Slashdot Mirror
Blind Sue AOL for ADA Non-Compliance
Aaron M. Renn writes "A group is filing a lawsuit against AOL claiming that site is not accessible to the blind. If successful, this lawsuit could subject almost every website (and certainly every commercial one) to massive government regulation for disability access." The ADA only applies to businesses, so there's no chance you'll have to make your personal site accessible if you don't want to. Rules requiring government agencies to make their websites accessible are now being drafted as well... Good website design generally suggests that it should be accessible to as many people as possible; why can't AOL use ALT tags?
So, when will Slashdot be blind accessible?
Why don't they go after the deep pockets?
Microsoft Windows OS is designed around a graphical user interface. That's obvious discrimination since it leaves the blind to fend for themselves since almost all of the information is represented graphically.
I think computer monitor manufactures are screwed as well, seeing as their product completely discriminates against the blind.
Injured worker wins against Mattel!
Blatant misuse of moderation really really annoys me.
I've never understood why people who spend good money on creating a web site don't make it available to as many people as possible; people who don't load images, don't run active content, etc, may be customers, and to design the site to break when these things aren't present seems like you're putting style above substance to the point of turning away unfashionable business.
If your site is failry useable in lynx, you should be okay. I know many visually impared people depend on lynx for web navigation.
I've patented a technique for making web pages accessible to the blind, so if you comply with ADA, I'll sue your butt off.
Is Slashdot a commercial website because it has ad banners on it? What about a personal home page that is on Xoom or Geocities or some other free service that puts ads in the page?
Will it be possible to sue any Geocities web page creator for not using alt tags?
I'm not against blacks, but I think they're being very stupid. Who says they need to eat at the same restaurants, use the same bathrooms, and sit in the same sections of the bus as white people? We have to draw the line somewhere.
> No. From the conversation I assume that it's a program which converts on-screen text to speech. But how does a blind person know where to click on the screen to access other pages? Is there a voice prompt, "A little to the left"? Or do they tab through, listening to ALT text at each tab stop? Am I close? Another question: I'm a part-time photographer selling the occasional black & white print. Does the ADA apply to me also? If so, how would I comply?
Well, this is hitting me at a bad time. We just had a 350+ pound woman who had had one leg (whe had already lost one to diabetes) walk out after the second day on the job and then immediately filed suit under the ADA because we didn't have a ramp un the three steps onto the raised floor. She does not use a wheelchair -- she didn't like the stairs (all three of them) and felt that we should accomodate her. She spoke to our manager, who pointed out that one was coming (for equipment needs) in two months, and she said that that was not soon enough. So she quit and filed suit. Now, it turns out that she has done this at a few other large companies and seems to be making a good living at it. Is this company going to fight it? No, because then we could be seen as being cruel to the crippled.
One of several reasons that I am leaving this place as soon as I can, and so is everyone else. This is extortion and they are concerned about whether or not Joe Mouthbreather will feel that they are mean to morbidly obese con-women.
I think that we should have killed her on the spot, but that's just me. Yet another reason why I haven't been able to vote for a Democrat for close to ten years.
It is about STUPID BOTTOM FEEDING LAWYERS who TWIST the law for their own personal gain. Lawyers don't give a shit about anyone, unless they're getting their 35%. TORT REFORM NOW
So shouldn't we be making driving a vehicle accessable to the blind? Is it not discrimintation that if you are blind you cannot obtain a drivers license? A blind person can still press the pedals and turn the steering wheel. Why not put devices in cars that tell the driver when to turn and when to brake.
This is rediculous, certain things are just not feasable for certain individuals with disablilties. That would be like saying that it is descrimination for someone with no arms to not be allowed to compete in an arm wrestling contest.
If you think the web has no sound maybe you should boot Windows.
Oops, did I say that out loud?
DUDE! Where's the MORON moderation option for comments like these?!? OK, to be politically correct I guess you would have to say "clue-challenged".
Ah yes, my point is: I put the 'txt' feature in as an afterthought. Took me all of 2 hours. After reading this I'm glad I may have helped some blind people doing this.
Why the hell not?
Of course, this is a touchy subject, and I feel that it is GOOD to design web sites that can work with equpiment for people who are missing a faculty or two.. ie: braille displays.... However. Making sure a business is accessible to the blind means that your place of business cannot have it's doors shut to the blind. AOL is not a business in the same sense. You can't 'go' there. They are an ISP. What prevents them from dialing up and using AOL as an ISP? Nothing.
He ment for deaf people
Actually, before the Kurt Vonnegut crowd gets on it's high-horse, I'd invite them to get a checkup from the neck up. He's the worst writer I've ever had to be subjected to in any literature class.
I am amazed at the ignorance and insensitivity of the people who have posted to this story. I currrently work at a rehab center that caters to many visually impared people. Just because a person is 'legally' blind doesn't mean that they can not see. It generally means that they have vision that is uncorrectable. THe majority of legally blind people can see and can, if allowed, function in our society. The reason there must be legislation to make people do things to allow acces to handicapped people is becasue many people don't think of them in their normal opperations and then you begin to descriminate against those people. The spirit of the laws are to make access to all things equall for all people. Of all places, a site that prides itself on the prinicple of equality and freedom of the net should recognze this.
