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Dept. of Justice Considers Web For ADA
beetle496 noted a blog entry saying "The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on the Accessibility of Web Information and Services Provided by Entities Covered by the ADA (i.e., State and Local Government Entities and Public Accommodations). You can read the fact sheet, or the entire notice. In short, the Department is seeking comments on their desire to revise regulation to 'establish specific requirements for State and local governments and public accommodations to make their websites accessible to individuals with disabilities.' The Department is seeking specific comment on many things including the standards they should adopt, and if there should be any exemptions for certain entities (e.g., small business) before they publish their Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. This is amazing news! The impact that this will have for individuals with disabilities cannot be overemphasized. It is time for our digital society to forever include individuals of all abilities. The period of public comment is open for 180 days."
Except without the spinning gifs and animated backgrounds and lame MIDI loops?
SOLD!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
and yet they are collecting comments on establishing more standards that go beyond 508?
Most of the pics aren't tagged, the graphical navigation tabs are useless to a screen reader, and the page is full of popup javascript.
It contains an enbedded alert that may be read off by an interpreter: "Regulations.gov will undergo a scheduled maintenance outage and will be unavailable Saturday September 19, 2009, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ET)" Thanks for wasting time with last year's outage info.
Come on, can't government provide GOOD examples of accessible resources ESPECIALLY when gathering suggestions for how current rules and regs can be improved?
WTF?
If a business doesn't cater to anyone handicapped (I guess it could happen), or just is ignorant enough to not do so and lose that business, that should be up to them.
No one is holding a gun to the person accessing a site, nor should they be holding a gun to a private business to cater to any specific crowd.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Before they can even think about making their web sites accessible for those with disabilities, they need to make the sites accessible for the general public. Nearly every time I have needed to find some information at the state level, I've had to sort through pages of outdated info, buried 4 or more links deep. I can only imagine what this process is like through a screen reader or other adaptive technology.
Yeah, right. Next you'll tell us that Windows 7 was your idea.
Why should websites be exempt from these requirements?
Because I shouldn't have to hire a lawyer to make sure I'm complaint with thousands of pages of State and Federal regulations when I publish a webpage?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They don't put braille on drive-up ATMs. They put braille on ATMs. They don't make different keys depending on where you're installing the unit.
Maybe because the web is a medium and not a place?
I'm all for requiring public physical places to be designed with the needs of the disabled in mind. This only makes sense and I think has made a tremendous difference for both the legally disabled and our generally aging population but I don't think the web is the equivalent of a public place. I think it's a medium more akin to a newspaper or book.
Would it make sense to REQUIRE all book publishers to publish extra copies in braille for example? I can certainly see the value of regulations which said that if the publisher (or website author) doesn't do it themselves a third-party service provider must not be prevented from (legally) making the information accessible but to require all websites to do it themselves would put a huge burden on website authors and may just cause a lot of people to stop putting information on the web unless they need to or their is a compelling commercial reason to do so.
Let's look at a project to scan in material from old books and make it available in image/pdf format for research. If the information were required to be accessible it would add a significant amount of work and cost to the (already expensive) digitization process. In my own case where I am putting up some very specific historic and technical material which I am making no money on I might just stop doing it. This would be a net loss for the spread of knowledge.
These types of regulations work best when they encourage people to do the right thing but do NOT just stop anything from happening. eg. If people stopped building public places because of the expense of ADA compliance the ADA would not make sense on a societal level as public places have value. The same goes for websites.
how much will this cost tax payers.
I'm guessing just about enough money to fight the war in Iraq for 5 minutes. Auditing and recoding government websites will probably cost several million dollars, but that's peanuts compared to most government spending, and it's more than worth it to make sure disabled people have access to the government they help pay for.
If a business doesn't cater to anyone handicapped (I guess it could happen), or just is ignorant enough to not do so and lose that business, that should be up to them. No one is holding a gun to the person accessing a site, nor should they be holding a gun to a private business to cater to any specific crowd.
