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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.'"
This is what I thought until I did have to actually make standards compliant websites. I'm a web designer/developer for a government dept (not in the US though), and they require all websites and content to be accessible to those with disabilities and in regional areas with extremely low-bandwidth connections. I thought this would be hard, but making something standards compliant is really just a matter of checking a few extra things here and there, and adding a couple of extra features here and there, that's all it takes. It is actually less tedious and time-consuming than making a site work consistently across browsers. Got a video or audio file? Subtitle it or add a document which has a transcription. That's the hearing impaired taken care of. Low bandwidth audience? Compress those images and use them sparingly. Visually impaired? Make sure your designs have good text-background contrast, maybe add a text size changer in the website, and that's the low-level guys taken care of. For the completely blind, you just have to make sure your alt tags are in there, your CSS isn't a cryptic/poorly constructed clusterfuck and things are intuitively labelled.
Only problem I have is that I have to buy a license for JAWS so I can test out my stuff on it; otherwise i use NVDA (open source & free download) just to make sure it's basically good.
HTML and CSS can not accomplish what the ADA is demanding.
Think about screen reader technology for the blind. Today even the best of these can not even handle a mildly complex page. I've tried them out at a friends house.
So, people will be encouraged to stop making needlessly overcomplicated sites. It sounds like nothing of value will be lost.
They are crap.
Assuming you mean the sites that don't work well when spoken, then yes. Assuming you mean the readers, then I disagree.
But it doesn't stop at your content. You are also responsible for all the advertising on your site, even when you don't create that advertising. Why should you serve a page without advertising to the blind? If that's how you make money for your site, you need to serve the ads to everyone.
How do you serve music to the deaf? Hmmm mmmm dum de dumm ta ta de da mmmm de mmmm?
And how do you serve online game content to the guy typing with his one hand, or his feet.
If you think this is easy, why don't you try it. The tools don't yet exist to do this in any economical way. If enforced to the letter, this serves only to drive most product advertising and support services off the web, shut down thousands of hobby sites, and shutter eCommerce.
I doubt you'll actually get many complaints for lack of advertising, especially considering that isn't really your "content." I've never heard of an ADA case where a blind person complained that they couldn't read a posted advertising flyer on a bulletin board in a store. If it does mean that the horrible chain of dozens of domains and layers of Javascript for ads has to go away so you just serve your ads yourself, meh. I'm still having trouble finding a lot of problems with this. You serve music to the deaf the same way you do everybody else. They just won't listen to it. Wall-Mart sells music on CD's. Deaf people are allowed to buy them. WalMart doesn't have to have employees to interpretive dance on command for deaf people who want to buy a CD but can't hear it. How do you serve content to the guy with one hand? Same way as everybody else. He'll probably just suck at league play against people who can push more buttons faster.
ADA compliance isn't about making every cripple get to win the Super Bowl, and every blind person win an Academy award for cinematography. It's about making minimal reasonable accommodations so that a person can live their life to the extent that is sensible. The government is involved, so there will probably be a few inane edge cases, but the basic principle here seems sound.
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.
I think another poster more knowledgeable as to the technology vis a vis the deaf punched a hole in that, so I'll defer to the expert there.
What the fuck is with the government wanting to tell *PRIVATE* business who they have to make non-mandatory (ie. entertainment) products available to?
Can you think of another minority to which a broad array of what you'd call non-essential services are denied? As an example, we'll take the on-demand service provided by my cable company. There is absolutely no way I can access that service through my set top box without having someone sighted present ... which translates, really, to "no way that I can access the service through my set top box". Unfortunately, "letting the market decide" there is a bit problematic, since a large chunk of that market, and a large chunk of various television providers, think that blind people don't watch TV. If I had to wait for the collective ignorance of a society that generally defecates themselves when faced with my condition, or generally finds my navigating our local public transit system to get to work of a morning "an inspiration", to catch up with reality, I'd be waiting a couple of centuries.
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.
Oh, wonderful comparison. I'll not spell out the differences between lack of access because of a safety issue (no one with bones that fragile should be bungee jumping) and lack of access because of an ignorance issue (But wait! That iPhone has a touch screen! Wouldn't you rather have a special phone for the blind?)
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.
Why not?
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?
There needs to be an equivalent to "Godwin's Law" to describe the invocation of either blind people driving (impossible due to current technological limitations) or blind people watching TV (possible, but assumed to be impossible) when these discussions come up. Looking at this logically, which you've completely failed to do here, if there were a means for blind people to be able to drive (cf. Google's self-driving cars), wouldn't it be more cost-effective to use, say, existing GPS infrastructure, already established map providers, and other existing technology? The navigation system to mitigate the lack of ability to see street signs is already in place (it's what allows me to download a map, copy it to my phone, and travel anywhere I take a notion).
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.
Again, that presupposes that the site's creator even presumes that blind people can use the Web. I'd wager that, until about five seconds before you read these