Actually, they have "reasonable accomodation". In this case, because books have long shelf-lives, reasonable accomodation includes having people translate the documents to Braille, or having them read the documents.
AOL's Web site has a short life span, so that accomodation isn't practical.
Good point!
And if you're an insensitive asshole, you just have to accept your inability to contribute anything useful or rational to a discussion like this one.
What really boggles me is that you reproduce the Unabomber manifesto from your personal site--why? You obviously don't have anything in common with Ted K.'s opinions on (e.g.) the ways that technology divides us, when it promises to bring it together. But I suppose that's all beyond you, and that you just wanted your friends to say "L00K D3WD!! UNA80M! M4R1U5 I5 L337!"
According to the ADA, I am "disabled" because of asthma and poor vision. According to the Federal Government, I am a "protected minority" because I am black.
For years now, I have filled out "white" because I was uninterested in helping the idiots meet quotas. I don't say a damned thing on the ADA form.
I will never forget the day a few years ago (after the ADA passed) when I was looking for work (got laid off at the aerospace contractor where I had been working since college). Being a busy sort and knowing that employment was largely a crapshoot, I applied to every staffing agency in the book and let them figure out if they needed me (which has turned out to be a very good strategy, by the way). One of the ones that called me turned out to be a brand new agency (in a very nice building) paid for with government funds (that would be you, and me) (according to a sign outside the door) set up to employ the handicapped (apparently like me, who had held a job since I was 14, ten years at that point, with no need for Federal help). The large, nice office was full of well dressed people reading novels and newspapers, just waiting for something. When I walked in, thought, they seemed confused, as I didn't look like I was disabled, yet they spend twenty minuted beating around the bush -- they would not just aske me "why are you here," apparently because if they offended me, I could sue. When I finally figured out that I was not what they were looking for, I was polite, said goodbye, and left. As I was leaving, one of the several people standing around said "wait -- look at the list! You might be disabled and not know it! Lots of people are!"
That was the day that I stopped cooperating with The Man.
Hey, I hope they can figure out how to do this. Then I can get off a lot faster since I won't have wait around downloading all those images over my modem ;-)
It's very simple. Nature penalizes bad behavior, and so does a free market. The ADA merely encourages more people to become blind. You can see the results all around you -- there is a record number of blind people in the United States today! But all we need to do to fix the problem is enforce sanctions against blind people. They'll get their act together, learn to see like the rest of us, and the stupid fucking BASTARDS will stop BOTHERING us. Who the FUCK do they think they are, really? Come on! They're parasites. If they don't want to see (look, people, it is NOT HARD TO DO: Just use your eyes! Even the POOR can do it!), then tough shit. You can't see? You don't eat. It's that simple. Learn quick, or starve.
I guarantee you that if we just get tough on these cripples, they'll quit whining and learn to use their goddamn eyes like the rest of us.
I'm already struggling to keep our companies site (which is our sole source of revenue) current, but this would make it impossible. If this lawsuit is successful, I'm moving my company and myself to the Caymens (and I'm not kidding).
Try my monkeys. They're milder.
This is in general to many of the comments I've seen on here. The article mentioned that their graphic intensive sight had no text labels that went with navigation to lower levels. This screws up braille text readers. There is no reason blind people should be left out of the net because its a "graphic medium" as someone put it. They have a right to information also. People say they are 100% for diversity and disabled peoples rights but don't let a few abusers make you all cynical. Try thinking with your hearts in a few instances instead of with your heads as techies are pronet to do.
If we don't make the internet and computers in general more accessible to the disabled, we are condemning them to the same future as abhor for Mitnick.
You're an idiot. Mitnick can see. Mitnick has EARNED the right to use computers.
Blind people, on the other hand, are just whining assholes. They have earned nothing. They choose to be incompetent, and then they demand that we help them out. Yeah, right.
However, the NFB seems to be a little optimistic. It's really NOT that easy to put text tags on arbitrary graphics without changing the layout of the app, and AOL probably spent a lot of money on the design they have now. The best they're likely to be able to do is add support for some standard like Microsoft Active Accessibility and hope that's enough to fill the void.
And yes, I know what I'm talking about. I write screen readers for a living.
I'm mono-lingual
If people choose to be blind -- as you have chosen to be mono-lingual -- they deserve to suffer for their foolishness.
Has anyone tried emacspeak? I've read a bit about it and it seems pretty cool (esp. since it was developed by a blind Unix programmer).
Now they're letting those people write CODE? What kind of insanity is this? Are we going to be letting dogs write code, too? What about cattle? Plants? Rocks?! Rock Rights! Equal Access for Minerals!
Thank god I don't use emacs. No wonder it's a piece of shit: They accept patches based on the "programmer"'s "need for self-esteem", regardless of whether the programmer is totally incompetent or not. No way do I need to deal with all the bugs this pathetic blind guy sprayed around in the code -- bugs which Stallman, Captain Communism, no doubt refuses to fix because it would be "unkind".
So the fact that I'm typing this in without looking means taht this message is 'non-visual' and therefore is NOT part of the web? Or does it become 'deperate from the we b in every way' once you read it with your VISUAL output device? - Theo pardon any typos, I wasn't lloking at the screen while I typed this, so I may have missed a couple, or over backspaceed.
