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Should Online Stores Be Subject To ADA?
prostoalex writes, "HTML tutorials usually mention alt tags for images and noscript tags as something optional that a Web designer should add to a site for the crawlers and users browsing with graphics or JavaScript turned off. However, a recent lawsuit against Target by the National Federation of the Blind accuses the retailer of not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Since Target's online store is unbrowsable with a screen reader, the nation's 200,000 blind people who go online cannot become paying customers, the NFB contends. From the article: 'In denying Target's motion to dismiss the suit two months ago, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel... held that the law's accessibility requirements applied to all services offered by a place of public accommodation. Since Target's physical stores are places of public accommodation, the ruling said, its online store must also be accessible or the company must offer equally effective alternatives.' Does the judge's name ring a bell? Yes, it's the same Marilyn Hall Patel who handled the RIAA's case against Napster in 2001." Web builders and tools may need to start brushing up on the Web Accessibility Initiative.
Maybe finally we can put a stake through the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Flash-only sites.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
-b.
...was also the second Judge for US v. Microsoft.
Luckily, my house has stairs, so they'll be stuck milling around outside in their wheelchairs when they come to get me.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
Not to sound insensitive to those with disabilities, but why not simply let the market push the matter? If companies want to attract a certain type of customer then they do what's necessary to attract those customers including marketing their products to those customers and making the purchase process as easy as possible for that customer. Wouldn't the market sort this out if it were left alone?
The accessibilities regulation when it comes to web sites have the same issues a LOT of things have when it comes to the web: They imply that the web is nothing more than a variant of a PDF browser. It doesn't consider that HTML/CSS were very poorly designed, that we have to deal with IE6 (even though IE7 came out), that the web already requires 10 bazillion skills, and if you need experts in every categories to do anything, a lot of companies will have to retire from the field, that a lot of the content is beyond the developer's control, etc etc etc.
The only thing one should require is to stick a div tag with CSS to make it invisible at the very very top of the site, that says "If you are a disabled person using a screen reader to navigate this page, and wishes to make a purchase, dial the following number and talk with one of our friendly representative who will be happy to help you, and give you any web-only discounts you deserve".
Otherwise, if you ever thought IE6 was holding the web back, never freagin mind screen readers. If your page is nothing more than documents with information, and maybe 1 form (which I guess a lot of e-commerce stores are), then go ahead and make it accessible. Its not very rough. But depending on your target audience, it very well might be a desktop-like application with all the wiz and buzz that it implies, and there's simply no way to make that accessible without ruinning your normal user's experience. And if you DO manage to make it accessible, it will be in the terms of the law only: it will still be useless a to a blind person. Those laws are out of date, simple as that: they consider the web as being nothing more than a giant e-book. It doesn't work like that anymore.
200,000 people out of 300 million is too small a population for national retailers to care about, economically. But besides the legal incentives there is an economic incentive to following the WAI guidelines. Better accessibility also means more useful info for search engines and other applications. Alt tags help SEO and scrapers, for example. Target should be able to increase their site's overall effectiveness by working to make their site usable for the blind. When companies realize this they end up helping the blind as a side affect.
Developers: We can use your help.
Webmasters should be able to cater to whomever they choose. Should Target be against making their website accessable I have a great solution for the blind, visit the retail outlet, or a competitor. Maybe webmasters should make their sites accessable to people that are unable to read as well....
Flash = tyranny of the clueless.
I'm no fan of the ADA, but anything that puts Flash developers on the streets with signs saying "Will skip intros for food" is OK by me.
Well, anyway, interpretations of ADA are taken too far. There are some things that handicapped people just cannot do - that's the very definition of a handicap. Should we require rock-climbing equipment stores to accomodate double amputees?
-b.
I would think that it would be in Target's best interest to enable their site so that blind people can read it. That is 200,000 people that they are not allowing to shop on their website.
However, if Target is too lazy to make the changes necessary then they shouldn't be made to make the changes. I know if I was blind, I would simply boycott them. If they aren't going to make it accessible, I'm certainly not going out of my way if I'm blind, I'll just shop at a competitor that does have these things enabled.
Vote with your wallet. But I'm a big fan of the free market, so what do I know?
Test your website for ADA compliance here
/. fails the test (anyone really surprised?).
Needless to say,
Online stores are undoubtedly a public accomodation, and the accomodation necessary to allow the blind to use the site is very reasonable, assuming that the original web deisgners weren't completely retarded when the designed the site. Simply create an HTML-only version and use alt-tags. Since you're designing it for the blind, it doesn't even have to look good, it just has to contain all the same relevant information that the standard page does.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Flash-only sites are crap, and a blight on the internet, yes. But how often have problems been really SOLVED by adding new laws?
Let market forces work it out. These companies will lose business because of the accessibility problems, and probably also because of unfriendly interfaces. Money talks to business far better than lawmakers, and it's a language they can speak that doesn't require translators.
The ADA is one of those "nice intentions" laws that, for every wheel-chair ramp added to a school has 20+ abuses designed to generate cash flow.
"Not to sound insensitive to those with disabilities, but why not simply let the market push the matter?"
Just like the market solved Jim Crow. No intervention by the government necessary at all.
Where were you when the voynix came?
You say that now, but I'm sure you'll sing a different tune if you go blind or deaf.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Define bad law for me.
Is a law bad because it requires businesses to accommodate ALL customers, regardless of whether or not they can see, hear or walk? Or are you a part of the group of pseudo-libertarians who think that government should butt out?
If it wasn't for ADA, my wife (who is confined to a wheelchair) and I would be extremely limited in where we go, what we do, and where we can shop, eat, or stay.
So it seems a bit ridiculous to you that Target was the target, and they want them to make the site accessible to the blind. It seems even more ridiculous to me that Target wouldn't do that in the first place (it may cost a bit more, but seeing as how they are a "good corporate citizen (compared to WalMart)", it would be befit their image.
Oh, but they don't want to. Now you see why laws like the ADA have to exist.
I'm not really a CPA, I just play one on TV
This sounds reasonable especially since Target is such a big retailer. It doesn't require too much effort either since Target could just provide an alternate "face" for the text readers.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
ADA is Civil Rights legislation. If a person feels that his/her rights have been violated they can bring a lawsuit against ANYONE who may have had a role in said violation. That includes you, Designer! Here are some examples which are similar to my experience in a different field:
- If you design it, and it is not accessible, you can be sued.
- If you design it, and it is accessible, but the client changes it to be non-accessible later, you can be sued.
- If you design it, and it is supposed to be accessible, but gets screwed up by a non-compatible browser, you can be sued.
- If you design the logo but have nothing to do with the design of the site, you can probably be sued.
The bottom line is that it better be accessible, period. Nobody is going to double-check you, and there are no protections (even for honest mistakes!) outside of defending yourself in a lawsuit.Now don't get me wrong, I think the goals of ADA are laudable and commendable. But the implementation under Civil Rights law leaves much to be desired. People who have trouble gaining access have no legal recourse short of a lawsuit, and owners/designers have no defense. I expect this issue to get much bigger before it goes away. My advice? Watch Wal*mart and match the accessibility they provide.
--- Corporations Are A Fad.
It's unreasonable for all the people of the US, through our government, to install disabled-accessible architecture at physical stores. But it's perfectly reasonable for our government to offer free architectural diagrams and plans for stores to build their own.
Likewise, if our government is going to require websites to comply with ADA, our government should offer free software and validation testing for easy compliance. That's a lot more cost-effective (and just effective) than spending time and money forcing websites to do it without assistance.
--
make install -not war
"You say that now, but I'm sure you'll sing a different tune if you go blind or deaf."
"Georgia, Georgia, The whole day through Just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia on my mind...."
Where were you when the voynix came?
Making an online store a public place isn't really that far of a leap. It will be interesting to see how retailers react to this. Perhaps we'll see seperate pages now for the regular surfer vs. the blind surfers.
It would seem to me that the disabled, blind or otherwise would be more prone to use internet services to begin with. The fact that retailers haven't seen this and adapted already is interesting into itself.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWAnd he'll sing no tune if he goes mute!
Suing a website for their design of their website...not even the content, the design. I thought handicapped people wanted to be treated equally? I'm all for accessibility, one never knows when one may be come handicapped themselves. But this is really going overboard.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
To my knowledge the PQ in Quebec have not started chasing websites with their language laws, but I would not be surprised to hear that they are thinking about it. How long before the US goes bi-lingual with Spanish as a second language? If you think adding alt tags is a pain, wait until you have to translate your whole site, and maintain two languages.
But then again, it may be just good business. It does expand your market reach if you are able to sell to a more diverse audience.
www.jmagar.com
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If this goes well, web developers with grounding in standards and accessibility may have a lot of jobs opening up soon.
I love how some people think it's disgraceful that web page designers didn't take the time to use CSS or follow the latest edict of the WC3, but think it's a waste of time to help enable people with disabilities to use the web.
If it ends up banning flash from being a part of web site's UI, it's got my vote.
Where were you when the voynix came?
why is your wife's handicap the business' problem? if you can't eat at Steak and Tacos, that's their fault, not yours. You don't have nor should have a right to eat wherever you like.
it's expensive to build wheelchair ramps (at times financially impossible) and to demand a small mom & pop shop to do so is absurd.
I just don't understand why people would be content to let a group of their fellow citizens be disenfranchised from large segmens of society because of their disability. Our sense of fairness demands that if we can do something to bring accessibility to people who don't have it, then we should.
These accesibility laws are not about making special exceptions to handicapped people. It's simply allowing handicapped people to live, participate, and work to contribute to themselves and their community just like everybody else.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Yes, but this is browsing the web, not a physical activity. Using the web is now a normal and necessary part of life for so many people. It doesn't take much to accomodate blind people at design and implementation time. If the web site designers/developers had done it correctly from the beginning then it wouldn't be so costly. It seems to me that many UI designers (be it web, traditional software application, media such as DVD, etc) are either ignorant or lazy. And anybody with a Comp. Sci degree has no excuse and should take this as a given - either that or their university was shit and the degree certificate isn't worth the paper it's printed on. This is fundamental and very basic HCI.
Society should take care of disabled people, but such charity should be limited to some small percentage of our resources. It would be reasonable to require Target to spend, say, 3% of their profit making its facilities accessible. Granted, this would probably accomplish much more than adding ALT tags to target.com. BUT, as a small or unprofitable website developer, I would be able to focus on staying afloat rather than adding an alternative interface. If my website (or say, a family restaurant) goes under, who will serve those disabled people now, or pay taxes for their medical benefits? Alternatively, government can decide that target.com is a key site for disabled people, and issue a grant to make and keep it accessible.
Otherwise I am going to sue owners of answering systems with voice recognition and operators of offshore call centers for not understanding my accent.
Harrison Bergeron was prophecy
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I'm sure you don't want my sympathy so I won't attempt to give it.
But in truth I have mixed feelings about enforced compliance with the ADA on online stores, for commercial organizations. They are trying to sell a product or provide a service - if they don't want your business (by way of not properly accomodating you) then don't give it to them! It is just that easy! Go to their competitor and let them reap the reward.
But then you start trickling down the web chain and think, what about non-profit orgs? Should they be enforced? What do you think from your POV? Should they have to take money out of their battle chest for whatever cause they are fighting so (parallel to your argument, no offense given) someone's blind wife can read what is on the page?
Hypocrite.
Amen, brother.
You say that now, but I'm sure you'll sing a different tune if you go blind or deaf.
I doubt I could carry a tune if I were deaf.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
I've bought quite a few things at Target's website, and I'm stunned that it's unusable with screen readers. There's little or no dynamic content, and none that couldn't be easily done by showing/hiding DIVs with CSS. Granted it's graphics-intensive, but there are still descriptions of products and other stuff that should make it usable for VI people using screen readers.
So I went to target.com in Lynx, which is our quick and dirty check for SEO and screen reader usability (we do other checks before we finalize designs). And I was stunned I had to hit PGDN 6(!) times before I got through the navigational garbage and got to any of the content on the main page. Target's site is apparently not designed to provide an optimal exprience to anyone outside of someone running IE6/7 on Windows XP and a modern PC. Screen readers, scrapers, search engines, text-only browsers, and mobile users do not appear to be welcome. To boot, in FireFox 1.5 on Linux I was unable to use some of the nav elements because they were hidden behind the Flash content.
Target ought to flog whoever designed their website. If it only works properly in modern IE browsers, then it's alienating maybe 20% of their consumers. More if you consider mobile users and screen readers that can't make use of that terribly designed site.
I thought the fact that they offer both the Online Store and the Brick-&-Mortar would satisfy the 'reasonable alternative' clause in the ADA.
Is a law bad because it requires businesses to accommodate ALL customers, regardless of whether or not they can see, hear or walk? Or are you a part of the group of pseudo-libertarians who think that government should butt out?
It's a bad law because it goes way overboard in forcing businesses to accomodate every single person on the planet and every single malady they could possibly have. If the government feels that strongly about it, it can pay for it. Then people can decide with their own wallets, at the polls, whether these sorts of things are worth it.
So it seems a bit ridiculous to you that Target was the target, and they want them to make the site accessible to the blind. It seems even more ridiculous to me that Target wouldn't do that in the first place (it may cost a bit more, but seeing as how they are a "good corporate citizen (compared to WalMart)", it would be befit their image.
Whether they want to is their own business. Where does it stop? Do they need to supply deaf/blind people with special tactile screens?
And big businesses are one thing, but this crap gets absolutely ridiculous when you talk about small businesses. So now we have to saddle every poor bastard who just wants a website with a bunch of ridiculous rules? No thanks.
I'm sure it really sucks being blind, but to me, as long as Target makes accomodations in some way, that should be enough. I'd make a blind-only site that redirects them to a page containing nothing but a phone number, and let an operator help them out.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
It is absurdly difficult to accommodate screen readers.
They are undetectable, and cannot be sniffed.
Therefore, you have to assume that potentially anyone coming in can be using a screen reader. You have to program extra code, but not too much extra code, or the screen readers will be reading "spacer" "spacer" "spacer" for three hours. You need to have noscript, and noembed tags in everything, and offer an alternate text version of your site that needs to be up to date and relevant. The law even goes so far as to state that you need to have alternate text on images, or specify the location of a file with a description of the image in it. Style sheets can be against the rules or not, depending on which contradictory section you intend adhering to, and you can pretty much forget about rendering anything on the client side. Although flash can be accessible if you write your code in sequence, make your text selectable, and make sure to specify an alternate text version of your applet (just in case).