Ding ding ding.
In my hometown, a hardware store couldn't afford to put in an ADA-compliant ramp for the one guy in town who used a wheelchair. When they said as much, he sued. The store, in the family for 2 generations, closed down because the owner couldn't carry the expense of the loan he needed for building the ramp- and the cost of the lawsuit. Result: he ended up working for nearly minimum wage at Walmart and couldn't afford to put his daughters through college. Another result: his two employees lost their jobs. The landlord lost a tenant (the store sat unoccupied for 2 years, in part because everyone knew that the first business to move in would get sued for not having an ADA-compliant ramp.)
He was not alone.
Some people just seem to forget that the world doesn't owe them anything. If you're injured or born without the ability to walk, that's nobody's problem except your own. "How cruel", you say. But where do we stop in defining disabilities? If I have autism, does that mean I can sue a store for being too noisy and crowded? If I have a peanut allergy, does a Thai restaurant have to give you a hermetically sealed room and special food stored, prepared, and cooked away from everything else?
Move to a city where businesses can afford good handicapped access. Hire someone to spend an hour each week getting your groceries. There are hundreds of solutions other than forcing your problems onto others.
Please help metamoderate.
Yes, and because we're 100% sure that the oh-so-enlightened Obama administration would never, ever use such a provision to quell free speech rights (unlike that bad ole' satan-worshiping Bush). It's going to be a total coincidence that "Justice" department lawyers only contact Web site owners who publish views opposed to the current administration's policies.
This year, they've contacted the NRA about their non-compliant Web site, while ignoring NOW. Once the sheeple vote in 2012, they'll be harassing PETA and ignoring the Chamber of Commerce.
In fact, I've been shocked, shocked! to find out that the Democrats are owned by lobbyists just like the Republicans. Not the SAME lobbyists, of course, but just as much a wholly owned subsidiary. Whodda thunk it?
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It'll be great for those it benefits, but what about the further infringement on the right of a person to put what they please on their own website? If they don't cater to a particular audience, that audience doesn't have to visit the site. Not that this is specific to this aspect of the ADA; the same applies to brick-and-mortar stores as well. What gives anyone the right to use legal force against a business owner who doesn't configure his property so that it caters to particular people?
(Here come the negative mods in 3...2...1...)
The real problem with the current system (IMO) is that--as always--regulation and government-created scarcity has lead to efforts to game the system and unintended consequences out the wazoo.
This results in things like a morbidly obese patient slipping the doctor a $100 and getting a handicapped placard. So the fatty who most needs to walk the extra 100 ft a week now parks as close to the ice cream aisle as possible. Or to people either holding on to their placards after they've expired or making fake ones.
When I worked in construction in L.A (putting myself through college) with my dad's company I saw two projects canceled because of the cost of complying with the ADA. One was a parking structure where the powers-that-be decided that it wasn't sufficient to have the "correct" number of handicapped spaces on the ground level--there must be an elevator in case some handicapped person parked in a non-handicapped spot on the 2nd floor and couldn't use the stairs.
Unintended consequences, my friends: it's the gift of government that keeps on giving and giving and giving.
And you can be sure that any effort to label the Web as a "public accommodation" will be evenhandedly applied by whichever of our two corrupt parties is currently in power. They'd never even think of using the "Justice" Department to harass website owners whose sites are ideologically opposed. Never, ever... pinky-swear, cross their hearts and hope to die.
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Yeah, this isn't about the deaf being able to hear music.
This is about every citizen having equal access to government, for example.
If you don't know the difference, then I think I've figured out what your particular disability is.
Your insinuation that everyone gets their "fair share" of harship and that this is no different for, say, a blind person than anyone else... yeah, that's nothing short of laughable.