There are speaking web browsers that rely on the ALT text fields to allow the blind to make sense of web pages. These browsers grok only text. Image maps, java applets, shockeave plug-ins and icons may look cool and glitzy, but a text-only mode should also be provided as a requirement to businesses just like businesses are required to provide ramps to their stores.
You're WRONG WRONG its blind people FORCE THEM do it TORT TORT, get it TORT TORT.
TORT.
TORT TORT TORT.
BAD BAD BAD.
It cheeper make all aTM difernt cause then theres less dots. dots caust money expensive bad make it inffeficient really espensive make. bad bad bad bad bad.
Well, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. Sheer lunacy, though, on a par with all the folks who should know better inviting the govt. and courts to step in and regulate the software industry, bust up Micro$oft, etc. Suicidal stupidity. On the other hand, it only hastens the day when the big dumb machine grinds to a halt. The beast is collapsing under it's own weight, tearing its own guts out in a mad effort to save itself.
Did anyone else hear George Carlin on the Late, Late Show the other night? (Cheesetits, anyone?)
Which way does the water swirl down the drain where you are?
ps. Nothing against the blind. Good luck, hope you win big. Hold a little back to stock up on canned goods, though. And people think the Depression was rough.
I'm all for ramps. But they are really not always necessary. At my school there is this beautiful building with very grand hallway. Up the short flight of stairs(probably like 8 steps) there is access to about 4 offices, if that. Everything else has other means of wheelchair access. There is one girl who requires the use of a ramp, and she complained about this area, now, in the middle of this staircase, is this HUGE elevator thing, it goes up, then way over. Thankfully they did not damage the building installing it. But was this really necessary? Espically considering that it is operated with a key that only this one person has. Sometimes things can get a little out of control.
they COULDN'T SEE THE FREAKIN' SCREEN TO BEGIN WITH.
Blind people don't need to see a screen to use a computer. There are dozens of companies that make voice synthesis cards. They plug in the way a sound card would and come with special software. They generally have 50 -150 special keyboard strokes to manipulate what the screen reads. They can tell it to read to the end of a line, end of paragragh, letter by letter, word by word, jump to the beginning, end or anywhere in between. When a user presses a key it tells them what key they pushed. When they move thier mouse it tells them what thier mouse is over or reads the text the mouse is over.
What blind people have a hard time with is images with no descriptive alt tag. They also have a hard time with tables, because the screen readers don't always jump to the correct cells, in the correct order.
And alot of blind people use computers, For alot of them it is one of the only ways to venture into the outside world and communicate others.
It isn't a rule, but before you spout off talking about something for which you haven't got a clue, do yourself a favor and be quiet.
Seriously. Slashdot is a site that enables hydrophobic right-wing libertarians to interact with normal people (to the profit of neither, but never mind that) and, in a crude and limited way, approximate some of the more primitive features of a normal life. Simple human decency dictates that we try to help these people, and Mssrs. Malda and Hemos have done so. Why should the blind be any different?
There is a huge difference between saying "The 'right' thing for AOL to do is to make itself more accessable to the blind" and "The blind have a right to make AOL accomodate them". This seems to be a very fine distinction these days, and to be frank I'm rather tired of people screaming about their rights and trying to get some sort of legal mandate rather than working on changing the views of society.
For a group of people who whine so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this attitude is utter hypocrisy!
Um... Ignoring the possibility that the set of 'whiners' is mutually exclusive from that of those who object to this... There is a difference between ending exclusion (segregation) and making special concessions for a group of people. And an even bigger difference when you're talking about legally mandating these concessions.
Anyway, I'd just be much happier if people would look for better ways to resolve things than screaming "lawsuit!" at the drop of a hat.
No, "suicidal stupidity" is living in an ideologically-defined fantasy world the way you do.
Facts won't hurt you, really. Just try a few.
The only way to find out what reality is like is to go out and look. Idiots like you tortured Galileo because his facts didn't agree with their theories. Who laughed last?
When you grow up, you probably won't understand then, either. Still, there may be hope, so I'll try and explain a little bit about reality, in the vain hope that it'll sink in:
Reality doesn't change to fit your ideology. Your ideology is a fantasy, generated by a nutty novelist who made it all up as she went along. I repeat: Your ideology DOES NOT govern reality. Your ideology does not even fully describe reality. Reality does as it damn well pleases, and it does not care about your opinion. Reality is very complicated. If you think that you fully understand it, you're either insane or an idiot. Perhaps both. In any case, you're making the same mistake the Communists made: You think that if you can brainwash yourself into believing some arbitrary set of silly "rules" about how life should work, then life will really begin to work that way. You're as wrong as they were.
I think the more appropriate question is this: what the hell are ignorant and narrow-minded people doing on the net anyways!?!? Perhaps you could shed some light on this, Kintanon?
JAWS reads the screen, and by using the number pad and function keys, provides a pop-up list of the links in a page, and opens a new window if needed for framed content. It has a little trouble with text that's near sub-tables -- it'll read left-hand navbar links with the text -- but on the whole, it does a good job on the Web. It uses a modified version of Internet Explorer -- not Lynx. Too bad it doesn't do Netscape. Too bad we don't have a little free time so I can teach her HTML, too.