It's a frustrating, even maddening standard to work with, especially when your boss won't spring for Jaws (or the like), which he sees no point in doing because no one in your workplace actually needs it.
I wonder if Porn sites could be held to that kind standard...
The entertainment value there would be priceless.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Using the phone is also a normal activity. Should be require every mom-and-pop store and restaurant to buy a TDD (Teletype Device for the Deaf) so that deaf people can call them on the phone and place orders? Disabled people have to allow for some loss in "functionality" compared to normally abled people. Deal with it and move on.
-b.
The judge? How about the law? The ADA was Bush Sr's favorite "social justice" law, which required many expensive (and probably worthwhile) changes to how American business places were operated. It hasn't been amended by the Republican Congress in the 12 years both Republicans and the ADA have both been in power.
--
make install -not war
Then why isn't your own website ADA compliant?
***whoooshhh***
Part of doing business in the community is that you have to be a part of the community. If you can't provide a service for people there is no reason you should be aloud to operate. You don't have nor should you have a right to do business wherever you like.
200,000 people, who statistically make less than the american mean, is not enough people for a large corporation to care about. Without the ADA, market forces would actually encourage all companies to exclude this population, and gain back valuable floor space in their brick and mortar stores.
I've been cruising with my ill, wheelchair bound grandmother the past year, and I can tell you how much some of the ADA laws have made it possible just to go shopping with her. And less tiring and frustrating for me.
The internet is not just about making money and the next hot web 2.0 property. In the same spirit of open source products creating a more egalitarian reality, the internet can also increase the range of disabled people.
ADA law has problems, and probably needs some adjustment through congress or judiciary intervention, but it is important. Some of the largest stores and government sites should be accessible. It makes a big difference in someone's life to buy personal products or send a gift online, especially when it can take 3 hours of prep and travel to travel round trip.
Those who poo poo this idea on ideological grounds: I've got some friends making decent freelance money working for smaller websites for ADA compliance. As more websites move this direction, the tools will get easier, as everything else has become over time.
Having visited Target today, let me state what I do not find. I don't find brail on prices, I don't find directions in brail to where they moved the various departments after last nights work, I don't find the description of the items of purchase in brail. So what's different in the B&M than here on the web? Oh yes, I can ASK someone to help me read the dang labels just like my blind friends would need at home.
Can the website not be read by a certain website reader? Then perhaps the fault lies not with Target, but rather with the webreader. I can imagine, at least, a reader capable of looking at the page's output and translating even graphics on the page into plaintext, and then into sound. While this may not exist, I am positive that such a technology could be designed. Therefore, the requirement that Target construct its website to match the needs of a particular reader seems absurd. Maybe all that's needed is a better reader.
Don't be an a**.
Web commerce is definitely something that handicapped people can do. This really is not that big of a deal if you use your head. Especially for such retail giants as Target, there is no reason why they can't implement ADA for their customer web sites.
Ever glance at their job application terminals? The mouse device is built into the right side, basically rendering it unusable to anyone who is left handed. They don't even care about a simple and cheap standard like "built-in mouse devices go in the center in the front.".
Where were you when the voynix came?
They're part of the community that can walk up steps. If they dont want to cater to 100% of the population that's their choice.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
>> Should Online Stores Be Subject To ADA?
Why not? They all appear to be subject to ADD.
Any individual or company sufficiently skilled in web development to be offering their services on a commercial basis should be aware of WCAG. If a commercial site doesn't achieve WCAG1 prority 1, it's a liability and the liability needs moving from the trading company to the developers/design agency. We've all known about this for years, the reality is that it's just too much like hard work when web developers can get away with delivering garbage.
Cue more: "Waaaahhhhh waaaaaaaaahhhhhhh" and pathetic exuses for discrimination.
Yes, because Computer Science has so much to do with web design.
Let me guess...you work for Human Resources?
I agree, but this is one of those really difficult problems as it requires drawing a "line" and the line is arbitrary.
Take this (completely made up but potentially real) situation:
A bar is required to be handicapped accessible. In that bar is a mechanical bull. If the bar is ADA compliant, shouldn't the bull be too? Isn't it arbitrary exclusion to the wheelchair bound to not be able to ride the bull?
Admittedly, this is a goofy case but it displays how difficult it is to draw the line. It certainly makes sense to have things like municipal offices, etc handicapped accessible, but does everything need to be? A handicap by definition means that some mediums are going to inaccessible to you.
The ADA over-represents a minority, but its intent is good. One main problem is its treatment of a failure to consider this minority constituting active discrimination.
And because the line is so hard to draw you end up with some really goofy extensions. I lived in Naperville, IL and at one point they were considering requiring that all new home built be ADA compliant. So if you built a house, and were not handicapped you would still be required to comply (at significant additional cost and a with a serious restriction in design options).
To the OP, web access for the blind is certainly good but is it an inalienable right? I thought the way things worked was that the market sorts it out. One store has an accessible website, one doesn't so the first store gets the blind folks business, simple as that. How/when has that changed?
The site IS poorly designed. I just went to it. I'm not blind, but it is less than the easiest to read the "light gray on white" characters found on the top, and further down, the moronic dark blue on medium blue section. Nice area at the bottom with the dark gray on medium gray too. All that's needed is a better website.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I don't know where else to ask, since I don't know a public discussion forum for discussing slashdot. :) But honestly: why are there so little modded comments at the moment? I also haven't had modpoints in some time. Has this something to do with the new comment system or tagging beta?
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Nope. Deaf dude calls relay operator, relay operator calls store and "translates" between.
Unfortunately, use of a relay operator is becoming common for scammers, etc. to hide accents and out of area calls.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
So easy to say that (and so flippantly too) when you're not disabled.
What would a 'popup' feel like?
This is my signature.
Well, in California, we have a statewide, free, public relay service so that TDD users can communicate with anyone with a phone with no problem, so its not an issue. I thought that was fairly common, and not unique to California.
That's an interesting parallel case. However, in this case, the law requires that the PHONE company (and hence you) find a way to make the PSTN work for the deaf. There are organizations (names escaping me right now) that have non-deaf operators that provide the interface between the deaf and the non-deaf worlds: if you are deaf, you call these operators via TDD, and they make a voice call to the destination, translating back and forth.
Should the law perhaps require ISPs to fund a similar service for the web? The blind call up the service, and operators with special training "translate" the essentials of the page into spoken word? I don't think that's a great idea, but until the technology of screen readers and authoring tools catches up, maybe they should?
Yeah, cause it's nearly impossible for deaf people to navigate a website...
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
If you've never experienced the flip side, you wouldn't know.
One of the law's provisions is that service animals are largely unilaterally allowed in places of public
accomodation. My wife is disabled as was our housemate at the time. They both have service dogs- certified
as such. Service animals aren't just seeing-eye or deaf dogs, there's a lot more there than that- and they
do actually help out in a lot of ways and you can't just arbitrarily separate them from their owners willy-nilly.
Needs to be very specific reasons- and there's not a lot of them.
My wife went into a store with said service dog and was physically accosted for her "dog"- the owner didn't
care if she was disabled or the dog was legally allowed. The police in Plano, TX backed up his "right" to
refuse service to anyone- never mind that like the blind and seeing eye dogs, she's in a protected class
(For this VERY reason...).
Until you experience the other side, you will never understand, never get that it's not QUITE
the thing you make it out to be. I only hope that neither you or any of those you love and care
for end up needing to be covered under the laws or that you aren't on the receiving end of someone
like yourself with that comment you just made.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
this ground was covered a few years ago in (what I think was) a correct decision by a federal court where a disabled person brought suit against Southwest Airlines for its web site. The court said, under the law, the world of online does not count as a place of public accomodation. The ADA was written very clearly to cover physical locations. It gives a list of places that fall under this definition, like a barbershop, auditorium, bakery, etc.
Whether or not the online world should fall under the ADA may be a legitimate question, but that is not the same as what the current law is. If new rules are to be issued, let that be changed through the public deliberative process, so that all the details can come out and be thought about first.
the related story: here in this article
The only thing one should require is to stick a div tag with CSS to make it invisible at the very very top of the site, that says "If you are a disabled person using a screen reader to navigate this page, and wishes to make a purchase, dial the following number and talk with one of our friendly representative who will be happy to help you, and give you any web-only discounts you deserve".
The ADA is overall a good law that has served a good purpose. But in this case, this is all Target should need to do - provide a method so that those who cannot read their website can shop with them from home. Just make sure the representatives are prepared to read out descriptions of items, etc., to that the customer can make informed choices, and this is covered. This would probably cost much less than a lawsuit anyway.
If this goes too far in assuming that someone with a computer has a phone line, then make it a web chat system - the alt text directs you to a site where you can talk online with the representative.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Should be require every mom-and-pop store and restaurant to buy a TDD (Teletype Device for the Deaf) so that deaf people can call them on the phone and place orders?
No! Every store should have to employ someone who signs in American Sign Language (and every other dialect too, of course, in case you get a foreign handicapped person) to be ready to answer a video conference call. Also, in case of a Helen Keller type situation, you'll need someone who can spell things out in brail, real-time. Also, if that person weighs 500 or so pounds, the required electric wheelchairs (which should be able to auto-navigate the store in case you're blind, and read out to you in brail, what's on the shelves as you go by) should be able to handle at least half a ton skinniness-challenged shopper.
*sigh*
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
. . . their brick-and-mortar stores.
Duh.
Fucking bleeding-heart courts.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
For example, say I own a PVC tubing company then a customer comes by and says, "Whoa, what are you doing here? I can't use PVC tubes, I can only use aluminum-copper alloy tubes and if you don't offer the services I need I'm going to sue you or have the government shut you down!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
The real problem with the ADA is that there is no real cost benefit analysis. For many ADA required fixes, the cost is huge and a small benefit goes to a very small group of people. How much will it cost a small mom and pop store to completely redesign the website of their home business? Thousands and thousands of dollars? And how many blind web-surfers will come by to buy a $20 flower vase because of the redesign, 1? 2? 0? The same goes for Target, how much will it cost them to completely redesign? How many blind customers are there going to be? Would it just be simpler and cheaper to have them come into the store and have a real clerk help them out? (or do something over the phone?)
This is just the latest in a long line of crazy cases coming out of the ADA. I'm not against the blind, but it's just dumb to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver a service to a blind person that that blind person values at maybe $20 or less
If you have ever lived in a place where there are no such protections for the handicaped (such as Belgium, where I currently live), you will understand how important this law is. Here, people in wheelchairs cannot shop in most stores (they almost invariable have a single step leading across the threshold, for asthetic reasons I guess), cannot access public most transportation (no elevator in most subway stations and you can forget about busses and trams), cannot access most museums, and frequently have to take substantial detours on their route to find places that have "cut" curbs. Oh, and if you can't use your legs and need to piss, you better get home in a hurry. Most offices (a career path that does not reauire legs) have little or no accomodation for people who cannot walk. Life unassisted (also known as freedom) is impossible for people who are perfectly capable of being contributing members of society, and it sucks for them and costs me money because they are not able to contribute what they could to our economy. The ADA is a good thing, and I sincerely hope that the internet becomes more navicable for the blind so that they can contribute to it for my benefit.
Who actually owns Target.com? The article states that Amazon runs the site, but does not go into detail about the relationship. If Target.com is not owned (at least in part) by the same corporation that owns the stores, then it seems unreasonable to hold them to the same standards as Target's brick-and-mortar stores just because they have the same name.
I used to work for Ritz Camera, and they made it clear that RitzCamera.com is a completely separate company with their own policies (re: sales tax, returns, etc.) and their own corporate structure. If ADA is only applicable because a company's stores are "places of public accommodation", then retailers just need to "spin off" their online stores as separate companies and they should be exempt.
Then why isn't your own website ADA compliant? ...
Would be interested in knowing
Well, in the US, nothing is really required to be in any given language since there is no national language. It's just considered bad business to cut out the English-speaking portion of the population.
AFAIK, there's service that allows deaf people to use a TDD to speak to an intermediary who will be the one placing an order on their behalf. So it's not strictly necessary for you to be able to accept orders from a TDD directly, because there's a way around that.
On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with the requirement that it should be possible to enter into your shop in a wheelchair. Somebody who can't walk is already compensating for their disability as much as they can by using a wheelchair. It's rather unfair to deny them the ability to live a normal life by placing unnecessary obstacles in their path.
The same way, blind people already compensate for their disability as much as they can by using a screen reader. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to browse websites like everybody else, other than bad website design.
There are entire ecommerce products that out of the box don't support page readers. And besides, going to the store IS a viable alternative/equivalent in my book.
Should Online Stores Be Subject To ADA?
Well it worked for Charles Babbage...
I have discovered a truly marvelous
go ahead
In which case you vote with your wallet by not partonizing them.
Welcome to capitalism.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
www.wheelieblog.org
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
I fail to see why the American Dental Association needs to be involved.
I mean unless it's an article about teeth, of course.
Boy, you sure do have an big supply of those straw men available don't you? Presumably you're against audio signals for blind people crossing the road at traffic signals - the audio component adds expense and, well they're blind god-damnit so what are they doing wandering around in the street anyway.
No? You're not against that? OK. Now, making a Web site accessible is not particularly hard or costly and whereas one TDD machine in a shop may benefit a handful of blind people at most, making a Web site accessible can improve the lives of thousands. If society mandates that it wants to place this burden on companies so beit. I suspect that once it becomes enforced it will become second nature to developers, much less onerous than having to support both IE and Firefox users.
Part of doing business in the community is that you have to be a part of the community. If you can't provide a service for people there is no reason you should be aloud to operate. You don't have nor should you have a right to do business wherever you like.
Um, why? That's kind of a value judgement there.
rock climbing double amputee. You knew this was coming, didn't you?
As far as I can tell, every REI and EMS I've been into has been pretty well designed in terms of universal design.. Were they required to? Probably not to the extent they were. I'm sure that since they're in malls, they have to meet minimum requirements by law, but, they also seem to be companies who are inclusive by nature, and likely to go beyond the minimums. To my admittedly non-expert eye, they seemed to be more accessible than the law reqired.
Anyway, yes. Rock climbing stores should by law be accessible to double amputees. They would not, however, be required by law to stock the equipment necessary for a double amputee to participate in the sport. It's one thing to have a barrier at the door preventing someone from entering or barriers preventing someone from navigating through the store, and quite another to simply not stock the items that person might be interested in.
