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Proposed ADA Requirements May Affect Public Internet Use
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press is reporting on federal officials who want to expand the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to require accommodations by public websites, call centers, and technology providers. Hearings are scheduled in Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. New rules could be implemented as soon as 2012. 'For more than a decade, the Justice Department has interpreted the ADA to apply to websites that offer goods and services. But now that idea could be clarified, and timetables for compliance could be set. ... The Justice Department is considering making it clear that some personal, noncommercial content would not be affected.'"
Drive-through fast-food menus in Braille?
I use a content management system which, if it does not already implement alt tags for all images, can be easily coaxed to do so. And I use (so far as I am able) standards-compliant markup, so this is not going to affect me.
It's even long been possible to have accessible flash. So what's the problem exactly? It's not like the web would lose anything but dead weight...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would hate to see a bunch of people get fined because their personal website has only plain text and images.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Letting people voluntarily make their web sites accessible certainly hasn't worked - for example, Flash content is the bane of visually impaired users but I don't see much of a movement to provide alternatives. I wonder if this means that popular OSs will have to provide real, working accessibility features and not bad jokes like Microsoft Narrator?
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
...but I don't think most businesses (or most people, generally) have anything to object to here. What's likely to make people anxious about changes to the ADA is uncertainty over what those changes will involve.
As a web developer, my main concern is just knowing what I'll have to do or do differently. It would be helpful if articles like this -- or their summaries -- provided links to the proposed guidelines. Personally, I'd prefer to get a head start on this so that my clients and I don't end up rushing to implement changes as the last moment.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
equality but I am sick of mandated equality. Let the market decide
if store X does not want to cater to group Y (for whatever reason, infrastructure costs to accommodate group Y or simple dislike for group Y It should be the store owners prerogative.
In this day and age, if people are THAT upset about it, they can organize boycotts until store X either changes, or goes under.
here is a perfect example in NY
smoking indoors is banned.... NOW I believe the store should have a right to dictate whether or not they want to allow smoking in their PRIVATELY OWNED establishment
the customer will either complain, and ask that smoking be not allowed and not go back until it is, or if enough people are bothered, he will see it on his balance sheet and ban smoking himself.
the government getting involved is always the answer to a question NO one asked.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
There are too many flashy (pun intended) websites without any secondary way of seeing them. A proper public website should be navigable with a screen reader. As "Web 2.0" has marched on, it has only gotten worse. Some are even so user hostile that even those wanting a bit of privacy without Flash or javascript enabled are simply locked out.
Exceptions should be made for personal pages, but for organizations, governments, and commerce sites that deal with the public, there shouldn't be any excuse.
--
BMO
The article talks about this extending into other realms like movies.
"About 1 percent of U.S. theater screens already have that type of equipment. But expanding the technology to others could cost nearly $160 million."
Thats the cost of one medium quality action film these days. Hollywood studios should be forced to pay for it.
I've worked on a number of projects where we were explicitly ordered not to "waste our time" with anything that would help the disabled to use our web sites. There wasn't much we could do other than sneak in things that we thought the management wouldn't notice.
Maybe it's time that people with more clout than us mere developers let the managers know that something a bit more, uh, civilised is expected of them.
We can't do it on our own, even if we want to.
(Actually, I'm currently doing some pro bono work for some nonprofits that involves making their web sites more accessible. A curious part of this is that they've mostly been persuaded by the growing number of people carrying a "smart phone", and it's getting through their heads that web pages forced to width=1200 or requiring javascript are limiting their audience. While we're at it, maybe we can sneak in even more stuff that helps the visually impaired, etc.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
How is this not a first amendment violation? If person X, or lets say even company Y doesn't want to make their articles/website/cartoons/jokes available in specific format, what right does the government have to come in and do anything about it?
And why is this any sort of priority for the justice department? I have news for the feds, your airplane terrorist watchdogs are molesting children right now, find something more important to work on. Mkay?
We already talked about this. The Chicago session mentioned in the summary already happened. I tried to tell you about it.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
something like that could force sites to finally make an alternative, html only version, at least for the sites where that have some meaning.
I'm all for making sure handicapped people have access to necessary services... however *requiring* movie theaters to provide closed captioning devices at every seat is ridiculous. Watching a movie is is not a life necessity. If the demand is there, and the people that need it are willing to pay a price that makes business sense, then the theaters will have Closed captioning equipment. If it doesn't make business sense, then they won't.
What the fuck is with the government wanting to tell *PRIVATE* business who they have to make non-mandatory (ie. entertainment) products available to?
