Slashdot Mirror
Blind User Sues Southwest Over Web Site, Cites ADA
scubacuda writes "According to Law.com, Robert Gumson, a blind man who uses a program that converts website content into speech, is suing Southwest Airlines (with the help of Miami Beach, FL-based Access Now) for its website being incompatible with his screen-reader program. The case has been filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act under the untested legal theory that ADA provisions on the accessibility of public accommodations to the disabled apply to Internet Web sites just as they do to brick-and-mortar facilities like movie theaters and department stores. There have been previous lawsuits alleging that the ADA applies to the Internet, but all have settled without a ruling on the merits: 1999 the National Federation of the Blind sued AOL alleging its service was inaccessible to blind users (AOL agreed to make its sites compatible with screen reader technology);
over the past two years, Access Now has sued Barnes & Noble and Claire's Stores for maintaining Web sites that allegedly violated the ADA (both settled)."
If the company doesn't cater to your needs then they don't need your business.
Too many people think suing is the answer to everything.
This would be like me walking into Target (or any other store) and suing them because they don't sell XL-Tall shirts that will fit me.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
This strikes me as a matter of simple human rights. Does anyone have the right to force a company to spend money on a minority, or accept customers they wouldn't otherwise accept? I don't believe they do.
If the minority (in this case, the blind) are sufficiently profitable as customers, it's likely the company will spend the time and money to cater for them. Or, perhaps, the owner(s) of the company feel that their public image would be best served by catering to the minority. Or maybe they respect the effort many blind people make to achieve their goals, and decide to assist them.
Either way, it's the choice of the company - what right has any individual or group (including the State) to force a company to accept customers they don't want?
A lot of people assume that the ADA is a farce designed to quiet the disgruntled whinings of mentally or physically disabled people. It's a bone tossed to them in much the same way that senior citezens get discounts and prefferential treatment in businesses. It's annoying for other customers and frequently inconvenient.
After all, how many handicapped parking places does the mall need?
What people who think that this is a joke fail to consider, however, is the fact that without the ADA in place, businesses can and will discriminate against handicapped people.
Consider for a second your state's major university. We'll use the University of Texas for an example, because I'm familiar with it. Most of the buildings were constructed in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the multi-story buildings have elevators, but not all of them. During class-time, the elevators are so full that if you want to get to class on time, you have to use the stairs. Remember that Austin is very hilly. There are stairs everywhere, even for one-story buildings.
Now lets assume that you were in a car wreck with a drunk driver and lost the use of your legs. Despite your new disability you are a smart individual who can get a job that does not require the use of your legs.
Without all those nice wheelchair ramps and wheelchair accessable elevators at the university, you are shit out of luck for actually getting to class... to say nothing of managing to cross the stage when you actually manage to earn your diploma.
We look at wheelchair ramps and other disability accomodations as commonplace. The truth is that very few businesses and schools had them before the ADA forced them to. It may be unthinkable now to descriminate against someone because he's deaf, blind, or crippled, but before the ADA went into effect, nobody thought twice about descriminating against people like that.
The ADA is not a joke.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
It is retarded to be suing over this. Not to be insensitive to disabled people, but if you are blind and want to fly with Southwest, pick up a damn phone and call them. You can do everything over the phone that you could online. If you are really this angry about Southwest's site not being compatible with a screen reader, don't give them your business. There are plenty of other airlines out there.
Not to be flamebait or anything, but I think we just have to accept that someone who is blind can never get the full effect out of the web, because you can't cut out the visuals and achieve the same result. It would be like cutting out the images in a movie but wearing headphones describing what you are supposed to see. Hearing what you are supposed to see and seeing it use vastly different sense.
Yes, it sucks to be handicapped. I would imagine blindness is one of the least desirable handicaps, but at some point, we just have to accept the fact that blind people can't effectively surf the web.
Q: Ok, tell me this - where do you draw the line between high traffic commercial websites, and (for instance), mine?
A: Wherever the lawyers with the most money decide the line looks best.
"where do you draw the line between high traffic commercial websites, and (for instance), mine?"
There basically is no threshold for size if the court simply rules the ADA applies as it does in the physical realm. Virtually all commercial businesses (including non-profits) with a physical presence must follow the ADA.
If the court says the ADA applies to websites...*unless* the court stipulates traffic parameters, revenues, etc...every commercial website would then have to be ADA accessible, and worse could be just as easily sued for ADA violations as businesses with physical facilities already are now!