Lastly, provisions of the ADA continue to come under Supreme Court review. I'll leave it up to you to search out the citations.Stuff I've built generally meets all the relevant accessibility guidelines - except I wasn't deliberately aiming for them.
If you keep to standards and don't defecate non-semantic pseudo-HTML from your crutch of a WYSIWYG editor, then it's really easy. Alt tags are required by HTML 4 and XHTML - they're not optional. Non-Javascript alternatives reduce support costs - for instance, you don't have able-bodied twits phoning up, asking why a particular section of their website doesn't work just because they disabled half of the features in their browsers when bored.
Check your website using lynx, or some other excessively simple browser. If the pages are still perfectly navigable and understandable, then you're doing okay. Being unable to write HTML or design websites isn't an excuse.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Building an accessible web site means being a professional web developer and doing it right from the beginning. Whining about the burdens of adding alt attributes is simply an excuse to live with your sloppy coding habits.
Target was sued because they were warned that their site was bad and given suggestions to fix them 6 months before the suit was filed. All they needed to do was put alternate text on their images and in their image maps. Instead, they continued to have a site where you had no idea what the navigation was. All of the information was locked inside images.
ADA says that if you are providing a service, that service should be available to everyone regardless of (dis)ability. If you have an online coupon or internet-only sales, you have to give everyone access to those deals.
Is that so tough? If it is, you should get out of the web development world. The future is standards-based web development with CSS, semantic markup, javascript that features graceful degredation. Flash can be accessible! PDF files can be accessible. It may require a bit more work, but that's what professionals do. They don't sit on their butts complaining about the burdens of advancing technology.
You can have a large, complex, and completely accessible web site. Look at Yahoo's new home page, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Tech, and the new Yahoo! Food. These are recent releases that are quite accessible. Google released an accessible web search that gives extra credit to sites that use valid code. Even Microsoft has made some very accessible sites.
Heh... Voting with wallets... As if that honestly will work under all circumstances...
Lots of things people are voting with their wallets with- but people like RIAA keep blaming
the losses their member labels see as "piracy" not what's actually happening.
The reality is, there's a threshold at which "money talks" doesn't even come into play- that's what
the ADA was supposed to adjust. Once you're on the other side of the equation, you begin to realize
how badly the ADA's provisions are actually needed- because there's not enough people to hit the
thresholds in most cases for money to talk like you imply it always will.
It doesn't work- and I don't buy it. But then, you're probably never faced with issues of
the handicapped; I am all the time with my Grandmother, Mother, and my Wife, each with problems
that put them all into those protected classes.
To you, I will only say, "Try looking at it as if there was nothing there like the ADA- REALISTICALLY".
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
... because a retailer is working off of a database backend, especially a retailer like Walmart or Target that is contantly changing merchandise. You can't just save a static set of pages when your inventory is changing on a daily or weekly basis (by store, even... these companies are global and in general you are shopping locally) ... you need a better solution that is dynamic yet implements the proper ADA corrections. (if you wish to comply...)
These accesibility laws are not about making special exceptions to handicapped people. It's simply allowing handicapped people to live, participate, and work to contribute to themselves and their community just like everybody else.
(Applause)
It _is_ a special exception. But it's a relatively _small_ investment on the part of the business owner which makes a HUGE difference in the independance and quality of life of the disabled. What society gains is a change between an individual who before was dependent on others and a burden - like in the pre 1970's era; and now is a capable, productive individual. There's a sound reason why the disabled are a protected group and that laws were created to oblige people to take that extra little step to help them out.
Redoing a website - or adding a special website for the blind - is not a multi-million dollar investment. Heck, it doesn't even have to look good if it's for the blind. It just has to work.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
With most TTY systems I've seen (or rather, heard) the hearing-impaired person on the other end types into the machine, sending its text to an operator, who then reads said text to the other person, and reverses the proccess when you respond. Whether this set-up is still use, I'm not sure, I haven't recieved a call from somone using TTY in more than ten years.
As for "deal with it, and move on", it, I think, would be in a buisness's better interests if the disabled person didn't "move on" to a competitor that did accomodate for disabilities. This sort of thing isn't just "PC whining", but simple market-place demand. Sure, it's fine if you don't like Brand-X, and don't want to carry it, but don't complain if your competition offers it and you see your customers go there instead. How well would a resaurant do if it was designed like a tree-house, and the only way of entrance was a rope ladder? How well would a library do if it only carried books written in sanskrit? The best way to do buisness is to let people inside so they can give you money.
Why are so many people blind to the fact that Ada is a good law. Like most things, laws must be understood one ada time.
Have you read my journal today?
This is true. It used to be the local Bells that did this free of charge. My wife's late grandmother was deaf, and we'd call the TDD relay operator to call her. Or vice versa.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The reality is, there's a threshold at which "money talks" doesn't even come into play- that's what the ADA was supposed to adjust. Once you're on the other side of the equation, you begin to realize how badly the ADA's provisions are actually needed- because there's not enough people to hit the thresholds in most cases for money to talk like you imply it always will. It doesn't work- and I don't buy it. But then, you're probably never faced with issues of the handicapped; I am all the time with my Grandmother, Mother, and my Wife, each with problems that put them all into those protected classes. To you, I will only say, "Try looking at it as if there was nothing there like the ADA- REALISTICALLY".
I'm OK with it to a certain extent, to allow people to do things they really need to do. Like making dips in sidewalks at intersections, that sort of thing. It's the notion that private businesses have to make it so the handicapped can do absolutely EVERYTHING that anyone else can do. And to me, there's a limit somewhere where government doesn't have that much business telling people what to do. At the point where the blind person can call Target and get help, I'm not concerned with their webpage.
There are entire ecommerce products that out of the box don't support page readers. And besides, going to the store IS a viable alternative/equivalent in my book.
Really? Where is the B&M storefront for Amazon.com? For eBay?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The problem with this is that if you get the government involved instead of voting with your dollar, what will happen will have nothing to do with actually helping the disabled and everything to do with the government and greedy handicapped people using this as a way to lay huge fines (good for the government) and settlements (good for the greedy)...and don't forget that this is ALL good for the lawyers...against online business which are unprepared for the ruling and will almost certainly have vague and unreasonable guidelines. You talk tough because all you're thinking about is huge corporate monoliths like Target, but a ruling against Target here would cripple small business / non-profit-but-we-accept-donations websites who don't know how to fix their sites on their own and can't possibly afford to pay someone else to do it. At best, all that will come of this is a bunch of rich lawyers, a few rich blind people, and a metric ass ton of sites making an absolute bare minimum effort to comply just enough not to get sued, but almost surely not enough to actually benefit anyone (think of tobacco / alcohol / porn sites that make you 'verify your age' by 'entering your date of birth' (i.e., picking 01/01/1900 and clicking 'submit')).
Unpleasantries.
No, seriously.
Keep pushing, handicapped people. No one resents these laws at all. This won't cause many people to hate you as a group. I think people enjoy being forced by bad laws to spend a disproportionate amount of time on complainers and lawsuit mongers.
If this goes through, it will be terrible for business. I only hope Target drags their feet as much as humanly possible and delivers the worst possible half solution to these miserable people.
Blind Man's Association (BAM!) sues a range of p2p fileshare application manufacturers for not implementing "no audio" tags to p0rn flicks without sound.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Beethoven seemed to do pretty well, in fact, when he lost all his hearing, he was no longer distracted by the mynah bird...
If they dont want to cater to 100% of the population that's their choice.
So you're okay with restaurants that refuse to serve, say, asians?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Never seen a worse analogy. Most people who call ADA bad don't have an understanding of ADA at all.
ADA is not absolute accommodation, but reasonable accommodation. A large company needs to have ramps, physical notions of floor in an elevator, etc. But does mom and pop gas station need to have grab bars in their bathroom? no. The cost in cases like this put undue stress on the business. Does every shop aisle need to be wheelchair accessible? Another no. But if someone wants something down that aisle, an associate needs to take a few and go get it.
Every aspect of ADA has exceptions.
So, hopefully all the so called experts here will actually go out and understand the subject at hand before saying anything. You can start here http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm
I'm not exactly sure why so many people don't go for this solution. My guess is that disabled groups want greater access than the market would give and they want someone else to pay for it. The public at large feels bad for the disabled and doesn't realize how much the changes will cost. Also, I think many voters think that businesses are some kidn of magical bank and that sticking some new business with a HUGE ADA bill somehow doesn't hurt them.
Imagine that the federal government had to pay 30% of any businesses costs associated with the ADA. If a business had to install 15 mini -elevators, it bills 30 percent to the government. If a business had to redesign its website, it bills the government for 30%. I'm sure lawmakers and tax payers would go nuts and change the law once they had to directly pay the real cost of what they were doing.
If you can't provide a service for people there is no reason you should be aloud to operate.
You mean, like being there for the spelling-challenged people that can't spell words like "allowed"? Doesn't it make you feel just a little odd, talking about what businesses the government should "allow" you to start?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If you actually were blind, your screen reader software (assuming it's Windows, it would probably be JAWS) would be handling the sound, not the website. While there are some places that use sound clips (like authentication pages that require you to read a garbled series of letters and numbers to register on forums), many sites depend on the user using third-party applications to access their site. In any case, since the website you're commenting on is a personal web page, and not a web presense for a business, it isn't the sort of site the ADA is being used on.
Extra Credit: I used JAWS on the site, and I could get around it just fine with the monitor shut off.
Myth of Hypocricy of a person commenting on screen reader accessibility while his website lacks embedded sound clips: Busted.
This
Blind people aren't forced to buy things at Target, so why should Target meet their online needs? I am sure there are plenty of other online stores that support the needs of the blind.
Surely you also have AIM out there - I know we East-coasters do. Sure, it doesn't use the phone system, but it basically serves the same purpose, and I'm sure there's a decent amount of operating costs that come along with TDD, even if it's provided for free to the public. Back in grade school I had a deaf friend - as I didn't know any ASL, we'd just use a pad of paper and a pen. Technology achieves the same thing, but without wasting paper.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
why is your wife's handicap the business' problem?
Because if no one MAKES it the business' problem, they will NEVER do anything about it. In the 1970's the disabled finally got together and convinced the world that they don't need the world's PITY or CHARITY, but rather just a little help so that they can live almost normally. Ramps on sidewalks. Wider doors in bathrooms. Wider spaces between cash registers. Etc.
Municipal laws and building codes now mandate most of this stuff, because if you didn't HAVE to do it as a business owner, developer, or whatever - you wouldn't. It's not profitable. But on the other hand your inaction obliges a disabled person to become a burden, instead of being able to fend for themselves. It's the hidden economic cost. It's going to be paid one way or another. If the businesses pay it, you increase the quality of life for the disabled. And it's not really such a great expense for the business - it's in fact the cost of doing business.
to demand a small mom & pop shop to do so is absurd.
You don't have nor should you have a "right" to open a business. If you can't afford to comply with the law, you can't afford to own a business. I'm willing to bet that you CAN afford it, you just don't want to. You think there's no point, for the extremely rare occasion that you will have a disabled customer. But this little detail allows disabled people freedom to live normally and choose.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Where does it stop? Do they need to supply deaf/blind people with special tactile screens?
I'm not blind, so I can't say for certain, but...
I suspect blind people would be happy if they just designed the site correctly so that the important text wasn't embedded in flash, or in images, or in fucked up layout tables, or in tag attributes that it doesn't belong in. Maybe a few actual <label>s instead of <span>s.
More than a decade of Web weavery has demonstrated that the lion's share of web designers/developers/implementarians couldn't care less about universal access. Voluntary measures just don't cut the mustard.
Making sites screen-reader friendly is very easy and very rare. The only barrier is ignorance.
No matter how tight your bottom line is there's no excuse for not spending the 2 additional seconds on each link or image to make sure they're universally navigable, unless you simply hate all cripples. In which case I raise my glass of virgin blood to you: "To evil!"
These stories are free but worth money.
Please mod up the parent. ADA makes life better for the rest of us w/o disabilities, by increasing the productivity of those living with them. When you amortize the initial expense of accommodating disabilities over any reasonable length of time I'd be willing to bet the gain for society exceeds the cost.
BTW I think the reason most businesses in Europe have a step up at the entrance is to reduce damage from minor flooding, not aesthetics, but I could be wrong.
I agree. My girlfriend's mother owns a dance studio, and they recently opened another small building as an annex where they can hold classes for the younger dancers (ages 3 to 8), and because of ADA, she has to put TWO handicapped toilets in a dance studio annex. There's not room in the annex for three toilets, so the two handicapped toilets are the only ones they have, and the young kids need help climbing up to use the toilet. This is a dance studio - they have some kids who are mentally handicapped, but everyone there is physically capable enough to dance so I think they should be able to use a regular toilet. Admittedly, one handicap toilet might be practical if one of the dancers has a handicapped parent or grandparent, but two is definitely overkill.
As a freshman in college I was called by someone through a relay operator to try to get me to join some kind of "secret society". Or it was probably just a silly prank either by one of my friends or some older folk in ECE. But I never heard of anyone else getting the call, and none of my friends ever admitted to doing it. Which is odd, for sure.
I hung up after a while, and they called back, this repeated a few times. Then my (drunk) roommate picked up the phone and started hitting on the operator. I felt bad for the operator, if she was really an operator, but it was still hilarious. It was especially funny to imagine because this woman had the most cold, strange, monotone voice I'd ever heard.
Being a relay operator would be a hell of a job. I should try doing it for a while.
But it takes a bit to get everything taken care of...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
... then you probably will want to obey U.S. law, especially when it's something a reasonable as the A.D.A.: I wish we had as strong a law up here in Canada.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
That was very well said.
Spoken like an old table based layout "web designer" who hasn't been able to adapt with the times
Semantic markup+css isn't rocket science. It's good on a number of fronts as well:
It's true that the really good xhtml+css guys aren't cheap, but it's a selling point for our products so it's worth us keeping a guy fulltime plus some contractors we know we can rely on when we're busy.
If you do this stuff from the beginning of a project it needn't cost much (if any) more, but it's true that retrofitting can be expensive. Target's codebase is probably quite old and crufty in places, but it's something they'll need to sort - sooner rather than later.
As for your idea about a phone line, what if the person is mute, has a stammer and doesn't like talking to strangers on the phone or any other such problems?