ADA is mostly bullshit anyways. Hey, let's also make sure we have a wheel chair ramp for bungee jumping, because you never know when some cripple with deteriorating bones might want to plunge down a hundred feet with only their legs attached to a giant rubber band. Why not require the same Closed captioning devices for normal theater (plays) as well? How about all sporting events too? Gotta have CC devices at the seats so you can hear the refs calls. Maybe we need to throw some braille street signs in there too, wouldn't want the blind to be discriminated against when driving a car, you know?
The bottom line is, if there is money to be made, some company *will* do it voluntarily. If the market can't support it, oh well, tough break, it doesn't happen.
Tell you what.
You end the pervy scans by child molesters and pervs hired by the TSA to "scan" "nude" images of little kids at airports and "pat them down" ....
And I'll let you tell me what my Free Speech rights to create any web site I want are.
Capiche?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm stupid, for a just a millisecond I thought they were going to talk about the programming language and how they adapted it for mission critical SERVERS!
Eat sleep die
Im all for equal access and equal opportunity but something really needs to be done about the damn ADA Trolls and the lawyers that feed their "pursuit" of money in the name of equality. I have known of 3 small businesses here in my area that have been basically attacked over non compliance even though there really isn't any real guidance provided in how to comply. Two of the businesses just decided to shut down rather than deal with the legal fees, the other is still fighting after 3 years over non-compliance issues he wasn't even aware of until being sued. I don't think many intentionally want to be seen as discriminatory and most would go out of their way to accommodate as they could afford to but the way the ADA is presented now does nothing but create hostility along with compliance, if half the time and effort put into litigation and enforcement was put into education and assistance for smaller businesses to get compliant it would go along way to giving both sides of the issue what they need without the animosity.
The problem it the programes the read websites AKA JAWS plane out suck. The amount of extra code needed is a pain. Get Jaws to work and we are fine
Very little extra code is needed, unless you're referring to ARIA, which is necessary because rich content is extremely nonstandard. As a result, there's no way for assistive technologies to know what does what without a bit of extra code to make it clear.
If a screen reader can't read it, a search engine also can't.
Dr. Jonathan Lazar - http://triton.towson.edu/~JLAZAR/index.html For for website designing: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-10-12/designing-accessible-technology
Nobody is claiming for a perfect life for disabled people, just that companies pay their web developers a little more and stop using proprietary shitty formats. This move is good for both disabled and non-disabled people.
Also, I can't watch your video, I'm not in the US, you insensitive clod!
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The larger side of the ADA/508 compliance revolves around the blind, the scapegoat is called a TTY Relay service.
Dilbert RSS feed
You don't have to like it, but getting along with civilization is generally a good thing, especially when you don't have to worry about boycotts.
So people who are unable to use his site are going to punish him by refusing to buy from him?
Sounds like a plan.
only +1 flame bait..... -__-
warning pointless sig
http://www.prestashop.com/bug_tracker/view/4826/
Dilbert RSS feed
We should be moving towards a more semantic web anyway...
Dilbert RSS feed
This is a huge project, and in many cases from what I've seen, even sites that are compliant are not that useable. It's not that you shouldn't make your site accessible, more customers = more money, right? It's that the "experts" that write these regulations are lawyers and bureaucrats that typically know fuck all about the industry they are regulating from a practical point of view, and are often driven by experts who have skin in the game.
I also take issue with some of the points in the article.:
Firstly, only about .3% of Americans (the article is about the ADA before you jump on me about being US centric) are deaf, and only about 2% have severe hearing impairment. I'm not sure why the deaf are included since the web is primarily a visual medium. Will we be expected to provide transcripts for YouTube videos now? Will Apple need to provide transcripts for all the songs sold on Itunes? Blind people on the other hand account for 7.5 Million according to the Braille Institute. I have no clue where the AP comes up with the 40 million number, that is off by a huge margin.
Secondly, I also disagree with the statement that "40 Million blind and deaf Americans stand to reap the biggest benefits". Actually, no. First it's nowhere close to 40 million, second the people that will benefit the most are people like my self who will bill out hundreds of hours of time offering services to make sites ADA compliant. I think this is a BAD IDEA, but I will lobby my local congressman to support it because if it passes I will make money. That's the bottom line. If the Feds are going to force shit down our throats I'm going to get my piece of the pie. The parent says it's easy and not a big deal. From what I've read and done in the past, it's a lot of extra work that clients don't want to pay for. That's OK, the government will force their hand and I'll get more work in the long run - the web is too important for businesses to simply say screw it and turn off their sites.