It does a prety damn good job in the rest of Windows, too. Using keyboard shortcuts, I've gotten her to the point of doing most of her work and email by herself, not using a mouse at all. That's doing Word, Excel if she needs to, Access, and in a very limited way (the sofware's just now supporting it), Powerpoint. She's as good under Windows as most of the sighted folks in here, even better than some.
I personally thought, CMIIW (correct me if I'm wrong), that anyone with connectivity should be able use the Web. It's all out there for general use. Sure, you can have shocked sites, but it's not too hard to provide a text-only, non-shocked, or reduced graphics site for those who can't see them. It's the same principle as testing under multiple browsers on multiple platforms. And it's not too hard to make sure fairly complicated HTML is easily accessible -- you can use Bobby to check it out.
On Slashdot it's very common to see a hopeless, drooling idiot pretending to be an expert on something, but you've got a special talent for it. What makes foolish and ignorant people think that arrogance and a loud voice are a reasonable substitute for knowledge and understanding? God knows.
This sort of nonsense thinking is founded upon the preposterous notion that the state somehow has a "duty" or "obligation" to improve the lifestyle of the disadvantaged at the expense of those who are not similarly disadvantaged. This is insane.
"Insane"? No, actually, not insane at all. You seem to be assuming that the founders of this nation were hysterical, rabid right-wing trolls like you. Fortunately, they weren't. They were actually responsible adults. It's nice that you can spell "preposterous", but those little shrieking noises that you love to make are, sadly, in direct opposition to the spirit of the Constitution (which you really should read; it's an interesting document -- though not a law of nature).
Actually you'd be mistaken there. The right to own private property IS a constitutional one, and it is this that is the foundation for the free market.
You missed the point, moron. She was talking about "laissez-faire" nonsense, which is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of a free market. The right to own property does not imply that the government is forbidden to regulate commerce; in fact, the Constitution explicitly gives the federal government the right to precisely that in many ways (while doing nothing to prevent the several states from regulating like gangbusters). So much for your cretinous little fantasies.
private property rights are raped by the ADA, which has no constitutional foundation.
To summarize: The Federal Government is granted the power to regulate interstate commerce by the Constitution. Since you are incapable of composing any rational and/or informed argument to the effect that the ADA oversteps any constitutionally-defined boundaries in that respect, I'm afraid I'll just have to write you off as a retarded child.
I rarely use GUIs, and when working with other people using a GUI-based program, I find many icons non-self-evident, I use pull-down menus, instead (why do keyboard shortcuts fail to do anything, so often?). With this discussion in mind, I can now squawk back that the icons are not self-explanatory.
(WHAT?!! What do you *mean*, that there's something wrong with the design of Microsoft Office? Are you Communist?")
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Hopefully, anyhow.
Main point, though, is that I used to work at a place where a guy with a limp and who was desperately disordered emotionally (swore and was nasty much of the time) apparently had management by the cojones. (My apologies to Spanish speakers!). Seems they didn't want to fire him because they were afraid to be sued. This was before the phrase "going Postal" became known. ("Going Postel" is a vastly different matter!) Seems they got a few clues when three or four technicians who worked for him, all quit at once.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Some people have emotional ages approximately equal to the square root of their calendar ages. (Logarithm, in extreme cases!)
On a recent contract for parking meters, we were required to add voice and braille capability for the blind. Goodness knows how they will manage to drive downtown and park at this building!
As for bus/train/ferry passes, I think it'd be easier to let the blind ride for free than it would be to make special provisions for them. C'mon, give the poor buggers a break.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
So, what do text-to speech converters do with misspelled words with syllables omitted, like "inconvience", "incandent", "nutrious", and many others? This is the one most-compelling reason to once again set up my Amiga 1000, just to see what happens. (Understandable text-to-speech included as standard, late 1985.)
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Shell account: Excellent firewall!
Dear AOL Users,
America Online can't support the blind or deaf - it would be just too much work. We'd have no time to work on our innovative and easy to use "send pictures" system.
We have no problem with the armless, because they can easily type in their AOL password with the other hand. Deaf people can't hear "You've Got Mail!" or "Welcome!". What's the point of living if you can't enjoy the chime when someone instant messages you? That's why we have no services for the blind. (I mean they can still see, right?)
As for the blind, there is nothing we can do. How can they read their email? What will they do if someone instant messages them, claiming to be an AOL employee, and asking for their credit card number and password? How do they know if they're sitting in front of their computer? This issues are too great to resolve.
We here at AOL are sympathetic to them. In our offices we even started the famous "blind guy with his speakers off" joke. That shows we leave no one out.
AOL is still for everyone, except the blind.
Thanks,
Steve Case
So who decides what minority groups we have to cater to? Do I have to redesign my doorknobs so that 1 fingered people can use it? Do I have to make my cars so that people with no arms or legs can drive them? If I'm a artist painting pictures, do I have to provide a document in braille describing the scene for the blind? What about illiterate people? Do we have to provide speakers to read stuff for them? The government has no right to require that of any private organization.