I am NaN
Look, buddy. It's people like you, who insist on talking about facts, and reality, and other such stuff that are insensitive and completely wreck the notion that the universe is a warm, fuzzy, inherently fair place. Next thing you'll say is that taller people have an easier time getting stuff off the top shelves.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It is a bad law when it hurts the majority of people. Take public restrooms in NYC. NYC wanted to use the self cleaning restrooms that are in use in Europe. But, those restrooms were not wheelchair accessable. So, the wheelchair bound sued under the ADA. The wheelchair accessable version was not self-cleaning and required an attendant.
The city offered to pass a law requiring all places of business to allow people in wheelchairs free access to their restrooms, but that wasn't good enough. In the end, the city had to do it's feasablity study with a normal and a wheelchair-accessable version at each location. The plan was abandoned because it would cost too much money to pay the attendants for the wheelchair accessable restrooms, which were barely used.
That is why it is a bad law.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The problem with this is that if you get the government involved instead of voting with your dollar,
But what do you do with a population of people excluded that don't have enough influence to vote with their wallets? There were a lot of eating establishments that made due voluntarily excluding Black people. They voted with their dollar (and not by choice). That didn't have any effect. It took the government stepping in to get rid of white-only drinking fountains, white-only bus seats, white-only restaurants and such. The dollar vote didn't work. It rarely works. So, why should I try something I know will not protect the rights of people when I know the government has done a good job of it in the past (and by "good job" I mean a whole lot better than voting with the dollar)?
Learn to love Alaska
Just watch out for the disabled ninjas who can turn link themselves together to form a ramp.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem isn't that people are "lazy" or "don't care" (or at least most people aren't that way), it's that the solutions to the problems are very difficult and sometimes are just not possible. It is much easier to accommodate people physically, such as providing a wheelchair ramp (just pour some concrete and make sure it isn't too steep) or a menu for a blind person (brail is a standard and there are special printers you can buy to make them for you). Trying to accommodate people on the web, though, is drastically more challenging and in some respects technically impossible without changing the very nature of the web.
Space for rent, inquire within
Yep. That is why Mother Teresa was prevented from building a men's shelter in the Bronx. Seems that under the ADA she would have had to put in an elevator. It cost to much, so no men's shelter.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
... no, I really have a wife. Anyway, she is a psychologist, and she got sued under ADA, and now has to supply sign language interpreters for free to deaf clients, and is not allow to charge more for these clients. She loses money on these clients as the interpreter cost more than the client pays. As this spread through the deaf community, it was decided she was the deaf psychologist of choice since no one else in the area had been sued yet (she was the first), so no one else would provide free interpreters. As a result, she no longer offers counselling services in this area (Long story but the lawsuit only applied to counselling services in a specific area of counselling). I hate these people (not all deaf people, just the stupid ones who feel it is their job the punish the hearing population because they can).
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
Can we get them to go after the RIAA for not making their music accessible to the deaf?
Actually, browsing the web is NOT necessary. The internet is an optional luxury that you choose to pay for. People who design content for it are under no obligation to meet your whims. ADA already works for the brick-and-mortar stores, and forcing websites to be ADA compliant is about as stupid as suing GM because their cars aren't operable my multiple amputees. Maybe libraries should be forced to hire people to read to illiterates.
If this really is important, the market will sort it out. Not in terms of Target or Walmart losing business, but by another independent person finding/creating a middleware solution that works well enough. Everybody bitches about the power of the large corporations and how hard it is to compete. Here is a business opportunity which may have some real potential if all those blind people really want to shop on-line.
why is your wife's handicap the business' problem? if you can't eat at Steak and Tacos, that's their fault, not yours. You don't have nor should have a right to eat wherever you like.
Why is being Black the business's problem? If you want to ban all Black people from eating in your restaurant, that should be ok. You don't have nor should you have the right to eat wherever you like.
Learn to love Alaska
webnavix "web experts", eh? Haven't you heard that alt tags aren't optional? That's some expertise you have there.
If I don't like an online store's website (where the ones that force you to create an account to buy) I don't sue them to change it, I just go buy my shit elsewhere...
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Put them in solitary confinement until they can fill out a 500 page webform explaining why they should be released. Every page has a non-skippable flash intro, the answers on the form are maintained by session cookies and the form is only accessible by a very noisy 14.4 dialup connection that can't be re-established without closing their browser.
It's not life imprisonment, officially, but it might as well be.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
It's rather unfair to deny them the ability to live a normal life by placing unnecessary obstacles in their path.
i tle14/part67.html#67.103 ) and that is probably not going to happen... That's ok, it's not in my cards.
Umm, they will never have a "normal" life, and "we" didn't put obstacles in their path, they - because of their disability - became obsticles without any effort of mine.
And on a side note, I am color blind (color vision deficiency is more accurate) and I've never ONCE thought that someone should make some sort of a change for me... I've wanted to be a commercial pilot ( http://www.washingtonwatchdog.org/documents/cfr/t
There are plenty of other areas where being color blind limits what I can do, but I'm just happy I don't have cancer, you know...?
Let's see...
bad law: Any law concerning technology.
There needs to be environmental laws to make sure we don't destroy the environment.
Other than that, everything else concerning technology should be nothing more than suggestive guidelines.
So much time and money is spent on regulating technology. The problem with that is the fact that technology changes too fast. There is no point in arguing about what we can or cannot do with certain technologies because in a few years when the specific technology is extinct/obsolete, no one will care and we will have a bunch of pointless laws on the books that do nothing but hinder the advancement of technology.
I can certainly understand the need for wheelchair access and other amenities for the disabled, but you're talking to the internet community here. You can't require all of us to program everything with the disabled in mind. Time is better spent looking for solutions to cure actual disabilities than to rewrite everything on the internet.
The internet was not designed with the disabled in mind. Sorry to say, but I don't believe the future internet(s) will be either. Your best hope is going to be technology that helps the disabled adapt to the world rather than forcing the world to adapt to the disabled.
If online stores are public places, then the entirety of the internet is a public place, barring sites or parts of sites that specifically deny access and provide no public means to acquire that access. Drawing a line based on one specific functionality is absurd.
Yes, this would mean that every site out there would have to be ADA compliant. That would mean developers would finally have to learn what accessibility, usability, semantics, and web standards are. It would be a welcomed blow to Flash, because Flash cannot be made accessible.
As for cost or return on this investment... well, all those companies (and government agencies) who built their sites without giving the first thought to accessibility deserve the agony of hiring competent designers and developers (who know more than just how to make a site pretty) this time around, heeding their advice, and avoiding the same potential exposure to litigation for which the case against Target has now set a precedent.
You are protected.
Using the phone is also a normal activity. Should be require every mom-and-pop store and restaurant to buy a TDD (Teletype Device for the Deaf) so that deaf people can call them on the phone and place orders?
In short, yes, that is required. However, because this burden would be great and the need is also great, the government does this already. There is a service where people with a TTD call a number and an operator reads off the screen and types on the TTD. So yes, you are required to have it, but thankfully, you already do. Convenient, isn't it?
Learn to love Alaska
No it isn't, since ADA. Its exactly this attitude that ADA is trying to address.
I would recommend you read "The Death of Common Sense". You will see how the ADA has hurt average, everyday working people homeless men in NYC.
The main problem is that it give people a "right" to something as opposed to giving them a right to be free of something. There is a big difference.
Of course, the ADA is not alone in this defect, but it is one of the most notable
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There are many examples of this foolishness. Here in San Francisco the ADA-compliant public self-cleaning restrooms are so large inside that they are mainly used by hookers as a convenient place to deliver a blow job. All apartments recently constructed here in the city have ADA-compliant bathrooms large enough to U-turn a fire truck. Let me tell you that it really impinges on your 800-square-foot apartment when your bathroom is statutorily required to be at least 100 square feet. And even a remodel triggers the ADA: in my former office, we had obnoxious ADA-compliant bathrooms which were both huge and furnished with uncomfortably-tall ADA-compliant toilets.
At all the new parks in the city, the picnic tables are 1) missing one of the seats and 2) have tables mounted neck-high so you can run a wheelchair underneath them. The furniture is very uncomfortable for the 99.9% of the normally-abled public.
The ADA had the right idea but the implementation has been a nuisance.
Sure, they are losing out on a potential business market if they do. Capitalism will deal with most situations. If you don't serve Asians, depending on your community, it will kill you or it won't affect you. I'm not even going into the situations that will develop from such a policy with media or employees refusing to work there, quitting and so on. Sometimes, the downside of living in "free" society is you must put up with people who offend you or refuse to cater to you.
Restaurants that don't have a vegetarian, vegan, lactose-intolerant, or whatever option are also in the same situation; it just takes one person in a group to have these requirements and everyone in the group will eat elsewhere.
Online places are somewhat different, however. Most people browse the web alone. If a site is not disabled-friendly then I might not even notice (although if it is too flash-heavy, then I will probably just ignore it). On the other hand, disabled-friendly and well-designed tend to go hand-in-hand when it comes to web sites, and so I am more likely to shop somewhere online that is disabled-friendly. The only time I really feel this law ought to be enforced is when a site is a monopoly; if I have the option of buying something elsewhere then a better option would be to just do so and let the unfriendly sites lose some of their income.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
At one point in my life, I was vulnerable, and yet the state did not come to help me at all. It was within their power to do so, but it was much more expedient to let me suffer.
If I can't be helped, or if I can't get special protections, why should anyone else????
... volounteer to poke your eyes out.
:)
Then tell you to deal with it and move on
I know advocates of the blind often blame websites for their incompability with screen readers. However, has anyone ever thought to ask if the blame should go both ways? Often times we complain when IE or Firefox when they don't render a particular site or the ACID2 test correctly. Is it possible then that the screen readers have flaws could use some work?
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Sort of off topic, but here (in Utah) we also have a video relay, basically a webcam hooked up to your tv and high speed internet, you video the translator who then calls and interprets for the deaf person. Much faster than the old fashioned TDD relay service.
Wouldn't work. It's all about return on investment. In a pure free capitalist environment, you want to be sure that the money you spent installing that wheelchair ramp is going to be made back by increased patronage of wheelchair users. Now, given the ratio of wheelchair users to ably-bodied people in most societies, that ROI may not be met for all establishments, so wheelchair access becomes a niche market - which in the real world means that, of all people, the ones that have to travel furthest for services are the ones with mobility issues.
The solution is to pass laws like the ADA. It would be an utterly ridiculous situation if the richest country in the world was unwilling to spend the extra money to ensure that people disabled through illness or injury, through no fault of their own, were able to live normal lives.
Yeah, capitalism was working soooo well in the south.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Yes we do, but please stop calling me Shirley.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I'm a bit surprised at the attitude of what looks like the majority of the posters on this thread - which is basically that disabled people don't matter. A bit more compassion and empathy is required I think.
As for the actual laws themselves, isn't one of the purposes of government is to stand up for people who cannot stand up for themselves? And laws are the way that it's done.
Yeah, and it's soooo much better now. We all get screwed. Yay progress.
So how would you like it if semaphores kept the color arrangement but were ordered randomly? Or every UI had hardcoded colors? It's easy for some silly thing like that to make life more complicated than it could be, especially when it's not all that hard to keep everybody happy.
For example, color blindness is an easy one: When I make an interface, I make sure color is never the only way to present information. I might for example color rows in a list box differently depending on status, but the status is going to appear there anyway so you don't miss anything vital if you can't tell the difference. And it doesn't really take me that much effort to make colors customizable either.
You probably haven't had to complain much because color seldom carries vital information that can't be obtained in any other way, but a good part of the reason is that somebody actually bothered to think of that.
(Or they could just make a .html version, but ...)
The ADA became law on July 26 1990, a couple of months before TBL started non-conceptual work on the WWW in October 1990. The physical argument is moot, as servers physically exist... the means to access and interact with them is the paradigm shift.
EVERYTHING should be subject to the ADA, and in particular it's easy to see why all websites (commercial or not!) should be required to comply.
- Obviously, we're just talking about electrons here, and electrons are free. It doesn't cost anything to do additional development or testing of a web site, or to pay lawyers to bless a given implementation when one's created.*
- Online retailers don't care about return on investment; they'd happily shut out blind people out of spite. Their vicious prejudice should be punished by making them take a lot of money from the blind customers they'd much rather fool with ugly patterned merchandise.**
- The line between commercial and non-commercial is always and forever a bright one. It's easy to distinguish a site where people gather to discuss news events or solve each other's problems gratis (for whatever version of enlightened self-interest rocks their worlds) from ones where crass and evil market exploiters want to trade money for similar results.***
* Except that this isn't generally true.
** Except that this also isn't generally true.
*** Except that this also isn't generally true, either.
I like businesses to be generally accommodating -- because (to garble a metaphor) a rising tide lifts all boats. Wide aisles are pleasant to shop in; ramps are good not only for wheelchair access, but for exiting with bulky packages; lavatories that aren't down stairs at the end of a murky hallway are a welcome luxury. I'm glad when businesses have those things, and I hope they benefit financially from having them.
But imposing some rule-writing committee's view of the best practices to follow gets me all bunchy and defensive. I get the feeling sometimes that a lot of people didn't get a chance to bully anyone on the schoolyard, and have been waiting for the chance to make up for it by trying to trip up people who've managed to put enough life energy into a business to get it off the ground in the first place.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If that argument worked, I could say that CDs aren't necessary, therefore my brick-and-mortar CD store shouldn't have to be accessible to the disabled either.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Sure. Whyever not? If they think that's a viable business model, good for them. I think that a private business owner should be free to do business with, or not, anybody they want for whatever reasons.
I wouldn't patronize such a business, but they should be free to make decisions I don't agree with.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You have to program extra code, but not too much extra code, or the screen readers will be reading "spacer" "spacer" "spacer" for three hours. You need to have noscript, and noembed tags in everything, and offer an alternate text version of your site that needs to be up to date and relevant.
No extra code. No "spacer spacer spacer...". No noscripts, no noembeds. No alternate versions of your site.
This is what CSS is for. Semantic design. Lists are lists, links are links, headlines are headlines. Only use <img> when the image is actual content and not decoration (which means it probably belongs in a background-image somewhere). Do that, and the number of images that you have to provide an alt attribute for drops dramatically.
As for keeping text out of your images... how can you not? What do you do when the boss says he wants a spanish language version of the site? Are you going to wait for the graphic artists to redo everything?
As for embed... please tell me you use the <object> tag for christ's sake.