Third, the idea of screens on the back of seats in a theater is simply, fucking stupid. A person texting 5 rows up is distracting with their bright little cell phone screen, how bad is it going to be with screens on the bask of seats? Going to the movies is borderline now with the prices, all the crinkling food wrappers, and rude people talking to the screen. Movies cost too much now. Who's going to pay for all this technology? a theater owner who's making about 5% margin if they're lucky?
Finally, I take issue with the parent's statement :
It's not like the web would lose anything but dead weight...
Who made you the arbiter of good taste. I must have missed the appointment of the Quality Web Content Czar while I was reading a magazine on the crapper.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
You can't outsource a lot of those jobs brushing up sites to support the disabled. However, you could license third party controls that are developed overseas (but you still have to hire people to drop those controls in, and that's often plenty of work in and of itself). Anyway, if you have to update websites to support disabled users, that's a whole lot of work for a whole lot of people. Heck, even if you don't develop websites, there will be work supporting the new hardware needed to support voice and sensory feedback-based content.
If you're a geek, look at it this way...it's like the y2k boom all over again, though it will actually help people long term and bring more people onto the web instead of serve virtually no purpose. And if you're not a geek, and you run some business and you're panicking about making your website accessible for the disabled, then screw you for dumping on disabled people.
I have food allergies. I expect an honest answer if I ask you a question about ingredients. If you don't know, tell me you don't know and I will go somewhere else.
I do NOT expect everybody on earth to remove all traces of soy from everything so that I don't get sick. That's ridiculous.
You want to know what's also ridiculous? I have seen parking spaces at busy malls that go unused for YEARS because they are handicapped spaces. Why are there so many spaces when there are so few handicapped people? I appreciate the spaces for people like my friend who was handicapped for many years, but even he agreed that the sheer number of spaces was way too high.
I like America's sense of caring for certain unfortunate groups, but the balance is too far the other way these days.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
This is why things are getting worse. Everyone is busy voting in laws and guidelines that make their hearts feel good but ultimately cause far more damage. Lets take the requirement to install caption devices in theaters. Instead of the disabled having to pay for themselves, everyone gets to pay! There is nothing left of a nation that one heralded the word "Liberty" when we start forcing people to pay for everyones else's problems. Lets also take into account the recent law that the Consumer Product Safety Commission helped to get passed. Everyone has to test their toys for lead. This sort of nonsense is killing American Industry and Productivity.
Did any of you stop and think about all the dynamics that lead to American's losing jobs to over seas markets that get to avoid this nonsense? We are intentionally crippling ourselves and making so that only big corporations are able to be productive! Every time we pass a law that makes you feel good we destroy a mom & pop shop's ability to be competitively productive!
Use your brains because your hearts are not functionally capable of determining what is RIGHT OR WRONG! Sure I would like to see people with disabilities get more out of life, but not at the expense of everyone else! Where is the LIBERTY in that? Where is my responsibility to the diseased, the disabled, or the poor? If I have any, where will the line be drawn? Does my responsibility stop at 10% of my income, does it stop at 50%, or does it stop at 100%, or what ever % decided by the powers? If the government has the authority to levy upon me, via taxes or rule of law, anything that requires me to expend my fortune to assist another in anyway, then that Government has discarded Liberty and assumes authority that only leads to corruption.
We should not do for others what they should be doing for themselves! No longer does the American citizen ask what they can do for their nation, they now ask what will their government take from another and give to them!
Liberty is dead, and I fear that its restoration will not be able to won again via Election, but instead with the blood of tyrants and patriots as required by the metaphorical "Tree of Liberty".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but accepting everyone on even terms would mean that they conform to his practices not that he is forced to conform to theirs, wouldn't it?
I mean people are out there, they are different, some are better then others, some are not, but even terms means he draws a line and they meet it or exceed it.
The Feds are just blowing smoke. They have far more important things that they should be doing, but aren't. They are just pandering to a few disabled people for votes. I seriously doubt that anyone in the ADA-enforcement business has the serious political pull to do anything more than make grandiose but vague announcements. Especially after the latest election. Tea partyers don't care whether or not disabled people have problems using the internet: nor would they be likely to sponsor legisation that inconvience anyone who might be a future campaign contributor, like big ISPs.
Put this one down to bureaucratic horseshit that just sparkles and dies when lit off.