Does this mean that the ADA can ask the porn websites to make their sites accessible to the blind and disabled, say through interactive touch and feel and sounds?...Hmmmmm...maybe this isn't a bad thing after all...
Try as I would, I had no luck finding an example, but to get a very definite idea, go to the Bigfoot site, using frames-capable Lynx (2.7 or better, IIrc), to see what I'm referring to. There are four frames, and the equivalent of radio-broadcast jamming is very impressive, indeed! (Note a nearly or completely blank screen for the bottom frame, btw. (You're a masochist if you point text-to sppech at these mostrous messes!
Maybe we should call this messy condition "source code leakage" (into the text-only domain).
I may exaggerate the present degree of the problem, but it's one horrible example of how not to design a Web site. IFRAMES apparently are useful, but are they standard? I'll bet they aren't, just like getting an e-mail message in Pine, in MS-TNEF format.
Well-designed Web pages can look good with Lynx, too, btw!
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
I thought that URL was misspelled; it isn't.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
OK, then. What percentage of the population does it take to require private citizens to cater to? Is it 0.5%? 0.01% Can this change? Please enlighten me as to where these numbers are.
Part of being disabled is realizing what the word means. Life ain't fair, and passing laws to force the appearance of life being fair only destroys what individual rights we have left.
Back around 1987 or so, a couple of hackers near Boston completely designed a package around the Amiga, which had standard (and understandable) text-to-speech conversion. Idea was that a blind person could receive the whole package, and set it up unaided. Process began with an audio cassette.
How can you say this? Without strict laws we would be screwing each other over every chance we have. It is obvious we need more laws to protect each other from ourselves.
-anon
If you ar having trouble finding good web sites on your own, maybe you really do need your mommy and daddy to hold your hand. Like you seem to need the goverment to hold your hands in your daily life. Poor weak little you, being hit and damaged by nasty old web sites. Some one should come and stop the bad people from making you surf the web all day. You need to be put in a place where they can wacth you day and night, making sure you come to no harm. In a better time your would have been left on the banks of the Tiber.
Worst was the Boston Globe; I was jobless, and their Web site had lots of interesting job listings. However, after spending about 10 minutes making on-line interactive choices, there was no way to tell the site to select the job postings I'd specified. NO text-based "Submit" or "search" button.
Told them, and they in effect gave me the bird, somewhat politely. Maybe they think the jobless deserve their fate. (I suspect that they got clued in, later. Haven't been back. Retired, instead.)
Another site,, however, took my comments really seriously; I sent along a collection of URLs, including AnyBrowser and All Things Web. (It's a real mess to put bookmarks into this form, using Lynx. GUI has the advantage, here!.) This latter fellow started redesigning his site, and the first beta pages were quite good. The bad page was hard to believe; depended upon Java(Script?), which he removed. Princeton site; maybe some Princetonians do care.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Too lazy to get out my secret envelope and key in my password and all that...That's why.
Have a look:
Lynxit
What this page does is take the one you specify, and fire it back, but presented the way Lynx displays it. There are clickable options.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
"I think even Jakob Neilsen and his merry band of anti-progressives " Neilsen is a total and unabashed fascist. His take is that everythign should be printable in moveable text or its worthless. Hes a ludite in an age where they become groundchuck in the gears of creativity. I do though, personaly, make all my web sites readable by text and useable for the blind in so much that they are readable with Web-Text speach aids. I do this of my own free will, not becuase its legislated. If it every is made a law I will fight it tooth and nail. It is wrong to legislate design. It is another way for the Government to get its greedy little paws into the internet, something it has been trying to do since the early 90's after it realised it let go one of the greatest innovations of the last few decades. Those who give them this power over us should be the marked like cattle and sent off to be butchered. They are the evil of evils, the betrayers of creativity and the Judases of the Net. If you are such a person, some one who would give up the net for a your own petty socialist leanings, I hope you are found squashed under a ground level transit system train. Fight the power.
"I think even Jakob Neilsen and his merry band of anti-progressives "
Neilsen is a total and unabashed fascist. His take is that everythign should be printable in moveable text or its worthless. Hes a ludite in an age where they become groundchuck in the gears of creativity.
I do though, personaly, make all my web sites readable by text and useable for the blind in so much that they are readable with Web-Text speach aids.
I do this of my own free will, not becuase its legislated. If it every is made a law I will fight it tooth and nail.
It is wrong to legislate design.
It is another way for the Government to get its greedy little paws into the internet, something it has been trying to do since the early 90's after it realised it let go one of the greatest innovations of the last few decades.
Those who give them this power over us should be the marked like cattle and sent off to be butchered. They are the evil of evils, the betrayers of creativity and the Judases of the Net.
If you are such a person, some one who would give up the net for a your own petty socialist leanings, I hope you are found squashed under a ground level transit system train.
Fight the power.
Your post is dead on. rather than helping the supposed source of its need the ADA is a hinderence and yet another layer of the great Cthulian mess of goverment hierarchies.
Fight to limit the scope of intervention WHILE opeing up as many markets to as many people(able or disabled) as possible.
Much like the people who live their lives in the cause of others (Society for the Protection of Clubbed Babby Lesbian Seals Working in Nucelar Facories or even slashdots own Jon "Voice for the Youth" Katz) so to has the ADA proven to be mostly linning in the pocket of an already wealthy few and the moral ego boosting for those who seek the profit of acceptence thru loudmouthing.