I, too, need special accomodation/protection from those who inflict emotional trauma on me. Where are my protections??? Why can't I be allowed to live a normal life?
Plain old HTML sites are a lot faster than the newer Flash-y sites with the latest doodads. Examples of well-designed sites (get the job done with a good, fast interface while managing to look good) are Google, LiveJournal, and Craigslist. All of which I can use with Lynx should the desire strike me.
;)
My problem with Flash sites is that they tend to be heavy, end up feeling very empty of content when you get passed all the junk and usually end up frustrating even the most able bodied of users. In conlcusion Flash is certainly a solution to leveling the playing field, since everyone feels equally locked out
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
To be fair, computer science degrees oftentimes focus on the theoretical, and the basics of programming, and don't necessarily try to teach a broad variety of implementations. My college certainly doesn't teach any web programming or HTML, unless you sign up specifically for such an elective. There most definitely isn't anything related to designing programs for the blind in those classes. For that, you would have to take an HCI [human and computer interactions] class, but again that would be a seperate elective (if even taught). The solutions to these problems are almost always wrapped up in specific implementations, and thus require someone to specifically seek this information out if they want to learn it. It's not taught in compsci.
Seems easy to me... am I missing something?
Actually, it's not that goofy of a situation. I used to work at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, specifically Space Mountain. (Also, my father is blind and my step-mother is in a wheelchair.) The building that houses the coaster is ADA compliant. The law says "resonable" and so Disney designed half the queue with ramps instead of the stairs used on the other half of the queue. That's your bar. The coaster itself is ridable by the disabled if they can get into and out of the seat without the assistance of a cast member. The law does not say Disney has to dumb down the ride for the disabled. There's your bull. That seems silly to you so let me set the scene. A disabled parent in a wheel chair is in the park with their child who is not disabled. The kid is tall enough to ride but still young enough that the parent does not want them waiting in a 60 minute queue by themselves. Now, those that are anti-ADA (not saying the above poster specifially) would deny both the parent and the child access. With an ADA compliant queue the parent can take the child through the line and then make the decision for themselves if they think they can ride with the child. If they don't think they can ride they can still see the child get on the coaster and then take the ramp down to arrival and wait for the kid.
You know what, in my 3 years there I never once had someone disabled get angry at me with this arrangement. They were given access to the building and then the decision to ride was left to them. Which is more than I can say about tall men with children that are too short to ride but slipped passed greeter. I think you'd get a friendlier response if you called their dead mother and wife both whores than tell them their kid isn't tall enough.
No, he didn't. He continued to produce but we'll never know what he might have accomplished had it not occurred. There's no doubt, though, that his life was ruined.
Being a mentally challenged person who is incapable of navigating a website, I hereby demand that Target provide someone to hold my hand during my online shopping experience. P.S. My mom helped me write this. She is usually very busy.
How exactly could they be disabled then? Are they deaf or something?
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
The problem is that all the details won't be thought about and we'll get more of the same.
Nonsense. I've been a web developer for only three years and I've mastered most of the web accessibility issues. My method of learning is the reason for this. I learned to design by the standards, and I learned to build sites that degrade gracefully. The key is education; there are thousands of web designers and developers that never touch the HTML, that start off a page in Design View of whatever tool they use, and they honestly believe that they are advanced web workers. That's how they learned how to do it in school. The state of our web education programs is dreadful world-wide, and something has to be done about that.
Good thing I'm ambidextrous, and not one of the handicapped 99% of the population.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Serving Asians does not place an additional cost to the restaurant.
The first EASY example I can think of is weather charts where green means light rain and yellow means heavier rain and red is terrible you're about to be lifted to Oz... Well, I know when it's red - but that's about it. Greens and yellows blend right into each other and I cannot distingush between them... And that's ok... It's something I deal with, I face it about every day, but - so? Everyone has SOME problem, why should I be the guy to file a lawsuit so that some other guy gets fired from him job because it costs the company a million in legal fees? So now my problem has just made a bigger problem (IMO) for this guy and his potential family, he loses his house, then his wife and kids... Because I wanted two colors to be seperated or optional on a web page... That's crap.
Second thing I think of is that game that is kinda like bejeweled - only without the shapes... Again, greens and yellows (or blues an purples depending on the version) are a total loss to me.... So I find one that uses shapes instead... It's not a big deal - or sure it COULD be, but why? When I'm faced with something I can't handel - I see if I can't find an alternative, the same would be for Target if my color blindness cause issues there. I'd go to amazon, or walmart, or "bobs house of good stuff"... whatever... It's stupid to create such a fuss over this.
All sorts of people have problems - why should I feel that mine are more important than yours?
Back to HTML 3.2, folks!
I wonder if Porn sites could be held to that kind standard...
Am I the only one with a vision of Blinkin with Braille Playboy?
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
It is important to note that nothing has changed legally. The judge just simply refused to throw out the case.
By the way, this is a ridiculously old story.
I wish more people would make web sites for deaf surfers (read: silent). You almost put your job at risk if someone asks you to go to their Myspace page when you're at work. And I despise checking the news and having some jackass ad pop up with some stupid sound.
"Honest boss, I was just checking the weather."
"That didn't sound like the weather to me."
Sheesh.
BTW, I'm all for the ADA on this one. As the web becomes more a part of normal American existence, we need to act more professionally about the way we run it. Just as it would never occur to a business to not have a phone number, we're about at the point where even the smallest organization does some form of business on the web. Government increasingly allows you to do business on the web and is on the cusp of requiring it. It's easy to help blind people on this. It's certainly no more costly to design a web page with the proper tags than it is to make sure your shop has ramps and isle clearance.
It's time to stop being kids with toys and start being men and women with responsibilities. If your web site is serious at all, then grow up and act like it. Stop acting like it's taking food out of your kids mouth to help a blind person across the street.
TW
I am continuously disenfranchised from large segments of society for reasons beyond my control. Why can't society protect me as well???
"Serving Asians does not place an additional cost to the restaurant."
Why, because they tend to be a little shorter and are thus easier to roast?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Per the ADA, a person is only legally allowed (whether they're a shopkeeper or just a person
off the street) to ask two specific questions.
1) Are you disabled?
2) Is that a service animal?
If the answer is yes to the first and second, there is nothing further that you are legally
allowed to ask (It'll open you up to the prospect of a nasty civil suit, believe it or not...).
The person in question may, out of politeness and consideration to those around them, offer
more information, such as their disability, any certifications for the service animal, etc.
Since I speak for my wife in things like this online, this extends to me as well...
In her case, she's got inoperable damage in four of her lumbar discs that causes extreme
limitations on her mobility and drastically affects her balance. In the case of the dog
in question, she's been trained to warn her she's about ready to fall and to go get help
or fetch things when she's down. For extended distances, she has to be pushed around in
a wheel chair or go around in her power chair. The dog in question has been trained and
certified as such. I suggest you go check the provisions of the ADA a little closer- and
not everybody that claims that they're "disabled" and their "little dog" (this dog is a
"little dog" but it, unlike the other animals has been trained and certified...) is a
"service animal"- which is bogus. If you question that she's legitimately disabled, I
will also add that she has another card, not for the dog, that indicates that by law she
has to be wanded instead of going through the magnetometer at US Airports as she has a
pain management implant that allows her the mobility she DOES have.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"I know if I was blind, I would simply boycott them." Actually, in my town I noticed a group of blind people standing outside JCPenny boycotting Target.
I call BS. I do not have the article in front of me, but there was a cabin/cottage or some such thing on a mountain. The site is physically inaccessible to the handicapped due to nature putting rocks and ledges and trees and things in the way. So the owners never added ramps and such. Well, a group sued under the ADA and they were forced to add these things. Why? Because a judge said so, eventhough the people in wheelchairs couldn't get there without gross assistance.
The group then dragged (and this is more literal then you might think) the people to this place so they could make use of the ramp. Trust me, this law is abused and misrepresented more than you would think. I honestly believe we will begin to see people attempting to receive accomodations under the ADA soon for obesity (if they haven't already).
Aha! Found It!
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Why is it we have to be nice to everyone? Now before you think I'm a jerk think about it. Target is not turning away business. Target is making it harder for them to access the site. Can they ask a friend to help them? Sure.
I'm sick of every disability group acting as if their needs are so important that if every company needs to spend so much money that they will go bankrupt to try to help them, then those companies should go bankrupt. If I own a business it should be my choice on how accessible it is, if it's not accessible then I lose business. Are we going to complain about stores above the 5th floor in buildings because they hurt people who suffer from vertigo? Are we going to complain about stores that are on docks because people who have a fear of water can't reach them? The answer is yes if they think of it.
Personally I think the government needs to stop bowing to every discrimination suit and realize that it's up to the business and the people involved to settle this, not to tell the business how to run themselves.
So why should Target have to make the online store accessible to the blind, when the actual store is already accessible? There's a difference between discrimination and frivolous lawsuits, and this one is firmly in the second column.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Flash is too accessible to designers. It simply has no place at all in UI design, where its main porpose seems to be to get users to frantically hunt for tiny "Skip Intro" link in order to bypass the terrible and slow and entirely unnecessary flash animation at the front of the page. Putting Flash on the frontpage of your site iss a nice way to tell the users go to to hell: the "brick and mortar" equivalent is to have goatse and tubgirl mannaquins in a clothing store window.
It has a place, and that is limited to online games, online video, cartoons or other such "content".
Where were you when the voynix came?
It is costs them extra money to serve Asians then that may be valid. However, it doesn't cost more to serve Asians, and there's no real reason, except that they don't like Asians. However, there's plenty of stores in China town that don't do a very good job of serving people who aren't chinese (or don't speak the language). They don't outright refuse to serve them, but some restaurants have only Chinese menus, only chopsticks (which is a problem for people who may never haver used them before), and have staff that only speak Chinese. However, it's their choice if they don't want to cater to the English speaking people. That would require extra effort for them in learning a new language, printing out menus, and buying forks. Speaking of restaurants, how many restaurants do you know of that have braille menus? Sure you could always bring a menu, and have your friend read it for you, but what if you want to go with a blind friend? Do you think the server would want to sit there and read the menu to you?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
An excellent question. Perhaps we should ask Mark Inglis for an opinion? (He's the double amputee who climbed Everest earlier this year - some may remember his name from the controversy surrounding the death of another Everest climber - David Sharp.)
After that, maybe we could check with Erik Weihenmayer for his thoughts on handicapped access to climbing stores? (First blind person to summit Everest back in 2001.)
Not trying to bust your chops or anything - your question is valid and very apropos for a topic involving handicapped accessability. (Perhaps even more apropos than you expected. ;-)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Back in the day, Sears used to do major business using mail order and catalogs...Are catalog print magazines required to print braille copies on store catalogs? Internet stores are basically interactive catalogs.
To take the argument further operating system vendors don't do enough to accomodate those with disabilities (such as vision impairment etc) and as such are not making them accessible to those users.
Following this logic charging down the garden path, $900-$2000 a copy for windows based screen reading software is creating an unfair hardship on the disabled. Perhaps the lack of affordable Braille displays (currently $1500-$5000 for braille displays) is the fault of the monitor manufacturer for unfairly creating an environment inaccessible to the visually impaired.
Not that I'd be opposed to cheaper accesibility devices through subsidy (only available for education that I was able to find in my research) but at some point you do have to draw the line. The argument is unfairness I supposed, discrimination etc. But in reality you have to create an alternative for those who cannot use the main stream approach. I would bet Target has already supplied this method. After all, I bet Target has a catalogue and an 800 number...
Why differentiate between businesses of different size? If book store A is owned by a multinational corporation then they aren't allowed to have the store in a place with stairs and no elevator. However, if the bookstore isn't owned by a multinational corporation then they are allowed to only have access via stairs? That seems a little unfair. If it's not worth it to put in a ramp/elevator, then it's not worth it, I shouldn't matter who owns the business. If the business will only make $2000 a year profit off people who can't use the stairs, but it will cost them $3000 to install and maintain the elevator, then why should they have to install it? It shouldn't matter who owns the business, because either way they are losing money by being forced to comply with the law. And the fact that there is exceptions makes this even worse. How is a business supposed to figure out if they're required to follow the ADA before they get sued, and have to spend thousands on lawyers.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Why attack the servers? Sounds to me like these HTML screen readers are the problem, not the servers.
If the screen reader cannot convey the information in a comprehensible manner, then it sounds like they are a broken, fraudulent product. If a visual browser can interpret modern CSS/xHTML and produce a meaningful layout, then perhaps the screen readers need to try a different approach. It's no longer just "reading" the screen like the old text-only HTML days. A modern day 'screen reader' (Really need a different term) should understand DIVs/SPANS/CSS, etc and take that into effect. Not our fault that the screen reader people cannot keep up with technology. If not, maybe we should just go back to text-only green screens and be done with it.
It's ridiculous that the government can force companies to do anything that isn't directly related to safety. Companies should be allowed to cater to whomever they want. If it's not economically feasible to cater to a minority, then it's unethical to force a company to do so. It is not societies job to help the disabled. I think we already do more than enough to benefit a tiny fraction of people. Wheel chair ramps, handicapped parking spots, special bathrooms, etc. These types of things are actually a really big drain on small businesses who can't renovate their bathroom out of petty cash. Handicapped parking is also a retarded idea. If you're in a CHAIR with WHEELS or a freaking MOTORIZED SCOOTER you should have to park the FURTHEST away. It takes less energy to roll than to walk. My mom's business has had to comply with all these things and has never had a disabled customer, ever.
"I'm going to sue you for discriminating against me because I'm [X]" (where X is some factor that would be highly politically incorrect to discriminate against one for)
"No, I'm discriminating against you because I don't like you."
"Why don't you like me?"
"Well, in part because I don't like being threatened to take action or else be sued, but mostly because I'm just an asshole."
"..." (blank, speechless stare)
"And since there's nothing illegal about being an asshole, it seems to me that you probably wouldn't win if you tried to sue me. Have a nice day."
"I will never shop here, ever!"
"As I had already indicated that I wasn't planning on catering to your whims that seemed evident to be conditional on your shopping here, it seems to me that you are merely stating the obvious."
"You're rude!"
"I told you I was an asshole."
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If every commerical website is required to be assessible to the blind, shouldn't every pizza parlor and other phone sales business be required to have a teletype number and phone for the deaf.
Unfortunately for you, the people replying do not understand the difference between having the individual stores provide the service and having a service exist.
