynx/Links2/eLinks.

    Yet all the morons kept making sites that became completely useless, once you removed their CSS or altered the default CSS of the browser.
    Then, even worse, it became all canvases and scripts and other things that aren't even using HTML anymore.

    I always wondered how blind people even get by with that crap. Let alone

  • There's no excuse for not following web standards during web development.
  • Supreme Court allows blind to sue...

    The blind leading the blind.

    The SCOTUS is the least blind-friendly or tech-friendly organization in existence.
    (Hint: check out THEIR OWN webpage).

    Maybe some blind people should sue them.

    E

  • The NBA and NFL have to hire blind Quarterbacks and Wheelchair-bound linebackers?

  • What about the people who don't even have a home in which to order pizza?

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