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)."
Ok, tell me this - where do you draw the line between high traffic commercial websites, and (for instance), mine?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Does this mean I am going to go out and sue all glove makers because they don't make a right hand glove with no thumb? No. That is plain stupid. The term disability means, acording to Dictionary.com ...
2. A disadvantage or deficiency,
3. Something that hinders or incapacitates.
Why can we not accept that there are things that we cannot do and not sue others while pretending it is someone else's fault that we have a disability.
Are these (the ADA) the people that made it so that there is Brail on Drive up ATM machines?
Only in Lake Wobiegon (sp?) is everyone above average...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Try this "Speak IT" site and install the readers...
Then come back to Slashdot, Highlight this whole discussion and listen...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
In their terms and conditions "Southwest Airlines" also state that they forbid "deep linking", using robots to spider their site, or just using any program to get their pages.
In fact, their license seems to forbids the use of any HTTP user agent to "acquire" some of their pages. Beware, by browsing their site you are risking to get sued =).
About time. I used to be a lead web developer at a US public university and was delegated by my director to provide accessability for all regardless of physically handicaps. After a couple years of doing this, developing in this manner became second nature and even as a nonvisually disabled person, I became more and more annoyed by sites that just didn't care.
It amazing me at the lack of professionalism in the web developer community for not addressesing this issue w/o legal being required to. It takes all of 15 minutes to run your site through bobby and the learning curve for meeting the W3C WAI guidelines is low. To not take the little time out of your unimpaired life to make life easier for others amazes me. Especially when 70% of it is just following good web coding practices (eg non-visual cues, alt tags, not using/requiring javascript/flash, using aural spreadsheets, etc etc). People seem to think that you can't design a site not using these items or that their site will be ugly / not satisfy the client. Both are wrong. Often you can use nice visual ques AND provide a seperate or alternate site for visually impaired people. Or just layout your site so even without visual ques, it is still usable. They aren't asking for amazing aural sites, they are asking for FUNCTIONAL aural sites. As for extra cost and time you spend designing these feature, bet that time is a hell of a lot cheaper that the multimillion dollar lawsuit you can/might get slapped with.
Trying surfing the net with lynx for an entire day, see usable it is. After thinking how bad that is, try downloading / buying your favorite aural browser for a real eye opener. Its not pretty. Now try doing that your whole life.
De Oppresso Liber
A couple of years ago, when I was in production support, I had to respond to our VP level concerning complaints from our clients who could not use our site with the standard screen readers. This was a novel issue to me at the time and I quickly familiarized myself with screen reader technology and the W3C's accessibility quidelines.
I suggested that it would not be a terribly huge undertaking to bring our site into a minimum level of compliance. Nope, this was deemed too costly relative to the small segment of our clientele who were disabled. Failing that, I suggested that we could simply ensure that all new development going forward implemented the accessibiltiy guidelines.
Well, two years and a new redesign later, and this still hasn't been implemented. I mean, how hard is it to include accessibility in the business requirements for the new development being farmed out?
Here's a web app that validates a URL against the W3C's accessibiltiy guidelines.Most sites will generate a ton of errors, but you'll also notice that this accessibility boils down to simple things like using *correct* html, making sure you supply text in alt and title tags, etc.
I'm not certain, but I think accessibility concerns was a reason that has caused the W3C to want to deprecate the use of framesets: screenreaders have a hell of a time trying to present essentially two different documents at the same time with any level of coherance.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
I don't know how the law is written, but the technology problems to handle in such a case are highly nontrivial.
Consider. We have plenty of trouble now with websites which can only be viewed in one browser. This is visual display, mind you, which the vast majority of browsers are built to do by default. We can't even follow the standards well enough to handle the default access method well.
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.
Then there is the problem of economnic considerations - without a simple standard in widespread use, implimenting an audio interface becomes costly. It is desirable for handicapped people to be able to participate, but statistically they represent a fraction of the viewership. There won't be money in it, so companies aren't going to be happy about it. This will inevitably show up in the final result.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most difficult point - how do we update the truly staggering amount of content already out there, much if unskillfully written and poorly maintained in the first place?