Start > programs > accessories > Magnifier Or whatever it is on windows machines. My point being, there are solutions that are already there and I know there are some other non-native solutions as well. For YEARS lawyers and "concerned citizen" groups have been using the ADA to make money off of small businesses and architects. Now that that has dried up, it is time for them to start harassing the owners of websites. Public websites will be just the start of it, it will eventually be expanded into the private sector. While implementation of tools for better viewing of websites and web content would be a nice feature, it is hardly the job of the government to start making such mandates. The ADA needs to apply to enforcing the rights of the disabled, not the privileges
making your site /STANDARDS/ Compliant and designed in a reasonable way will make it work well on a smartphone as well as work with screen readers and high contrast setups
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
About describing images: Which way would it go - Short and to the point, or trying to recreate the image?
"Blonde hair caresses a woman's shoulders, her exposed skin seems to quiver in the air. Her nipples are concealed beneath her slightly spread hands, tempting you to imagine what lies beneath her palms. Her eyes are staring directly at you, and her lips are curved into a seductive half-smile, inviting and tempting you to fall into her. Her face seems to say, you want me. Have me." sounds a lot more inviting then "A naked woman, hiding her exposed nipples with her hands whilst staring into the camera".
Anyone want to try this for Goatse or Tubgirl?
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
The answer for deaf people and movie theaters is simple, just do what the theaters around here do and run "open caption" sessions which are basically regular screenings that also have subtitles up on the main screen.
Does not require expensive equipment in the theater and still allows deaf people to enjoy a film on the big screen.
We do the best to accomodate.
I hereby assert you are 100% wrong. Most sites do *nothing* to accommodate. If you can't see their flash, they don't care. If you can see only in 320x200 on a 24" screen, they don't care. They code their site to work on 800x600 or better and nothing else, and they don't care. People are doing nothing to accommodate, and aren't even thinking about it. "We" don't do much of anything to accommodate.
I mean, do I want the darkness of my movie broken up by a deaf person sitting in front of me with a screen display sub-titles.
Never mind. You are just a fucking moron. I've been to movies with a person signing along with the movie. It wasn't that bad. Most people just forget she is there. But that's irrelevant to the web. Tag it. Someone wants it, they ask. Someone doesn't, they don't ask. It's not like a movie where everyone in that theater at that time gets the same experience. You can serve up the same content an infinite number of ways you don't even care about. Just give the content, give some alternate content if the client requests (or serve the whole thing and let the client pick what to display, though that's not as bandwidth friendly, it's easier), and the "normal" people won't ever know. That's 100% unlike your theater example. No hearing person is inconvenienced in any way by optimized content being available. Not to mention that you value your minor convenience above a deaf person's ability to experience it at all, which seems quite egotistical.
Learn to love Alaska
Is it just me or did anyone else think the title meant something sensationally different when they read Ada instead of ADA?
Fuck you...I love being a gimp. I get all sorts of cool drugs and can stay fucked up all the time.
Not to mention the possibility of large fines when my (commercial) websites aren't compliant with some obscure requirement in the new guidelines.
As the fines and penalties becomes stiffer and the rules become more complex and difficult, will we end up with ADA trolls who find ADA issues and then either offer "remediation consulting services" or an anonymous phone call to whoever enforces the ADA?
I just parsed your sentence as "a person _singing_ along with the movie. It wasn't that bad." and thinking you are far more tolerant than I would be. Sudafed, Scotch and Self-Pity, good for colds, not so good for reading comprehension.
If they force the ADA on technology then Microsoft will have to find a way for Stephen Hawking to use it's new Kinect product. That would be fun to watch.
Try this - Turn on your TV and enable Closed captioning. Count how many ads have CC.
My experience is that about 10% do. Most of those 10% are either for hearing aids, or they are targeting senior citizens. Those that don't fit into those categories often don't do CC as well as they could. I saw an Intel commercial a while back that had CC for every thing, including repeating text that was already on the screen, and informing the viewer that the Intel sound bit was played.
Never heard about RFID?
BTW, you'd need a lot more than "a radioactive particle or two", considering that the blind person his/herself is emitting more radiation than that!
What's the rule here? Anything delivered via port 80? Anything that uses HTML? Anything anyone can download over the Internet? I don't understand how they can apply this. Sure, there are fairly obvious cases but if I'm sending you flash content that can be run in your browser or standalone, do my standalone apps have to be compliant? Silverlight? What about a Java application that can also run as an applet? This is going to be yet another "I know it when I see it" law that will be misapplied and used to file frivolous lawsuits on a daily basis.
The ADA is already hugely abused: people sue businesses for trivial reasons, not because they have been harmed in any way, but because the ADA lets them financially rape any business that fails to meet any aspect of the guidelines. Even if the business would likely win in court, the costs of defending yourself are such that most settle out of court.