I have no problem requiring Target to spend a couple hundred bucks to put ALT tags on their images.
Creating a whole separate blind-friendly site would be ridiculous, but requiring a reasonable effort on their part doesn't hurt my feelings at all. It's not hard, it doesn't cost lots of money, and it helps integrate persons with vision impairment (of whatever degree) into society.
Again: The Web is not a giant e-book reader anymore.
It should be.
The web was designed as a network of electronic documents. Anything that is not a document should not try to be shoehorned into such a framework. Database output can count as documents since that's really still just data, but interactive games or anything else that you could call a "program" is not what the web was meant for.
Online applications are neat. Having a standard, thin method of delivery for them is neat too. Maybe some of the modern technologies used to do that are neat too. But such things should not be conflated with the World Wide Web. Build something else and call it something else, or adapt something from the technology already built. Just don't conflate a document framework with an application framework.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"Spoken like an old web page designer who hasn't seen what the web can do."
Just because you can do it, does it mean you should do it? Bad web design has proliferated because it is so easy to do dark-purple-on-black or light-green-on-orange. But do those who do this ever bother to look at what they have created? The Web should be like an ebook reader. I doubt very much the ebook readers have inchworm-on-pumpkin color schemes and nasty funky fonts. The designers tend to remember the concept of readability more the web designers.
Where were you when the voynix came?
" I don't require it on anything directly exposed to the public, but once a user logs in to one of my sites it is almost always a requirement."
Other than an online cartoon, what do you have to do in Flash that can't be done in html?
Where were you when the voynix came?
If you want to try out what the online world is like for the blind and you have a Mac running OSX 10.4 or better you have a screen reader built into the OS. Here are the very simplified instructions for getting it running so you can test a website.
Make sure your using Safari as your browser.
Press command-F5, you will here the computer say "VoiceOver on"
You navigate using the control, option and arrow keys Hold down the control and option keys and then press the arrow keys to move through the controls.
When VoiceOver says "HTML content" press the control-option-shift-down arrow keys to interact with the content.
Now for the real test, control-option-shift-F11 will turn off the screen so you will learn what it is really like to try and navigate with out sight. pressing this command combination again will turn the screen back on.
To get to the menus do command-option-m once for the main menu, twice for the utility menu and three time for the spotlight menu.
Greg Kearney
What computer science course did you take? None of the ones I went to even mentioned people with a handicap. When building a website, designers don't consider the handicapped either. I'm willing to bet most designers don't even know how a screen reader works. The market will have to teach them. They aren't going to learn because of a law. Browsing the web is normal but it is by no means a necessary part of life. The proof is in the pudding, if it was necessary it would exist for everyone, handicapped or otherwise. You can't force the billions of websites on the internet to comply. Most of them couldn't afford it or wouldn't even know how to go about doing it.
It does take much to accommodate the blind at design and implementation time. Thats why people don't do it. They don't know how and their client or employer doesn't care so they don't offer it.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Sorry, my inner Libertarian won't sit quiet on this.
Target's website is a commercial site. It is there to provide goods for fees. It is not a public information portal. It is not an online government service. No law should mandate how they reach their customers. If they are alienating 200k potential customers, why should the government have a problem with that? I'm sure Walmart or any other competitor would be happy to accomodate the optically-challenged. Why don't we let the market govern how accessible a commercial website should be?
Certainly there will be those who will cite discrimination. But successful businesses have evolved beyond the stupidity of discrimination into the glory of greed. No successful company will intentionally employ discrimination tactics when their competitors will gladly take in the outcasts (and their money).
Same goes to all you Flash whiners. If you don't like sites that employ site exclusively (I'm one of you), don't use it. You work hard for your money. Every dollar/euro/pound/peso/yen/yuan/etc is a vote. Use it to change the world.
weird that of the two of us, I'm the troll. . . Oh well, as a +2 troll I must say I win.
For the record I'm not against ADA at all. My problem is that Target is handicapable, and they provide very reasonable accommodation. The accommodation being that if Blind Person 'A' goes to Target Store 'B', I can guarantee Employee 'C' will provide any and all assistance to 'A' for fear of being fired by Employee Supervisor 'D'. 'D' in this case would more than likely be complying with rules set forth by Regional Manager 'E', who answer's to CEO 'F', who wants his business to stay afloat and doesn't want to pay a hefty fine set forth by Justice of the Supreme Court 'G'.
I don't know where I was going with that, I'm sure I could turn it into a joke about 'A' not even having the chance to be offended by my post since he can't read but that would be awfully mean of me.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Flash always ignores my browser default text settings. It also makes noises when I have configured the browser to be silent. On top of that, there are bugs in it that mean that highlight,copy,paste doesn't work. Of course, these would not be a problem if the flash users followed the basic rule to never use Flash as part of the UI, and only use it as part of media to be viewed or a game to be played.. If they followed that rule, it would get rid of the frustration of having to fight against a Flash UI that fails at following ui/web standards.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I wonder if there is a parallel to be drawn between accessibility concerns and perhaps multi-language sites? If your country of origin (and of hosting?) has bilingualism laws are they a template to establish the same/similar laws for accessibility?
;-)
Poor you. Welcome to the EU, where there's something like twenty different languages!
Until recently, good old ISO-8859-15 was just about good enough in terms of character encoding, but now with all the new member states and their weird-and-wonderful accented letters, full-blown Unicode is necessary. Recent programming I've done has had to be fully UTF-8 clean - and it's really satisfying when a fully-automated email system manages to send someone's name with all accents intact.
So... Two languages, you say?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
the screen readers will be reading "spacer" "spacer" "spacer" for three hours.
You should throw in a "MUSHROOM MUSHROOM" here and there to break up the monotony.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Boo Hoo to all of you developers out there that are hating this idea because "do you reallize how much extra work I'll have to do!??!!" This is a pretty dumb reason. When the Sarbanes-Oxley went into effect, how many companies were pissed because of the extra money they had to spend on auditing and fixing their financials to be compliant? Just about all of them. Does this mean the law was bad? Absolutely not. Any law that enforces accountablility for the accuracy of a company's financials is a good one. Is this ADA law a bad idea? Not at all. The web is a big part of everyone's lives now, including the disabled. Not happy about all of the extra work you'll have to do? Then how about you start charging more for sites since it will take you longer and hire more developers to work on it and test it. If you look closely, a lot of "compliance" laws end up making people more money. SOX gave auditers and IT consulting companies record profits. How about you start offering compliance services to sites that aren't compliant? You could charge a pretty penny for that, or recommend a new site from the ground up made by yours-truly.
Imagine if we never enacted any quality control or safety laws because "oh my god do you know how much work that would be!?"
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
That's one terrible designed site. I had to wait about 15 seconds for a front page with hardly anything on it to load. Once you click on the option, it brings up another standards-defiant crippled screen with no browser menu on it. The thing even has popups in it (nicely blocked by my browser). What sites bombard users with useless popups? Badly-designed quickie Geocities pages, porn sites, and JK Rowling's page. I never could get anywhere in it. I will say that if Rowling had her site designed as an inscrutable puzzle, she did the job well. Otherwise it is a great example of how Flash does not belong in a UI fo a web page. At all.
Where were you when the voynix came?
MOD PARENT UP!!
"You don't have nor should you have a "right" to open a business. "
That's utter nonsense. What is your basis for determining that you get to choose what people are and are not allowed to sell to one another?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Sorry, I didn't hear that, would you repeat please?
Do you have anything else? The worst thing you have seen for left handers is the design of Apple laptops and that assertation is based soley on the placement on a sigle key? A key that, unlike in Windows, isn't really a requirement to function in the OS?
What about Microsoft mice? Many are industrial-designed only to mold to a right hand comfortably. Or motorcycles having the throttle on the right side?
"Define bad law for me."
A law which places unjust restrictions on the actions of citizens, gives government too much control over citizens, or does not function the way it was intended due to poor wording.
"Is a law bad because it requires businesses to accommodate ALL customers, regardless of whether or not they can see, hear or walk?"
I've never heard of a store which doesn't serve blind, deaf, or wheelchair bound customers. However, if the customer is unable to get to the store, or is unable to communicate with the staff, then the store may be unable to serve them. At that point, it is the store's decision as to whether it is economically feasible and cost-justifiable for them to attempt to make adjustments such that they can serve those customers with specific disabilities. Oh wait, no it isn't, the government has made that decision for them. The government has told citizens that they must output monies they may or may not have, and may or may not ever earn back to make special accomodations for a small segment of society that unfortunately has some disability or another.
"Or are you a part of the group of pseudo-libertarians who think that government should butt out?"
Show me one thing the government does better than citizens and perhaps us 'pseudo-libertarians' will butt out ourselves. Thus far, I've yet to witness a single thing the government does well without screwing up royally. Government is all but worthless at basically all levels, and should only exist as a necessary evil to coordinate the few necessary things individuals would likely choose not to deal with themselves if given the choice - like national defense.
"If it wasn't for ADA, my wife (who is confined to a wheelchair) and I would be extremely limited in where we go, what we do, and where we can shop, eat, or stay."
I'm sorry your wife is confined to a wheelchair, but that is not the fault of businesses, and it's not their responsibility to try and erase her handicap. Tell me, have you sued all your friends who haven't put in handicap ramps and doors at their private homes? Isn't it their responsibility to put out whatever money is necessary to make those places accessible to your wife? After all, the wheelchair musn't prevent her or you from doing anything in the world you want to do, so they, like businesses, should be forced to spend money making 'reasonable accomodations', right? What if you and your wife want to go rock climbing? Should companies that do rock climbing expeditions be forced to assist blind, deaf, and wheelchair bound customers even when they risk life and limb doing so? Where do the so-called 'reasonable accomodations' end?
"So it seems a bit ridiculous to you that Target was the target, and they want them to make the site accessible to the blind. It seems even more ridiculous to me that Target wouldn't do that in the first place (it may cost a bit more, but seeing as how they are a "good corporate citizen (compared to WalMart)", it would be befit their image."
First of all, the second we started looking at corporations as 'citizens', we screwed no one but ourselves. That confers on them rights they simply do not deserve. Secondly, who in the hell am I, are you, is the government to tell Target what their website must have on it? Frankly, if Target replaced their index file with a plaintext "Go Fuck Yourself" (which would be screen reader compliant, of course), they would be perfectly within their rights. I'm sorry there are blind people in the world. Y'know what? That's not Target's fault. Target didn't make those people blind. As such, Target as no responsibility for them. Neither does Walmart or anyone else.
It's a handicap. People just don't see to get what the goddamn word means these days - it means there are some things you just cannot do. I think it's wonderful that companies have created screen readers; I really do. I think that was a brilliant business move by shrewd individuals who've cashed i
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You never know when they're going to figure out whom you were and you're pulled over for :-)
some traffic violation... Never fun to have your ticket escalated on legitimate, but otherwise
normally overlooked things- or detained for a little while. They might just take the
opportunity to show you how MUCH of an "Asshat" they really are.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Fortunately your rights stop when they start infringing on my rights.
Um, rights are negative rights. Government "shall not infringe on...". Positive "rights" are not true rights and are really entitlements. A "right" to a free education does not exist. That's an entitlement. To be sure, free education is a very important entitlement that we cannot do without, but it's still an entitlement, not a right.
Government should step in only if the market fails to address the problem. For the most part, the market takes care of itself. The cost of lost business (given how much big corporations spend on advertising to lure in all sorts of people, they do place a lot of value on snagging every last customer) and the cost of a tarnished image (which can counteract any marketing or brand-building and cause a loss of regular non-disabled customers who turn away in protest) is generally much higher than the cost of putting in a ramp or a wide door. For smaller businesses, this cost equation may work out differently. And so they should decide for themselves if it's worth it. It is not the government's job to decide for them if it's worth it, and it is most certainly not the government's job to then shove the government's evaluation of the situation down their throats.
If people think that this is a moral travesty, that's fine. Vote with your wallet, so that they will lose not only the disabled customers but the regular customers. But to resort to the coercive force that is government to do your bidding is not acceptable.
Well, Target was stupid. The cost for a big megacorp like Target to do their web design right is low compared to the cost of 1) lost disabled business and 2) lost non-disabled business from people who are morally outraged. And thus, the market takes care of the problem because the market will punish them by denying them profits that they could have had if they just did things right. Why government needs to get involved is beyond me.
(I'm an Asian, BTW)...
1/ Serving Asians imposes no additional costs compared to serving non-Asians.
2/ Not serving Asians denies the business the revenues from the Asian population.
3/ Therefore, the business loses revenue and does not save significantly on cost.
4/ A rational, profit-maximizing business would be idiotic to not serve Asians (and indeed, when the South decides to collectively lock the blacks out of the economy, they are shooting themselves in the foot economically, but I never said that people are always rational).
5/ This equation does not work for disabled people because installing that ramp and widening that door and printing those braille menus incurs a lot of extra cost. For big megacorps, the extra cost makes sense because they can easily absorb those costs and because they stand to lose a lot from poor public image and from shutting out the disabled people themselves. But small businesses are not big megacorps.
In either case, government intervention is undesirable. In the case of Asians, the market takes care of the problem. In the case of disabled people, the government is forcing a one-size-fits-all solution down people's throats, regardless of whether it makes any sense for the given situation.
Person claims balance problems, doesn't appear to have any...
Person claims vision issues, but doesn't appear to have any...
If the person's obviously disabled, you can tell. The legitimate ones that have hidden problems, for
the most part, offer extra info (We typically do, unless someone's being an Asshat
about it.) and are willing to discuss it further. People can have siezure dogs, legitimately. People
can have balance dogs. And the list goes on and on. All legitimate. Typically, they will have a brightly
colored vest, yellow, orange, or blue- with "Service Animal" and sometimes "Please don't pet me, I'm working!"
on the vest. Some of them will have a tag with "Service Animal" and even the certification on the tag or
collar. The honest people, typically, if you're nice about it, will tell you more.
You can ask if they're disabled.
You can ask if the animal is a Service Animal.
That's IT. Asking more when it's not offered is harassment/assult (depending on the nature of how
it's done...) and in violation of the law.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Still don't have a life I see.
Go ahead and protest, it's not going to convince anyone who has seen you post 30 times in a day.
You're a loser. A socially stunted, intellectually deficient, computer addicted loser.
And every tme you post you prove I'm right.
So post your stupid puerile reply. I love being proved right.