In short if the court rules that ADA applies to websites, unless the court is very specific to how it applies, all commercial websites regardless of size would be subject to the ruling...ouch!!! Talk about a legal nightmare!!
Ron Bennett
Are these (the ADA) the people that made it so that there is Brail on Drive up ATM machines?
After having witnessed this in use the other day, I agree with it.
Two women drive up to the ATM. The passenger gets out, walks around to the machine, starts punching buttons. Gets her money.
And then I realize she is blind. Walks around the car and gets in. They drive away. No problem.
Without Braille on the buttons, she would have had to give her card, and PIN, to the driver to do the transaction. It's not just drivers that use those machines.
no, not all sites *i want to say*.
..and I recon he sues the airline because he feels (somehow) discriminated that he can't use the same public site as you do... to book his ticket.
I recon it's like IRL: that every one should have the same opportunities like the other. Meaning that someone (a disabled, blind in this case) shouldn't somehow be discriminated someway (like not beeing able to access a public place, or site in this case).
From what I know this rule applies here in sweden to all public [access] places...and ends at your home.
Here are a few examples (where it [should] applies): Schools, Banks, any-sort-of-Stations & transportation, postoffice, restaurants, airlines, airports, airplanes, companies (!$ms too), malls, the beach, ya' you get the idea...
I interpret his claim as "all physical public [access] places with internet sites/service should comply by/with ADA".
So you can feel safe you won't don't get sued to have to modify your personal-p00rn site, nope : )
[*hum... wonder how this applies to PlayBoy.com, and the works...*]
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
I use the web when interacting with Southwest because I can get the data I need faster visually than aurally.
If someone's blind, it would seem only fair that southwest has the option of providing them with a dedicated, live concierge to help them with all their questions. That's why they can CALL 1-800-IFLYSWA.
The ADA is intended to make sure that people are not disenfranchised by their disability, and in this case the person is not, since they cn accomplish the same task via a means that SWA has provided for them that is compatable with their abilities. The *only* caveat I would make is that if they show they are blind, they should be able to get the double-points and internet-only fares afforded to those who frequent the site.
This particular lawsuit is as ridiculous as a person in a wheelchair suing for there not being a stair-climing inclinator when there's an elevator down the hall.
I'm all for blind readability on sites without an alternative, but if it's a service operation where you can accomplish tasks via phone, then I believe that that is a solution to the mandated requirements.
Kevin Fox
Check the "Phone rates" versus the "Web rates". Then you may understand why. Hell I book every hotel online then call 5 minutes later to make sure it's in their system (saves around 50%). If you don't think the web is becoming a necessary part of life just try living without it for 1 month. I for example couldn't for 1 day because I make my living developing online systems.
Like a previous poster said, I look back on they days of Netscape 2 with envy. One set of html to follow and little fluff. Oh well, now I just sound like my grandfather.
I'm amazed at most of the comments.
Before people flame the ADA and access to the web for the blind, they should remember that they too could become blind someday.
The web and HTML were created to make information _more_ accessible to people, not less. Good coding for the web is supposed to ensure that people with _any_ type of browser can get your content, not just people with IE+flash. It's not very hard to make your sight accessible for the blind -- just use well-formed HTML or the new flash accessibility extensions.
The more accessible the web is for all of us, the better we all are.
He is being denied access to a store/site because he is blind
This is fairly stongly worded. You might want to s/denied/not able to attain, because there is no active attempt to disallow entry to the site. The company hasn't made provisions for this special group
But, you could also spin it off the be the fault of the screen-reader. One could state that the company designing the screen-reader product did not make it work with the increasing graphic standard, perhaps by adding an advanced OCR, etc. Maybe a brail-reader based on color depth.
It's fine to say that disabled individuals are not able to use this site and are losing out. But this could set a bad precedent making all companies with graphical type sites liable. How many major sites now use flash, can the screen reader translate that? It would also suck if this set a precedent so that even my little site had at to conform to blind-compatible standards (I do, however, try to use text when possible for lynx compatibility etc)
The major point is, while much information is being presented in a textual format, the internet is moving towards towards a more visually stimulating form of presentation. People with vision impairment are going to lose out a lot from this, but not everybody will think to account for all such special cases, especially when gearing towards a more flashy and potentially better selling presentation.