If everyone would shut thier Slashdot ego driven mouths for one moment and go visit
www.weabable.com
most of the questions would be answered.
But no, slash dotters need to blow thier half formed opinions around to prove how cool and "geeky" they are. This thread proves beyond a shadow of a doubt Slashdot has become mostly a stomping ground for ego and is no home for facts, debate, or intelligence.
Way to go "geeks"
A democracy protects the interests of a minority against the will of a majority.
In a nutshell, it means you need to build a wheel chair ramp even though only one person might ever use it. Majority does not "rule" when it comes to matters like this - the majority cannot knowingly marginalize a minority or refrain from providing a decent and acceptable basis of opportunity (meaning someone in a wheelchair who is a great programmer cannot be overlooked for employment at your company because he can't climb the stairs - you need to give him a decent and reasonable basis of opportunity to compete with able-bodied programmers).
As it stands, creating accesible web pages isn't that hard. Yahoo runs an entire news site that is a mirror of their main news site, simply for the use of lynx users (here). If they can do it, so can other companies.
Im laughing already. Your so transparent on this, mentioning hakims name and them expounding an MTV mindset. Good going dude, your so militant and togther..lets do tofu sometimes. If you came out of your little shell of verbiage and fancy you would see that you are one of the many problems witha free and open society. You reek of ego driven sameness, of self destruction in a futile willess life spent in masterbatory flailings. You wander about and find no face to call your own lost you seek anothers found and worn you become as them no voice no face no mind to be self Sufiless guilefull wanting for all needing for nothing become now nothing Sucka
Great post
informative and on the money
Of course the egomaniacs here wont read it.
Particulars, if anyone cares: I've selected black on white, using config. on my term. emulator (Conex 7.1 for DOS: very good, for me). An <EM> tag results in white-on-red text, with the red filling the character cell. (50-line VGA). As I type into this form, the underscores are green on a blue ground; entered text is black on white. Where it says "Create an Account" above (I did, btw), it's blue on green. "Anonymous Coward" is white on red. Some tags create yellow on red, iirc; they're less common. My Lynx is 2.8.2dev22 running on FreeBSD. How much of the color choice is ANSI-determined, I don't know; Conex probably re-maps ANSI color sequences to my choices (have forgotten what I did to config. Conex). Heck, take a short /. page, or any other of interest, and send it to Lynxit, also mentioned [above]. (Sorry; link's quite messy to key in.) /.'s Web designers have done quite a nice job, folks! (Hope a moderator reads this, but I seem to get posted very quickly. (I don't say nasty or dumb things, much!) (^_^)
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
You think it was easy to get that <EM> char. string into the final text? Every Preview "undoes" the ampersand-; notation!
In a new development the ADA lawyers are preparing to sue game makers ID and Dynamix (now defunct) for not making thier popular games Quake and Tribes accessable to the blind.
The constitution is simply there to tell you what basic rules any new laws have to follow. Since the constitution does not expressly forbid government protection of the disabled, it is most certainly allowed. In no way is the consitution being violated by government mandates of handicapped accesiblilty.
Added to which, if you read any early American political writings, you will note that it is expressly requested that the populace hold a "constitutional congress" every two years or so in order to change the constitution where needed. If Jefferson were alive today, he would waste no time in organizing an effort to bring the consitution up to date, particularly with reference to guns.
In fact, government protection of the handicapped is abstractly inferred by the observence of inalienable rights for American cicitzens...which I think fairly imply that the handicapped should be able to use a public washroom in dignity.
Illiad is now hunkering down for an oncomming legal battle with the Ludites United Inc. They claim the popular comic strip User freindly makes them feel "Liek we are being excluded from some cool joke that we really want to be in on, cause we think you might be laughing at us, and that makes us feel icky inside." Spokepoerson for the group further says "Its evil and wrong to exclude us based on technical skill or understanding. Why cant they be more like that funny Dilbert strip?"
Illiad is now hunkering down for an oncomming legal battle with the Ludites United Inc.
They claim the popular comic strip User freindly makes them feel "Liek we are being excluded from some cool joke that we really want to be in on, cause we think you might be laughing at us, and that makes us feel icky inside."
Spokepoerson for the group further says "Its evil and wrong to exclude us based on technical skill or understanding. Why cant they be more like that funny Dilbert strip?"
The one time organized attempt to link the nation from sea to sea is comming under fire today in a hellstorm of legal actions.
Spokesman for the group against HandsAcross America said "They excluded us from teh get go. Not only those without hands, but the fish and the cats and the little puppy dogs. We are seeking to have them include everyone regardless of limb type or appendiage choice."
No comment yet from the organziation.
You are confusing protection of basic rights for minorities with a government that mandates a base standard of living.Protection for the disabled means that they have the ability to compete by virtue of their stated skills, on an equal playing field as able-bodied individuals. What that implies for web sites is another issue - mostly, we don't have an adequate technology for letting disabled people access web pages.Nonetheless, the principle of protection for the disabled is exactly rooted in the democratic principles you are extolling.