My site has a bookmark search engine, Atom+XSLT based news page, some snippets of third-party JavaScript, and a couple static pages. All of these are WCAG level double-A compliant, and it's not difficult to keep it that way.
At work, I've voluntarily changed some pages to be valid, accessible XHTML+CSS, at the same time reducing the markup significantly (79%, 82%, and 60%, respectively), all the while keeping the old layout. The new one had a few additional advantages over the old ones:
All this finally convinced the other developers that it was a good idea to switch.
The bottom line is that accessibility is not hard (you can even learn a lot from validators), and if you think semantics while developing, it's almost automatic.
PS: Ironic that /. doesn't support <abbr> or @title on links.
Two magic words change it all...
PROTECTED CLASS.
Your examples and analogies don't use protected classes- you CAN make a business that does cater solely to blue eyed redheads.
They're not a protected class and it's no longer really a public accommodation, when you do that, now is it?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Comparing this to copyright/RIAA is not appropriate. The crux of the anti-ADA argument is that government has no business regulating this stuff in the first place, and because the market can provide a solution of its own ("vote w/ wallet"), then let the free market handle it.
This is NOT how copyright/RIAA works. The RIAA derives its power from the government because copyright is a government-issued monopoly that breaks one aspect of free market economics (music is no longer being sold at the marginal price) in an attempt to fix another aspect of free market economics (the market's failure to reward positive externalities). It's two totally different issues, two totally different markets, and two totally different sets of background principles.
Luckily, my house has stairs, so they'll be stuck milling around outside in their wheelchairs when they come to get me.
If this is the extend of your defenses than I hope the Daleks are not involved.
This raises some interesting questions. In particular a website is mostly, perhaps exclusively, expressive content. I think there is a plausible argument that the ADA act amounts to compelled speech in this case and thus is unenforceable when applied to web sites.
Also remember that the ADA only requires that someone make reasonable accommodations. If building a disabled accessible website is impossible or nearly so with the technology the company choose to use it likely won't have to be compliant. But since you could always add an additional text only website this is a problem.
I'm very conflicted over the ADA act. On the one hand disabled people clearly shouldn't be screwed over and ADA protections have heavily helped them. On the other hand it seems not only disturbing that the ADA is so intrusive but downright backwards that the ADA penalizes companies for offering more service. A law that says you must offer everyone the same level of service encourages people to make that level universally low. It means that if I'm a company thinking of going online I either have to do it all at once or not go online at all. I don't really know if this applies to sufficiently small companies however.
I think I would favor a replacement for the ADA that instead of requiring compliance pays (or gives serious tax breaks) companies to be compliant. Yes this would be expensive but we are paying the same price through increased good cost anyway. Perhaps we should just pay the disabled people directly and let them decide if they want to give the money to corporations to become compliant or keep it and use it themselves.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Ever notice how many people use those automatic door opening buttons designed for people who use wheelchairs?
It's awfully convenient when your hands are full - even for a person who has complete use of their arms/legs.
Most accomodations designed to benefit people who have physical/mental challenges actually benefit everyone.
While I'm often weary of government intervention, there just seem to be certain problems that only government intervention can solve. For example, it used to be legal to smoke in a NY State pub. You might think that if there was demand for a smoke-free pub, such a place would exist, but believe me - NO such place existed. If you wanted to drink, you also breathed in smoke, and that was just the way things were. Now it is not legal to smoke in a NY State pub, and I have to confess that it is probably one of the most wonderful things that ever happened for me. My quality of life has gone way up - not just because I like to have a drink once and a while, but because the restaurants that adjoin these pubs are now also smoke-free. Now going out to eat is a geniunely pleasant experience. Personally, my patronage has skyrocketed.
I know it's always a slippery slope, but unfettered capitalism might as well be fuedalism.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
That is true.
But Target's failure to comply with basic design principles isn't an excuse for government intervention, either.
I'm just interested to hear any input from the blind about this matter!
It's worse than you think it is.
It's not that they get a dozen or more dingbats in, they associate "Service Animal" with "Seeing Eye Dog" and don't go
any further. I've seen restaurant managers try to send someone with a balance dog out the door because "seeing eye dogs
are the only ones allowed" or "You're not blind...". (My wife gets the "you're not blind" one a LOT...).
I've seen all kinds of reactions, all of them the WRONG ones- and it matters little unless they've got the seeing eye
harness, which everyone understands and has for some time now. We've got the vest on our dog and we still get accosted
for varying reasons (like the ones I've mentioned...) that have little to do with what you state.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The more accessible a site is for the disable, the more accessible it is for mobile devices. Which makes supporting accessiblity a plus all the way around.
The biggest thing that annoys me on websites is the use of java, flash, or anything other than html for links.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
The thing about a Microsoft mouse is that it's fairly cheap and so you can replace it easily. Not so with a built-in trackpad. As to it not being a requirement to function in the OS, perhaps you can tell me how to get a list of suggestions for an incorrect spelling without using it. Of course, this issue doesn't exist in the newer machines, which allow you to control-click by holding two fingers on the trackpad...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In reality, I suspect that there's a few protected classes that don't need it anymore, honestly. Disabled, though, probably needs to be for a a long while yet because of the nature of things. But you'd not be in trouble if you up-front said "Blacks Only", even if you're a blue eyed, red headed person. Again, it's not the same thing as the dollar store that was in a place of public accommodation that the assault on my wife occured.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I don't recall ever getting a mail advertisement or seeing a billboard that was blind-accessible. I suspect the direct marketer's association might have something to say about this, because a poor ruling could significantly affect us all.
What they should do is play in 10 languages "if you are handicapped and unable to read this site, please call 1-800-foo-barz for assistance on ordering" and leave it at that.
The Death of Common Sense
Assuming you mean this, then Common Sense is truly dead, laid to rest in her family plot along side her husband Critical Thinking, and her daughter, Common Decency.
Had she been alive, Common Sense would have dictated that the nuns revise their plans so that their operations could have been carried out from the ground floor and either close the upper floors entirely (gutting the top floor and turning it into a private garden would have been a nice touch), or spend the money on a lift and recoup it by renting out rooms on the upper floors to hard working low income people who would have appreciated reasonable rental costs in NYC.
The main problem is that it give people a "right" to something as opposed to giving them a right to be free of something.
The right to be equal can also be expressed as the right to be free from inequality. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and the idea of allowing the handicapped to participate in society by being employed and engaging in commerce rather than soaking up Medicaid/Medicare and welfare checks must have seemed a good one at the time. I wonder what went so wrong.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
No. Seriously. No.
... as opposed to me after a bottle of scotch) then they are going to loose customers who can't read the site. Simple.
And if you didn't get that, let me put it another way, STOP TRYING TO IMPOSE YOUR STUPID BACKWARDS LAWS ON MY INTERNET.
If sites aren't viewable by the blind (sorry, vision-impared
What next, how about you legislate that every american-hosted site must be readable in english to avoid desciminating against the 'multi-lingual-impared'?
1. Find a lawyer and a blind person.9 /
2. Sue the wealthiest of the mostly inaccessible 100 Million Web Sites http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/01/20221
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Of course, you could also add this to your arsenal of reasons to switch to CSS based, standards compliant, web design.
If I'd been that articulate in the original post, maybe it wouldn't have been marked flamebait.
Actually around here... yeah it would have. :-)
>then it wouldn't be so costly.
"SO COSTLY?" Spoken like a true authoritarian. I am a one person company, we don't use flash, we have plenty of text.
Never-the-less, *I* don't have the time to find out exactly what the requirements are for each state in the US (much less each country in the world) or even interpret all the vagueness of the ADA.
The sites ARE MY SITES. The sites belong to no one else. If I choose to ignore part of the market (e.g. I don't test with older browsers any more), that is MY CHOICE. It isn't up to some piss-ant administrator, let alone JUDGE somewhere to tell me that I have to spend 50 hours a quarter checking the laws.
Look, don't get me wrong, I think my sites are quite accessible, ALT tags etc. I try to make them accessible to blind people - not because some idiot TELLS ME I have to, but because (a) I want them to be able to enjoy the sites, and (b) I think it is the right thing to do. BUT I don't KNOW whether they comply fully with all the laws everywhere in the world. Nor do I have the time to do so.
It is pure and simple some person telling me that they know better than each of us what is best, and it is BS.
It is just as if someone came into your house and said that you need wider doors to accomodate a wheelchair that you might need some time and that you need to rearrange your furniture so that a blind person can walk through the house.
Frankly I am sick and tierd of these minority groups causing a fuss over anything they can. If you got a problem then fix it yourself or fund the people who can. Why should I waste my time and money making a site that is accessible to blind people when they are such a small portion of the possible market. Sure when there is enough blind people to make a dent in the online market then i think you will see websites making their sites accessible to the blind.
It is a violation of basic property rights (and by definition fascist) for a government entity to direct a private company to serve certain customers if they so choose not to do so.
Target should be chastised by users for being idiotic, but it shouldn't be the government's business.
Derek Greene
Maybe the idea is to try to make life equally inconvenient for everybody. Eventually we'll all have to go everywhere blindfolded and earplugged, with our hands and feet bound. And drunk so we're not too smart or coordinated.
Ah, Americans and our infinite capacity to forget history. It's breathtaking, really.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Here's a scary thought, applying said logic to the DMV.
That is fine, but let the individual business make the decision, not the government.
Regards,
MBC1977,
since when does anybody tell me who I must do buisiness with in a capitalistic society. ADA infringes on freedom of enterprise by forcing me to conduct (possibly unprofitable) buisiness and unwillingly make a trade that I don't want to. not catering to 100% of the population is an inherent right of anybody in a capitalistic society. Extending your argument, since a business must cater to 100% of the population, should they also cater to the ones incapable of paying them? are you sure you aren't confusing socialism with capitalism?
What's the reason?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Target should fire it's designers. Target wouldn't be in a lawsuit if the designers would adhere to W3 HTML Strict Standards. ALT is required for a Valid HTML Strict or XHTML markup. I am glad 'National Federation of the Blind' doing this. It will encourager designers everywhere to start doing the right thing. NFB could focus on Web Design corporations as well. Flash programmer could design the movie to Read Button text or block text out loud. And those who hate Flash, you must really hate Youtube since the movies there use Flash.
\
"It is a violation of basic property rights (and by definition fascist) for a government entity to direct a private company to serve certain customers if they so choose not to do so."
If there's one thing fascism was known for, it was for requiring citizens to give fair and equal treatment to the disabled and members of minority groups. Why, I have no idea how someone could have gotten the opposite impression!
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Yeah, but Flash developers are like lawyers: it's that 95% that make the good 5% look bad."
Marty McFly: "The Web is so.... fast, and it's hard to find a real bad site!"
Doc Brown: "The internet system works swiftly in the future now that they've abolished all Flash."
Where were you when the voynix came?
And those who hate Flash, you must really hate Youtube since the movies there use Flash."
Flash has its place, as I said, in such things as content, not the UI of a site. Youtube does a great job with this: the flash is limited to the "movie view" windows. You don't find it in the hyperlinks, IMG, or other basic HTML elements where Flash is clearly not needed. It's the bad Flash programmers that don't know where to quit. They'd be the ones who'd trash with Flash everything on Youtube, not just the little movie windows.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"which allow you to control-click by holding two fingers on the trackpad..."
Don't tell me.... is those one of those that registers click-button presses when you accidentally bump your finger on the touchpad? Those are worst of all, and constantly register mis-firing. A real mouse does not register bogus clicks when you move the pointer, nor should a trackpad. When I see such a machine, I'm quickly digging into the settings to get rid of the possibility of bogus mouse clicks generated from the pad surface.
Where were you when the voynix came?
amen to that.
"When I'm faced with something I can't handel - I see if I can't find an alternative, the same would be for Target if my color blindness cause issues there. I'd go to amazon, or walmart, or "bobs house of good stuff"... whatever... It's stupid to create such a fuss over this. "
I love Target. Their green bullseye logo is so distinctive.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Of course ADA infringes on your freedom. It does so inorder to "promote the general welfare". There are plenty of laws on the books that infringe on your freedom. Obviously you don't own a business, in the U.S. or anywhere else, or you'd realize this. A few examples:
Have you tried this? There is also this utility, which appears to be shareware.
Also, It might be possible to pull up the list with a function key, as F5 will pull the autocomplete.
And I'm sure there are utilities out there you can use to remap the control key to a more convienent key on the keyboard. Here's one.
Not to be mean here, but I seemed to have found quite a bit in five minutes of Google searching, two of them open-source solutions no less. What have you been doing?
How can the computer illiterate buy things online with this technologically discriminatory system? It's such a shame that the sisabled get laws to protect them while the masses of unabled citizens are left out in the cold.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
Not only do you have the "right to open a business" you have the "right to a profit" just ask the neo-cons here.
"Not only do you have the "right to open a business" you have the "right to a profit" just ask the neo-cons here"
I've only ever seen one neocon on Slashdot, ever. As for a profit, as long as you earn it with the consent of those involved, what is the problem? This sounds like traditional basic rights and freedoms, not neo- anything.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Should Online Stores Be Subject To ADA?"
Why yes. I believe they should brush between every meal. Why do you ask?
"And every tme you post you prove I'm right"
Thanks again.
The greatest injustice of all. How do you rotten-souled, life-hating, whining wimps sleep at night? Disability can strike at YOU any moment. Falling on your head can give you tramautic brain injury. Falling on your back can give you a spinal cord injury that could leave you barely alive on a ventilator. Yes, slashdot morons, even YOU grow old. YOU can develop Parkinsons or Alzheimers. YOU can have a myocardial infarction or a cerebrovascular accident (I'm sure you dead-heads wouldn't know what those terms mean). Disability is going to be a part of YOUR life, whether you like it or not, because YOU are going to live a long, and hopefully, meaningful life.
I'm normally very sympathetic to the type of argument you and a number of others are making in this thread - no one should be required to undertake burdensome measures to accomodate others unwillingly. But in this case, I think you're all wrong. Because this doesn't require any extraordinary or burdensome measures at all - it only requires that people purportedly offering services through a web site in fact do that. HTML was designed for accessibility from the ground up, and if your site isn't accessible YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
For handicapped people, using an online store is probably much more viable than going to a store. Using a computer doesn't necessarily require moving around, driving, reading signs, talking to cashiers... The only way web pages aren't accessible is when the developers go out of their way to make it "pretty" or something and break accessibility in the process. Those people don't have any business writing e-commerce software. And as another poster pointed out, many retailers are online-only, or have products or promotions that are only available online.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
No, I am talking about the book "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K Howard. ISBN: 051731696X
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that one already. It's called Harrison Bergeron
One notable example where colour is often the only means for providing information is in the use of an LED for indicating status. There are times I curse the invention of the multi-colour LED, because electronics almost always use them, and I almost never can tell the colours apart. Green/red - I sometimes can, but green/yellow/orange/red all look very similar. Sure, it's not something that's caused me a great deal of grief, but I can never tell when my battery charger is finished.