Can we really expect that text-based support is going to be around forever? In a decade, will an increasingly visual medium be forced to retain non-visual support?
A lot of people will probably be tempted to say "I'm sorry, I understand your loss but why should it also be mine." It's in a way a selfish attitude, but it's also somewhat logical in current society.
Well, time to go back to text-based internet - phorm
It is retarded to be protesting over this. Not to ve insensitive to black people, but if you are black and want to get a drink of water, go to the damned coloured fountain and drink there. You can do everything at the coloured fountain that you can at the whites fountain. If you are really this angry about Southwest's white fountain not being usable to blacks, don't give them your business. There are plenty of other airlines with fountains out there.
But then, nobody on slashdot is old enough to remember those days.
Web sites are primarily designed for a particular, limited audience, in most cases. If someone *chooses* to make their site easily accessible to everyone who comes across it, that's their option -- but it certainly doesn't need to be legislated as mandatory.
That's as ludicrous as saying every author writing a book needs to have it translated and published into every foreign language in common use, so those not speaking English are ensured "equal access" to it!
The fact is, many sites right now are quite browser-dependent, even if they opt not to touch any additional "plug-in" technologies such as Shockwave or RealAudio. If we didn't have Javascript, web sites would be much less useful. (As just one example, I recently found a site that calculated your speedometer error based upon changing your car's tires out with different sizes. If this had to be presented as pure HTML, I suppose we'd be reduced to looking through a huge list or table of every combination, to find relevant data for our particular car and situation. How is that a *better* way to build the site?)
Sure, some of the ".bomb'ers" are out there drawing up poor quality sites, and don't deserve a job designing web pages. That's not what this discussion is really about, however. This is a question of whether we want to let government dictate requirements for every site we build. If this becomes law, many people will take down sites completely rather than pay to do major revamping to meet ADA requirements, and then *nobody* benefits.
Now, we add a whole new method of content rendering. We can't even impliment the main standards properly. How do we plan to ensure that an audio interface can successfully read a website, as well? Keep in mind that this is not what the web was originally designed to handle.
Actually, this IS what the web was developed to handle. Take a look at any HTML/1.0 page and you will notice that it can be read perfectly. Everything became screwed up when the <table> tag was introduced and people started to use HTML as a substitute for PDF, and later Flash. HTML is a markup, not a layout language.
As far as the internet being "hard to convert": no it isn't. Some businesses just need to get hit with a couple of lawsuits to figure that one out. Yes, websites do need to take that into account, so some webmasters will have to change their ways. But, you can make a perfectly functional audio website by using a content management system that supports it, without too much effort. Audio internet is not a hard problem unless you are an amateur trying to do a professional's job.
Getting back to the plaintiff described in the article, I'd think an easier solution would be to call 1 800 555-1212, get Southwest's toll-free number from them, and then call that number. I'd think the same information is available that way as is available through their website (probably more info, in fact, such as information on what flights are on time/delayed/etc.). This has to be easier than filing yet another lawsuit. Then again, I suppose the ambulance chasers wouldn't make any money off of such a common-sense solution.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
To quote you out of context:
How many major sites now use flash, can the screen reader translate that?
Not only might the screen reader not be able to read this, but chances are my PDA can't either!!
Sites that use only flash, or make important data require flash to access, are not a good thing. There should always be some way that someone with the most basic browser can get to information they need. Furthermore they lock themselves away from many wireless or small device users.
Companies, think carefully before thowing away future customers! Text is simply the best way of transmitting most information that humans want to see (even text directions can be better than a map at times!!), and as such plan for a future that integrates text with diagrams, rather than throwing it away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
are lawyers. Why does the US have half the worlds lawyers? It really makes no sense.
Anyways. The clear answers to this blind persons problem is that instead of suing a company for not supporting their method of access, use your power as a member of a capitalistic society, and send a message with your money.
Find another company that supports you better, and spend your money with them.
Why does common logic like this escape so many people?
Casual Games/Downloads
I think the line is very clear. What you described is obviously fine, and blind people would have no problems with something like an art site that used Flash or movies of any sort.
The line is in my mind lives about where it lives right now in the physical world, and as with so many things needs only slight clarification instead of major overhaul. If your web site is for a commercial entity to be accesses by the public than you need to make any pages external customers might access in the course of doing business with you accessible.