I think if AOL loss in this case, braille libraries could be sued by visually normal people too.
In yet another legal action of its type a group of gay Americans is suing Bill Clinton for not including them in his extramaterial affairs.
"We just feel his actions kep us out of a very important part of American life. Why is it that we are excluded from the scandals and hoopla of the Oval Office.
Besides, did you see that MS Lewinski thang he did. Pullleaseee. Im sure givent he choice he would much rather have smoked one of our cigars...ooga. And thats what its all about...Choices...you sillyhead you."
When asked for a comment President Clinton hurriedly remarked "Well im not saying I have excluded gay males from my life, lets just say i didnt inhale."
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Basically you are arguing that we should let the free market take care of all the disabled people, we all know how much disposable income they have. If you are in a wheel chair and no one can turn a profit on you, well I guess you are shit out of luck. Any cost society bears in accomodating your needs could stifle innovation. That logic is rolled out anytime the government proposes regulating something. While I know /. loves to bash the govt, what was the US like before regulation? Well, lets see, children routinely worked 80 hour weeks in unsafe sweat shops. Competion in many industries was essentially impossible due to trusts and interlocking directorates. John D Rockerfeller was worth 10% of the GNP at the height of his wealth. Workers were disposable, if your leg was mangled in a machine, sorry if your family starves. What did people say when reforms were proposed? "If I can't hire 8 year olds at slave wages it will dramatically increase the cost of doing business and hurt the economy."
In still antoher law suit filled today the Weight Challanged Association sent a letter of intent to sue the White Castle Corporation.
"They just make em so damn tasty , who could resist?" A spokesperson for the group said. " Im mean have you every just got close to one, really lcose and takenin that smeel, that taste that.......I gota go...wheres the closest White Castles? TAXI"
A sister motion is being filled agianst the Yoohoo Company.
Its not a problem getting over this one: get your commercial site hosted in another country besides the US... none of the red tape or encryption laws.. DATA HAVEN!!
That's fine and dandy, but you cannot have a government mandating that kind of thing.
Long time tech hangout slashdot has fallen prey to the legal flury today. The infamous user Anonymous Coward is suing the website for lost wages, wasted time, and mental damages to the tune of $3 billion dollars.
"I feel the by letting me post all day from work they have entraped me. The peopl I have seen, the debates i have been part of...it has warped my fragile little mind."
Asked why he doesnt post from his own account the Anonymous coward responded "Oh please, with my lousy spelling you think half the people here DONT know who this is. Please. Theymay have weak arguments but they aint all as dumb as Katz.
Besides, id gladly drop the lawsuite if the slashdot boys get me in on thier interview with Pete Townshend, who by the way is god."
The law suit was imediatley striken down by a district court judge who happend to have mod points today . Said the judge " It cost me 5 mod poitns, but damn it it was worth digging that asshole a new grave. Lets hope he gets another project at work and leaves us all alone, at least until the next Katz article comes out that is."
It happens. Mine seems to be about 2*sqrt of my calendar age, but, then, I'm 63. Despite my emotional age, I do have a sense of life's perpspective only obtainable either by going through horrors at an early age, or living a while.
Typical liberal logic. Are you saying that non-white people have a disability?
Its amazing how much you liberals just don't get it. Not wanting government intrusion into our lives has nothing to do with our capacity for compassion towards disabled individuals.
The Volunteer Proofreader
I suggest you do not open a business in the United States - you will find that your statement is entirely false.
Simply put, if you ran a software design shop that was had an elevated entrance, it may be the case that it would never be profitable for you to hire a disabled person - you may never recoup the costs of the construction.
This leaves the disabled facing unfair competition for a prospective job. You can't just assume that by luck, someone somewhere has an entrance that maybe the disabled person can use.
The principle is very firmly rooted in a market that provides for fair competition, which in general you seem to be supporting.
Your vision of a pure, unregulated market doesn't exist - since you're so fond of history, go look up Teddy R. and the trustbusters.
Blind people should get respect an their rights should be guaranted. We cannot take an indifferent aproach on this... Is sad to see some postings that reminds me Hitler's attitude for people with disabilities...
People who are functionaly disabled in our society did not enter the market force in 1780. Firstly, medical science could not get them to adulthood. Secondly, if they were lucky to get to that age, they were left to the whims of their family. Drop your comparisons to the eighteenth century - they make no sense whatsoever.
Its the states that pass the accesibility laws you moron...which jive with your crack-induced rants regarding the consittion.
Two of my best friends are blind.
One of them is an excellent programmer.
I would bet all my bucks on him when he
plays Tetris (speech enabled) against you.
You may use your eyes and you wouldn't have
a chance against him.
You could be blind tomorrow. Take care.
What the hell are ignorant people doing on
slashdot anyways? I guess they MIGHT have someone
or something explaining the websites to them.
OK here we go:
Ever heard about speech synthesizers?
Good set of URLs. Mod this up.
Oh wait, everyone is to busy being blind to the facts.
-a
Welcome to the State Mindset.
Hypocrite.
You guys have no idea what compliance means. I work at a university they tell us to use ALT tags and not to use frames. That's generally accepted to be all you need for compliance right now. Gimme a break it's not gonna cripple the web. There's something new on Slashdot that will "cripple the web" every day. Slashdot seems to be becoming the tech world's version of yellow journalism of late.