I'm not so sure people design specifically around colour blindness. I think the factor working in our favour is that some degree colour blindness is really quite common. The Wikipedia entry on colour blindness claims that as many as 10% of men have red-green colour blindness. I'd imagine most major products go through many more than 10 people throughout the entire process, so major colour problems get pointed out along the way.
We're talking about Target here....the real store came first...the online store is just a supplement that came later.
Just because the online store is potentially more convenient doesn't mean that it must be the way that is ADA accessible. The Target storefronts are viable alternatives to the online store. It is not incumbent on Target to provide a viable alternate OTHER than a storefront.
There's an arcade game I played once (I can't remember the name) that was a bit like Snood (I guess Snood adapted the idea for its own use). Anyway, I got trounced by the person I was playing against after a single level. The reason? I couldn't tell any of the colours apart, and the shapes were too close to quickly identify (or maybe shapes weren't distinct, I don't remember).
That doesn't bother me so much as playing FPS games where the enemies are distinguished by colour. Call of Duty is an example of one that gives me no end of trouble. I simply cannot tell the enemies and allies apart (aside from the fact the enemies tend to shoot at me)... I'll watch other people play and be astounded by how quickly they recognize friend from foe. It doesn't keep me from playing the game (or enjoying it), but it is a real problem.
World of Warcraft has the same problem with character labels. IIRC, a non-PvP enemy, a PvP ally, and a non-PvP ally all look similar enough to me that it would cost me some time if I had to figure out which they were. I still played the game, though!
Why is being Black the business's problem? If you want to ban all Black people from eating in your restaurant, that should be ok. You don't have nor should you have the right to eat wherever you like.
Blacks don't require special provisions in order for stores to be able to provide service to them (well, except for extra security guards maybe). However, handicapped people require special accommodations which costs the businesses money.
The problem with this approach is that, like supporting other OSes or browsers, most businesses just say they can do without the 5 or 10% they miss by not supporting them. Happens all the time and is an undeniable fact of business life. They look at the market as primarily global and don't care if they are unavailable to a few percent since they got the majority. They, of course, right now are loading the gun which will eventually shoot themselves in the foot with mobile devices such as PDAs, BlackBerrys, etc. which can't support flash for the most part! They are just being too short sighted to see this yet, within 2 years they will probably be glad they accomodated these ADA requirements since it will go most of the way to supporting these additional devices as well.
Keep in mind that the above statements come from a conservative person by nature who is still pro global trade and not a big fan of all applications of the ADA, plus I strongly consider goverment regulations as a truely last resort option. However I recognize that simply allowing status que de-facto standards to run everything isn't a good idea, some entity with clout (trusted industry trade group or if all else fails government) must set some baseline standards to be followed.
My $0.02 worth..
BC
* Nevermind that the quote was from a fictional character, the premise is sound.
Only if you do it while clicking. It has one button. Every click requires you to press the button. If you have zero or one fingers on the trackpad it registers as a left click. If you have two then it registers as a double click.
Apple are about the only people who make laptops with trackpads I consider usable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The ADA is unconstitutional.
No where in Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution is Congress authorized to legislate employment/labor laws (unless it happens to be across state lines). Congress is also not authorized to specify building design to residential or commercial facilities. Congress is also not authorized to legislate telcos within state bounds, nor can they dictate to state governments the design of their buildings either.
Besides all of that, those classified as 'disabled' in the US is roughly 20%. There is obviously a niche market for these people and the free market would begin to cater to them obviously as it would be profitable to do so.
Lessons?
1- It's illegal anyway
2- The free market will handle it
Libertas in infinitum
Your premise is wrong. You can detect disabled users. You do it in the same way you accomodate other languages, you simply ask their preference early on and set a cookie.
You're right, of course. However, the way I see it, after giving certain buisnesses tax cuts, then turn around and give them the equivlant of corporate welfare, I think the government has every right to insist on certain policies.
The worst thing is that there is a completely superfluous newline key right by the left arrow key (on the right hand side of the keyboard) which is very easy to accidentally hit, which could easily have been a second control key completely eliminating this problem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... to just kill all the blind people and pay their loved ones hush money?
Who are you, or anyone, to mandate that a legal burden be placed on every website designer to include certain features solely to benefit a tiny minority of users? Does this mean that if Joe Average who wants to create his own website to show off his beer can collection, then he must, by law and under threat of criminal penalty, conform to someone else's arbitrary page design specifications? If Joe pays for a domain name and server space out of his own pocket, then that website is his to do with as he damn well pleases; YOU didn't pay for it, so YOU have no right whatsoever to tell him how to design his site. Sure, his site might turn out to be complete and utter crap, but that's his right as the person who paid for the site.
As for business websites, if they fail to accommodate the visually impaired then they will lose their business, as well they should. And the impaired have every right to take their business elsewhere; that is their choice. Regardless of one's physical disability or lack thereof, the one thing they always have is personal choice.
In which case you vote with your wallet by not partonizing them.
Or patronizing them... Even if you ignore a fairly significant part of the population, you won't necessarily go out of business. A minority is easy to ignore, especially one that's very small. It's not like the all white diners went out of business because they didn't serve "colored" people.
There is no right to be equal or be free from inequality, no matter how you put it. That requires that everyone be given the same start in life, and that in turn requires theft and aggression on the part of the government. As an example, you would use force or the threat of force to steal from the rich and give the stolen wealth to the poor. But notice how you are now unequally persecuting some citizens and not others. Oh the irony.
Nobody has the right to be equal. But everyone has (or should have) the right to the free pursuit of bettering themselves and their situations. That right however stops (or should stop) where it begins to infringe on the right of others to do the same.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
Exactly, I can't tell you how many times I've felt bad playing FPS games, looking on the horizon and killing my partner... OR rounding a corner, thinking this guy was with me and getting shot in the face. Ahh well, all part of the fun I suppose. :-)
I've never seen a braile price tag in a physical store, so why is the web any different?
I submitted a story about this lawsuit agains target, and the press release from NFB that was the source for the story, over a month ago.
It was rejected.
Way to go slashdot! Keep everyone up to date! You're at least a month behind, but who cares, its news! Except its not "NEW" at all at this point.
That's like forcing Mom & Pop stores having to hire operators to be on standby so deaf people can call the store.
Hi, I'm an architect. I deal with building codes on a daily basis. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is civil rights legislation in the same vein as the Voting Rights Act. As a gross simplification, the ADA merely states that thou shalt not discriminate against persons with disabilities. It is not building code legislation.
Now, this is a pretty broad decree. How exactly does this apply to the real world? The ADA does not say. In this way, it is very much like most of the Constitution, which is long on general guidelines but rather short on specifics of implementation. So the Constitution says the legislative branch makes the laws and the executive branch implements them (current realities notwithstanding). In response to the vagueness of the ADA, the Department of Justice (the executive branch organization charged with enforcing the ADA\) came up with a document called the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines, or ADAAG. (Note that this is being replaced by a new document that combines the requirements of the ADA with the ABA, or Architectural Barriers Act, which is itself much more like building code legislation but still leaves a whole lot of specifics floating in the breeze; it also incorporates ANSI 117.1, which is kind of a predecessor to the ABA and ADAAG.)
So Congress passed the ADA, which says you can't discriminate, and the DoJ published the ADAAG, which basically says "if you do (or don't do) these things then you are not discriminating." But one of the most fun things about the ADA is that, like the Constitution itself, it is constantly being reinterpreted by the Courts. So even if you've complied with the specific building code-like requirements of the ADAAG, you can still be sued and lose for failing to comply with the ADA, because a judge somewhere can rule that, well, you know, on second thought, maybe 34 inches is too high for a countertop after all... And like that, all of those countertops that were perfectly accessible yesterday are suddenly discriminating today.
I'll let someone else explain the history of the Interstate Commerce clause and why you're mistaken about its reach, even though you've given the obvious (and probably intended) interpretation of it. In summary, the federal government went on a power grab following the Civil War, and courts have not been exceptionally sympathetic to "states' rights" issues ever since, never mind giving a hoot about the 10th Amendment.
Please understand that that "20% disabled niche market" of yours could just as easily be described as a "20% black niche market" or any other subdivision of humanity. Remember that the ADA is about civil rights, not about building codes.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
You can also turn on Sticky Keys (which has been part of the Mac OS since at least System 7.5), so you wouldn't have to hold control at exactly the same time you were clicking, but I thought that seemed a little overdoing it for left-handedness.
That would be the one in this picture you're talking about? That is an Enter key, which actually is not the same as the Return key, even thought PCs give both the same name. It's the Enter key one would have with the numeric keypad on a normal desktop keyboard. The reason it is included is some software actually uses the keys for different functions, so without an Enter key some software would be less usable (don't ask me to name any, but I know they exist).
You don't have to use the spell checker as you describe. You can simply go to Edit->Spelling->Spelling and run the spell checker as an all-at-once command like an old word processor (might need to select you text block first). So it not like the spell checker is completely worthless if you can't control-click easily. Also, given that all shipping laptops have the two finger control-click function now, you're really beating a dead horse here.
If you have a laptop that didn't include the new track pad functionality, get the free utility to add similar functionality, or get the free remapper and make the "Enter" another "Control" key. You excuse the Micorsoft mouse on the fact it can be easily replaced. Well, you can similarly buy a two button mouse for your laptop, too.
You're talking to someone who doesn't know how to touch type but can hunt-n-peck 35wpm. I could lose a couple fingers and still type this well. To bill this "The worst thing I have seen for left-handers" is just Apple-hating. Fix your issue and move on. Apple has people with real disabilities to think about.
Hmm. In the State of California, you should be more concerned with complying with Chapter 11[a/b] of the California Building Code than with the ADA (or more correctly, with the ADA Accessbility Guidelines). I'm interested in the "statutory" requirements for 100-square-foot bathrooms. I routinely design California-compliant accessible bathrooms well under that mark (about 8 feet by 10 feet). While I'll freely admit that this is twice the size of a "standard" bathroom (8 feet by 5 feet), you shouldn't kid yourself that someone in a wheelchair would be able to even enter such a bathroom, let alone be able to actually manuever within it. First hand experience: you need about 30 inches for wheelchair clearance, and most older homes have bathroom doors between 28 and 30 inches -- but the door hangs into that width, so in reality you only have about 26 to 28 inches. So California requires 32 clear inches for accessibility, which means at least a 34 inch door... Anyway, there's nothing preventing you from adding creative storage opportunities (wardrobe or linen closet?) in your fire-truck-sized accessible bathroom. A well-designed accessible bathroom should feel a little roomy but hardly excessive; anything that falls into that latter category is probably the result of a lazy developer who, fed up with trying to figure out something complicated, just decides to throw a whole lot of floor space at the problem because that makes it go away. Note that the requirement for most new apartments to be either accessible or "adaptable" came about because those same developers (those damn free marketeers ;-) kept locating the accessible units in the "undesirable" locations next to garbage dumpsters, elevator shafts, and so forth, in clear violation of the "equivalent facilitation" mandate of earlier laws.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Thank you John Cleese.
(or was it The Who ?)
Car manufactures should need to redesign their cars so that blind people can drive them. It's simply allowing handicapped people to live, participate, and work to contribute to themselves and their community just like everyone else.
They arent refusing to serve anyone, they are refusing to go out of their way to cater to a particular type of customer. If an asian came into the restaurant and demanded they cook him a specific dish, should the restaurant be required to cook that dish at extra cost to themselves?
Who said anything about personal web sites? Perhaps you're also thinking that I insist that you make your home wheelchair friendly too?
You make it sound like a huge burden. It's not. Try building these things properly from scratch and it becomes second-nature and no extra effort... just like putting proper comments in code.
My problem with accomodating the blind is this: I absolutely HATE sites that make all sorts of unnecessary sounds. The last thing I want is anything but my music or sounds from games coming out of my speakers. Honestly, think about it: you're surfing over to newegg while listening to something soft (in the middle of the night) when all of a sudden you hear "WELCOME TO NEWEGG!" blaring out of your speakers. I would never EVER visit that site again.
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
Car manufactures should need to redesign their cars so that blind people can drive them.
OK. When they have driving licenses, they'll do that.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Target could always just shut down its website in protest until the case is over, and redirect complaints to the plaintif and lawyers.
You seem badly confused and self-contradictory to me.
The statement of mine you single out to endorse is a statement grounded in a philosophy of individual rights.
Then you go on to immediately endorse the contradictory principle of majority rule.
You need to pick one or the other. If majority rule, you can have no remaining objection to the law in question. It is, after all, the result of majority rule. It was enacted into law by the democratic process, and expresses the will of the majority that the disabled among us be accomodated in all public spaces.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
ADA laws have got you down? And they are forcing neck-high tables in parks?
Easy as. Just find a kid, put him on top of the table, and push him off. Say goodbye to those tables, at least.
Dark wizards? I always thought it was Dork wizards!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
However, if one were to take the idea seriously, it could be implemented by merely expanding the job of the people who provide the TDD relay. They could have computers and could browse web pages for blind people and read the pages to them, describe the graphics seen, etc.
I'm not saying this is a good idea -- I can just imagine kids calling this service up, saying they need somebody to go to a youtube URL (and trying to give the URL over the phone would be a pain in the ass by itself) and then the page comes up with a picture of some kid talking with his butt -- but it could be done.
I think that it overreaction. If we follow through to the letter, all the signs in a MacDonald or Burger King or whatever public store should have a braile version. Even the packages sitting on the shelves of the supermarket should have braile on them. Braile must be everywhere. Going further, my newspaper must have a talking version produced daily, or at least a braile version. I would dismiss that lawsuite. The ADA is being overextended in it's application.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I wonder if those TDD people are forced to call phone sex hotlines, and if not if phone sex hotlines can be sued under the ADA.
When a disabled ninja flips out, he doesn't kill people, he just maims them.