If you're smart then you'll also make internal pages accessible as well so that when someone who does fall under the ADA guidelines gets hired, you wont have any problems. Even better, how aboput making sure your crucial internal app is not the reason the company has to turn somebody away because they will not be able to run it, who then sues you as a result (only a step away from this story).
I really can't believe all the people here pushing back on this issue. I like to think that, god forbid, something really bad should happen to me I'd still be able to work AND use the internet for leisure. A lot of people here seem to be fine with the thought that the internet as a body should cast away anyone without two hands, great reflexes, and 20/20 vision.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think that the problem with the SouthWest site is simply that they use graphics links that don't specify their alt tags. At least when I ran it through the w3c's HTML validator that's the main complaint. This isn't rocket science, nor is it very hard to comply with. We're not talking about a lot of money and if their web guys had followed standard industry best practices there wouldn't have been a problem.
As a bonus, you make your site accessible via Lynx so it wouldn't just be a benefit to the blind.
I don't know who did the SW airlines site but they weren't served very well.
do you drive a car? should we make the streets blind accessible?
Rights do not impose burdens upon others. Laws like this, which can be easily be carried to extremes, can be stifling. For example, I am a public school teacher. We are being killed by special ed. There is no limit to what can be asked for, and gotten. Parents get "advocates" and lawsuits kill the schools. Most of these kids are totally fine, just that the parents abuse the laws.
Remember what Barry Goldwater said, "A government big enough to give you everything, is big enough to take it all away".
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Assuming this person had contacted Southwest's webmasters (which as I said they should have,) what would you do next?
/., and read these long threads! However, consider the fact that the web is a visual medium which is obviously not very condusive to your disability. It would seem logical that, if that medium wasn't suiting you in a particular case, you would then use a medium that better suited your abilities. You can still hear, and the phone is a very easy way to use Southwests services. Not to mention, regardless of disability, it is also the most popular method of using Southwest's services. If I were in charge of Southwest's web site would I make it standards compliant so that accessibility utilities worked properly? Yes I would, but I wouldn't want the government forcing me to do it.
Use the phone. It's great that you can post to
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Haven't spent to much time on that web, myself. The web I use tends to be composed of information, usually in the form of little magnetic bits aligned in one direction or another. As I'm unable to access info directly from magnetic media, I prefer to get that info in the form of written words. But this web I use isn't inherently visual- I could get the same information aurally, just not as quickly. A SQL query on a database to retrieve a ticket price-- nothing inherently visual about that, except the purely personal aspect of me reading the results rather than hearing them.
But then until 1997 or so I did most of my web browsing in Lynx, and I'd be happy enough to be able to do so again. When I want a pure reading experience, all the "inherently visual" aspects of the web get in the way: text is quick to download, unlike all the gifs and flash bouncing advertisements. So I'm not unhappy about people pushing for ADA and accessability standards for web pages: what makes for better access for the blind also makes for an easier, faster, and less stupid-blinking-ads experience for me.
Long ago, a science fiction writer (I don't remember who, unfortunately) wrote a short story about a society which tried to equalize everything for everybody. If you were too fast, you wore weights to slow you down. If you were too smart, you wore a device that randomly made a loud noise and startled you out of your train of thought.
sounds like "harrison bergeron" by kurt vonnegut. an excellent story, made into a tv-movie in 1995, also very good:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0113264
The government's been requiring almost all IT products including web sites be accessible for years. If you do design for anything government-related, you're used to this by now. And you know how government self-regulation has a habit of leaking out to the country at large.
If you need to make a site accessible quickly, or develop an accessible one from scratch, get InFocus from SSB.
To have the govt set up a service with humans that read web sites to any blind web surfer? Could be linked via a collaboration program so both would be seeing the same site. Overall, this seems cheaper to the US economy than forcing every business in the US to redesign their web site.
.gif files or something it won't be.
Have you ever heard of this thing called "HTML"? If you use this "HTML" stuff to design your website, it will be able to be read by blind people. If on the other hand, you use flash, or put all your textual content in
In other words, you actually have to work to make a website that can't be read by blind people. Since these companies already put so much effort only to exclude people, they might as well put in a little more to fix the problem.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you have a disability, why is it the world's job to cater to YOU, instead of YOUR job to adapt to the world?
If someone is blind AND deaf, will they insist that every movie theater provide someone to do that Helen Keller style sign-language-inside-your-hand-so-you-can-feel-it to tell you what's happening on the screen and what's being said?
