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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)."
what if I write a website that shows one thing, but spits out text telling the blind person something else. Namely, what if I setup blindpeoplehelp.com and it have pictures of chicks with dicks? can't wait to see the blind person in the library with this one.
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
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 why html standards exist. XHTML requires all img tags to have alt="" attributes, which several images on the southwest web page do NOT have. These images seem to be the only links to any other functions on the first page.
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...
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I just have one thing to say to people whose screen reader software can't read this post and are offended enough to sue:
er....
Oh wait, nevermind.
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!
Try this "Speak IT" site and install the readers...
Then come back to Slashdot, Highlight this whole discussion and listen...
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"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
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
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
Those bastards at SouthWest don't hire visually impaired pilots either.
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.
Bullshit. Extortion? Do you really know what it takes to be compliant? Not too much. I asked for and received an ADA manual last time I was renovating my office (gov't sent one without charge) and TOLD my employeer we were going to be ADA compliant even if it bankrupted up (not likely, we are a small department in a much larger organization).
What did it take? We ordered a few signs that had braile on them, made sure the aisleways were wide enough to accomodate a wheel chair and got a few tables that were articulating to accomidate the wheelchairs to get under them. Computer terminals were made it be sure that they had the standard ADA compliant software on them (Windows and Macs come with most of this and most of these folks know how to activate them if they ask).
Get the problem fixed before hand and you won't have to worry about someone suing you. All in all, it cost me about a grand for the extra equipment AND a disabilities advocate was able to meet with me to make sure we were in compliance as much as possible for free. Since doing this 3 years ago, I've had to accomodate 2 people. Were they worth the $500 a piece that it cost me? Probably not from a profit centered notion, BUT it was money well spent.
Get the shit done and don't put it off as something to do later, and you won't get sued. If you do and you are sued later, you've made a good faith effort to try to be accomodating. You can't please everyone and you can't expect every situation to be convered but you can try your best.
clif
It would be nice if you'd make your 3D game accessible. I've often wanted to play Quake with my eyes closed, and it would be nice for some audible clues. For example:
"VISOR AT 3 OCLOCK."
"SARGE RUNS BEHIND THE WALL."
"VISOR SWITCHES TO RAILGUN."
"YOU SHOULD TURN LEFT AND SHOOT NOW."
"SARGE SHOOTS YOU IN THE NUTS WITH THE SHOTGUN."
"TOO LATE."
I think you can see my point.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Full text of the act -- now if only the DOJ would actually learn HTML and/or writing skills.
"Heh, we're so web-savvy, we just dumped 160Kb of unformatted crap on our website"
Companies that want to make their sites more accessible, but don't want to build their own standards could always adopt the 508 standards and perhaps pick up some legal cover in the process.
Most of the rules are basic. It does hamstring you out of some of the more sexy things (flash is difficult) but it also keeps you true (you tend not to waste taxpayer's $$$ having to make silly flash intros).
If you have diehard GUI html designers in your shop, there are several plug-ins for Dreamweaver (and others) that force the code to be 508 compliant. Vi can write 508 code just fine.
Many COTS vendors now also have 508 compliant versions of their s/w, otherwise they can't sell to government.
To learn more, good place to start is the Section 508 homepage.
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.
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!