If the government starts enforcing the ADA on website, you may be sued because you forgot an ALT-tag somewhere in a website with a thousands of images. And, yes, it really will be that trivial - just like the brick-and-mortar business that was sued because the mirror in their bathroom was a couple of inches too high.
Here is the non-PC question that needs to be asked: Why should the government force business owners to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to cater to a tiny portion of the population? Why should the non-disabled not be allowed to patronize a mom-n-pop restaurant on the top floor of an old building with no elevator? Is it really better to force the restaurant out of business? Being disabled means - guess what - that you cannot do everything a non-disabled person can. The ADA goes much, much too far...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I knew of a lovely, quaint old shop in New England, in a building built more than 200 years ago. The ceiling and doorways were so low that I had to duck (and I am not particularly tall). There was no handicapped ramp, if they had a toilet, it certainly will not have been wheelchair accessible. I have no idea if the shop still exists, as I haven't been that way in some time. It was clearly only a matter of time before some ADA nut closed it down. And yet, how does closing such a shop make the world a better place?
Why should a private business be required to cater to the disabled? What principle is at stake here? What fundamental right of the disabled is being violated by a business without a ramp, or without alt-tags on its website?
A private business should be able to cater to whomever it pleases. Adults only. Children only. English-speaking only. Men only. Women only. You cannot require customers to patronize a particular business, and you should not be able to require a business to cater to particular customers. If you believe otherwise, I want a membership at that women's gym across the street...
The federal government is overstepping its bounds. There is no Constitutional right at stake, and the ADA simply should not exist. If anything, this may be a subject for State legislation.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
i thought it was about the ada programming language...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
You wanted to provide the link to the actual proposed 508 new rules as published in the Federal Register in March: http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/refresh/draft-rule.htm. There are differences from WCAG 2.0 just as the current 508 rules differ from WCAG 1.0.
HOWEVER, those are just the proposed new rules for Government websites whereas what the developer really wanted to know is what rules will be imposed on non-Government websites. As far as I know the process hasn't gotten as far as any committee reviewing the rules for Government websites and deciding which ones are reasonable to impose upon private sites.
I will take my neighborhood civic association website down before I spend my personal, volunteer time to make it ADA compliant. It's not that I don't want it to comply, but there's simply no budget to hire people who know how to do this right, and I can't put the extra time in to do this myself.
to provide comfort for a very small minority. Call me cold hearted and cruel but I do not believe either individuals or busineses should be compelled to provide any assistance at all to the disabled. In effect the government is mandating that money be spent on 'compassion'. Let me decided how I wish to be compassionate and how much. Let business decide whether it is to their advantage to spend what are sometimes very large sums to provide easy access (off or online) to the disabled. Frankly the same applies to government spending. I don't want to see projects done that are soley for the purpose of providing some minority group with better access to facilities or services. If something new is built and these features can be added at no or limited extra cost, fine go for it. But don't rip down what is perfectly good to accomodate the very few at the expense of the very many.
Are you going to pay him for his time and effort to do all that you propose?
Do you pay him for the time and effort to conform to IRS regulations?
Learn to love Alaska
Im all for equal access and equal opportunity but something really needs to be done about the damn ADA Trolls and the lawyers that feed their "pursuit" of money in the name of equality. I have known of 3 small businesses here in my area that have been basically attacked over non compliance even though there really isn't any real guidance provided in how to comply. Two of the businesses just decided to shut down rather than deal with the legal fees, the other is still fighting after 3 years over non-compliance issues he wasn't even aware of until being sued. I don't think many intentionally want to be seen as discriminatory and most would go out of their way to accommodate as they could afford to but the way the ADA is presented now does nothing but create hostility along with compliance, if half the time and effort put into litigation and enforcement was put into education and assistance for smaller businesses to get compliant it would go along way to giving both sides of the issue what they need without the animosity.
I have to agree on the "very little guidance being given". As I found myself doing accessibility testing on thick client software and websites in addition to my usual testing, I'd seen instances where folks followed precisely what was in their developer docs, or implemented accessibility after having spent maybe three to five minutes with accessibility tools (usually because of a lack of high quality user acceptance testing in the accessibility field). Again, I can't speak as much for architectural barriers, but for access to normally visually presented information, I totally concur that more guidance and documentation needs to be made available. Two things that this makes me wonder--first, if the government is going to implement these regulations, are they going to provide grants for smaller companies to bring their sites up to code? Second, as these regulations become more widespread, would it not make sense that the tools needed to implement them would become more common, and thus we'd see an end to the need to retrofit existing technology?