I'm all for companies voluntarily making their sites/buildings/whatever more accessible, and I believe that government sites might have a greater reason to be "required" to be accessible, but to make it mandatory is just cost-shifting the expense of "being handicapped" from the person who actually is handicapped to "lots of companies who are rich and can afford it".
As far as I can tell you're working on more strawmen. Just like the first poster I responded to, which was the MAIN point I was making--it is a fact that the ADA is about access. It is not anything like a fact that the ADA would force anyone to hire a firefighter without arms. Making up arguments that don't exist is known as building strawmen and that is what's wrong here. You have a beef with a real application of the ADA that you think is wrong? Cite it. That's a real argument against it. Quit making up BS arguments against it.
As for arguments for...the point is that all people have a right to participate in society. If society is set up so that it inherently excludes some segment of people because of 1) active discrimination or 2) passive exclusion, those people have the right to try and get that exclusion corrected. And that's what the ADA is.
Is the ADA perfect? No. Does the ADA get abused? Just like any other legislation, of course--in a land of a billion lawyers, every loophole in every place it can get someone some bit of advantage gets used. But I think we're better off with it than without. I have deaf friends who I would never have met if it weren't for the access they recieve at the behest of the ADA.
Nothing in the ADA mandates the more ridiculous strawman arguments used against it, and the only thing that causes the excessive abuses that really do occur is lawyering, not regular people, and not the legislation itself.
Feel free to argue that it ought to be corrected to prevent the abuses, or to cite real abuses. But until you do, I'm going to assume you're just against it as a matter of conservative ideology rather than actual investigation (i.e. you buy the strawman arguments yourself).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The idea that making a text-only version of a website is all that's needed to make a website accessible is a myth. Its the same myth that provokes other webdesigners to construct "Netscape" and "IE" duplicates of websites - its ludicrous and involves some serious overheads in keeping multiple versions of a website in synch and up-to-date. You can bet your bottom dollar that the text version of the site is the first to be left behind and overlooked when it comes to updating.
Creating an accessible website is not difficult. The recommendations and guidelines have been available on the web since 1999 - the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is there for website authors to create accessible content. There's nothing in there that's remotely difficult.
I'm amazed at the level of complains from so-called "creative artists" about the Web and how they don't want to follow the standards path. Other artists in other media work within the constraints and boundaries of their chosen media and deliver work of high quality. And then they use the media to its full use.
But when it comes to websites, these so-called artists cannot understand the web beyond what they see in their browsers. They limit their imagination and scope and refuse to make their creations accessible in a public medium.
They are "so-called artists" since its clear they do not understand the breadth and depth of the World Wide Web. The ability to build accessible websites should be a mandatory skill requirement before embarking on a professional career in web design - its as important as the ability to write legibly.
What's remotely difficult and expensive about doing the job of building a website correctly the first time? Accessibility is not difficult - never has been. The guidelines for accessibilty have been around almost from the inception of the World Wide Web, heck even the City of San Jose have their accessibility guidelines on their websites for quite a long stretch of time.
The whole point of accessibility is that it makes websites more accessible to more people in more locations, more situations and more devices than without accessibility. It allows your company access to a larger audience. Its not expensive or difficult to implement accessibility. Anyone with common sense can do it.
When a company gets serious and makes its website fully accessible, it benefits not only people with disabilities, but also allows their website to be accessible to mobile computing devices such as the Pocket PC and handheld computer -- this is going to be such a huge market, the pervasive web. If you can't sell accessibility to a company with this advantage, then I guess you have a website that isn't worth anything to anybody.
A book publisher is not forced to publish his work in braille. And internet site is comprised nearly entirely of text and graphics. It is simply one of those things which makes it suck to be blind.
If a government service was available only on the web, then of course that web site must be accessible. But in general, a web site should only have to provide alternate means of access if they value the market they are locking out by not providing that access.
Similar to Playboy publishing a braille version (which it has). They don't have to do it, but when they want to sell to blind people, they realise that blind people probably don't get much out of their normal issue.
Why should Southwest.com be forced to provide an accessible web site? Does Southwest have to send out braille versions of all their newsletters? Sure, apply financial pressure with your business, but what in the world does the government have to do with whether or not Southwest values having blind customers able to visit their web site?
MORTAR COMBAT!