Now it woudl be easy to assume that you have no physical disability based on your comment. Alternately its possible that you have some (most likely minor) issue that your extremely proud of overcoming "on your own", in which case I guarantee there are ways you haven't even thought of that your daily life is affected. Either way, I'm willing to bet you have at least pretty good use of your eyes, ears, and arms.
So try this: if I'm right that you have use of your eyes, go through one day wearing a blindfold. All day. No peaking, for any reason. Now imagine doing that every day of your life.
If you don't have use of your eyes, then instead try going through a day having immobilized your writing-hand arm in a sling. Again, no use of that arm for any reason.
Then we can haev a conversation about your "fair share" of hardship.
well, unless you are one of those people who insists on using Flash and Javascript for every damned thing, and considers creating a less "feature filled" version of your webpage to be an undue burden.
I consider the Federal Government telling me how to design my webpage to be an undue burden.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That has nothing to do with ADA, it's just a tired old joke. It's a very simple application of the economy of standardization.
Let's say I build ATMs.
If I'm going to build 10,000 ATMs and I have to make the the buttons, why in the hell would I make TWO kinds of button, one for ATMs that need Braille and one for ATMs that do not? That doubles the cost of my key molds or machining equipment, and I have to keep track of separate inventory of assembled ATM models and separate replacement keyboards.
Instead, I'm going to make one ATM model, offer different casings for it depending on whether you want a standalone or one that's built into a wall, and I'm done. I have exactly one ATM model in stock, and when you call and order one, I ship one.
When one of your customers in a fit of piqued rage about the fact that he has to deal with those little dots on the buttons busts it with his ever-present whiskey bottle, I can replace that keyboard with the secure knowledge that it's ADA-compliant even if it doesn't need to be, because it's cheaper to make them ALL compliant.
Standardization leads to a lot of little things like this. It's usually a lot cheaper to standardize on a part that has ALL of the features you could possibly need across as many applications as possible than to make specific parts that fill the exact feature set for each application.
Random example:
Why do you think Southwest is almost invariably good about having working aircraft where they need them? Because they fly only one basic model of aircraft. They've centered their entire business model around flying routes that can fill the 137 seats in a 737-300 or 737-700 (they have a few 737-500s with lower seating capacity for specific routes, but it's a small amount of their fleet). Their pricing adjusts dynamically to make sure that their planes fly nearly full.
All of their mechanics can work on any of their airplanes, all of their pilots can fly any of their airplanes, and if a plane breaks down or is horribly late they can (with very few exceptions) replace it with any aircraft in their fleet without having to worry about finding one with the right number of seats, a qualified crew, etc.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Part of my job involves compliance testing for internal web sites. The regulations.gov site is pretty good from a compliance point of view. Have you tried 'viewing' it with a screen reader (eg JAWS)? All of your 'insights' are wrong.
A screen reader does not just read the source of a web page aloud. It renders the page, then helps the user navigate through it.
I did not find any non-tagged images (ok, if you look at the source you will see some, but those are in comments and thus not rendered).
The graphical navigation tabs work correctly (the reader tells the user what the alt tags are for each area of the map, and allows them to 'click' on them).
Pop-up javascript is no more of a problem to a screen reader than to a sighted user. When a pop-up occurs the screen reader will say 'new window' and read the contents of it.
The embedded alert has exactly the same effect on a screen reader as it does on a sighted person - none, because it is never rendered.
The image tagged 'close' is a big red X that is displayed at the top of a pop-up window. If a sighted person can understand that clicking on that X will close the window (as opposed to meaning 'sign here' or 'treasure is buried here'), why would a person using a screen reader have difficulty understanding that a clickable thing tagged 'close' at the top of a page will close the window?
Lastly, tagging an unclickable image as "logo" tells the user everything they need to know about it - the image contains new usable information.
You need to remember that having a page read to you is already a much slower process than looking at it. Making non-ambiguous things (like 'close' and 'logo') as terse as possible while still conveying the correct meaning is the right thing to do.