Total access is a good goal, but the technological tools just aren't robust enough yet to handle it. The law needs to take that into account - this isn't a matter of adding a ramp, lowering telephones, handicapped parking or other straightforward and easily solved problems. Audio internet is a HARD problem, converting content on the internet is even harder, and it's just not going to be happening in the short term.
In the end I think it is a good one to solve, both for the sake of those who need it and the fact that a more robust audio structure on the internet is likely to have many other benefits, as well. But that kind of work takes years and years. I don't know if the legal system will be able to figure that out.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
OK, let me throw in my two cents both from the perspective of a blind web surfer and a blind website designer. I actually am a user of the technology mentioned in the article, and yes, some web sites can be extreemly difficult to surf. /. itself isn't the easiest in its default state, although it is usable and making some customizations in user preferences does help a lot. From my experience on the whole, if a web site sticks rather strictly to HTML, CSS and the other standards, they're OK. Problem is, very few sites do. An even worse problem is many web designers design their sites using Dreamweaver or some other graphical tool. This seperates them from the HTML itself, and many times they don't know what's going on under the hood. The common mantra among web designers I've noticed is "if it looks right, its right." It is very frustrating running into one of these sites, and the unfortunate thing is, there are many of them.
Now that I've addressed the technical issues, let's move on to some of the other things that I've been reading about in this thread. I tend to aggree with the common conseption around here that lawsuites are way over used, and many people tend to be way too sue happy, thinking that will solve their problems. But let me ask, in a situation like this, what would you have done? I'm sure this blind person did try to contact the web designer. In fact, as blind people we are instructed to do just that right away when we encounter an inaccessible site. Problem is, very few web designers listen to us. I'm not sure if its intentional, but many of them just do not understand how we surf the web, and are probably under the impression that they have to go way out of their way to modify their pages for a screen reader. Refer to what I said above, that if a page is designed properly, nine times out of ten it will work just fine. OK, so contacting the web designer yeilds no response, so what next? Sometimes there is no other way to get a business to listen other than through its wallet. Very sad, dispicable, but true.
So, again what is he to do? Assuming this person had contacted Southwest's webmasters (which as I said they should have,) what would you do next? And don't say just not use there services. There aren't enough blind people who have access to the internet in the first place to make it make a difference, and that's just like saying that blacks should just not frequent the businesses that discriminate against them. We all have a right to make use of public services, be them brick and morder or online. And considering how relatively little modification it takes to make a web site accessible (following standards is not hard,) I think that this person may very well have a case against Southwest.
Nope, Southwest always has plenty of incentive deals for those using the website, apparently because using the phone costs customer rep time while the website is much lower overhead.
This would seem to be a necessary condition for the suit. IANAL, but it would be if I were on the jury!
That is real similar to this real-life case: one city (IIRC it was New York) installed port-a-potty units on every street corner in the primary "homeless district", so the homeless wouldn't have to shit in the alleys and pee in doorways anymore. And to accomodate the homeless who use wheelchairs, they made one unit in every 5 a wheelchair-accessable unit. Everybody happy -- streets cleaner, homeless have a chance to use toilet paper.
Well, ALMOST everybody happy -- along came some disabled guy with a chip on his shoulder, who got some disabilities advocacy group to sue the city to force ALL the units to be wheelchair accessable. And sure enough, the court ruled that IF port-a-potties were provided for ANYONE, they must ALL have handicapped accessability.
Well, there were several problems with that: 1) Standard units take up 4 square feet of sidewalk space. Handicapped units take up some 100 square feet of sidewalk space (ie. pretty much the whole corner). 2) Standard units cost $500 dollars apiece. Handicapped units cost $25,000 apiece. Making ALL the units handicapped-accessable was WAY over the city's budget for the project. 3) No one can sleep in a standard unit. The existing handicapped units were already being abused as bum hotels and crack houses.
The city examined the verdict in light of the drawbacks enumerated above, and said to hell with it. ALL of the units were removed, and now ALL the homeless, disabled or otherwise, are back to shitting in alleys and peeing in doorways. All because one guy didn't want to wheel himself 5 extra blocks to use a handicapped unit.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?