Congratulations, sir **YOU** are what is wrong with this country. Politicians, lawyers, special interest groups, and **YOU** -- the type of person who lets 0.5% of the population walk all over the remainder. Thanks alot, jerkwad.
PS - After I take your money, I'll go double or nothing in Quake with him!
Besides being redundant, your language leaves something to be desired.
is going to be designed specifically for fucking with blind people. It will feature light green text on light lime green text. Lots of "catch the monkey" ads. Randomly, the server will just sends blurs - just to fuck with people who can see but aren't really sure (teeheehee). Perhaps www.blindfuck.com is still available...
F the Blind.
You suck.
Angered because AOL was suddenly out-of-the-blue sued to be accessible. That's bullshit!
Duh!
Gotsta say, your own methods of mailing suggestions seems a hell of a lot better than LITIGATION for the sake of litigation. Sue big so that there will be lots of publicity. Makes sense to me.
Abuse, abuse, abuse, abuse.
The w3c is working on their own accessibilty guidelines, it contains a long checklist htat covers everything from alt text to coloration of links compared to background.
it's here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
YOU SHOULD TELL JON KATZ TO
WRITE AN ARTICLE ON HOW OTHER
SLASHDOTERS MISTREAT THE YOUNG
IT IS NOT RIGHT. PLEASE SAVE
USE JON KATZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You clueless posters who think a legal action will cure anything are idiots. You should live blind for a day and see where the legal system gets you.
You are all a bunch of guilt filled sighted idiots who would not know how to help the blind if you tried. You would rather have a law help some one than help them yourself. Shame on you.
I am not asking for pity or legal aid. If I am not able to get a web site I will mail the owner of the site. I do not need you to hold my hand.
More laws are what is wrong with many things in this country. For GOD sake no more.
Having to use a modem that's limited to V.34 (i.e. 33,600 baud connects at best) means I generally surf with images off. If a site uses an imagemap that takes 20 seconds to download, or uses 1001 images for buttons with no ALT, I'll just go elsewhere.
Around 20% of users browse with images off (an old figure... probably lower now), blind or not; is it really that hard just to add 'ALT="Introduction"' etc to image links, or even just to forgo half the pointless flashy GFX that make your website eat 10x the bandwidth it really needs and makes the actual CONENT of the site nigh on impossible to access to anyone without a T3...
Reading information. Dealing with morons like yourself. I'd have my companion describe the pictures to me, but since his command of english is severely lacking and he is colorblind, he isn't much help. And yes, Kentanun, he is a dog. I supposed I should have placed that in an ALT tag for you. I am always amazed when somebody realizes I'm blind (the sunglasses and dog aren't as much of a clue as one would suspect) and then talks louder and slower so that I can understand. A similar problem to this is some restaurant owners don't want my companion dog in the restaurant with me. They complain about the dog hair that they have to clean up. Well, shouldn't you be cleaning your restaurant anyway?
http://www.conversa.com/Web/Web.asp
Admit it, most of us were cheering like nuts when the DOJ opened fire upon MS. Though we don't know what'll happen to MS yet, you can be sure as hell that nothing would've happened for years from our little 'boycott'.
Same thing with AOL. I doubt they'd care that a bunch of blind people aren't using AOL. Not like they don't have enough buisness already. :/
Yes, they impose a burden on us. They mean we can't legally kill you to make your dumb ass shut the fuck up. Man I hate 17 year old libertarians who just discovered Ayn Rand and think they know how the world works.
Let us play a little game. Just for a moment there close your eyes, get up from your seat and start walking. Just go anywhere but remember no peeking. Bump! What is that? A table? Feel with your hands .. wait .. there is a book lying on top of it Try reading it ... yes .. with your eyes closed. Not much fun, is it? This is the world of a blind person. You can open your eyes and see but theirs is just a world of sounds, a world where words mean everything. It is very hard to live in a world where you have to be dependent on another person to read you a book or to tell you the latest news. Yes it was hard but now the Internet has opened a whole new world for the blind community. They can browse the web using their screen readers. All that is out on the web is read out to them and they do not need to be dependent on anyone but themselves. They can go to any web page, read its contents just like everybody else .. but wait .. at times they are faced with blank pages saying [image] [image] all over and they have no idea what those images are. At times they are stuck in frames and cannot navigate through them. Then they are faced with image maps which they cannot see, which their speech browser can only read as an [image]. These are some of the problems that they face everyday while browsing the web. You might be thinking what does this all mean? Does this mean I cannot use frames, I cannot use image maps? No, not at all! You can use all these things and yet make your page accessible to the blind. It does not take a lot of effort to do that, only a little bit of caring. Here are a few tips on how you can do that. 1. ALT TAGS - These are amongst the most important tags to use if you wish to make a speech friendly site. Adding this tag does not only make your page accessible to the blind but all those people out there who are using text browsers and it is good programming, too. When you put an image in your page make sure you add the alt tag. That way a speech reader instead of saying [Image] every time it comes across one, will read out the alt tag. Try to make your alt tags as descriptive as possible. For example rather than having your title be alt tagged as "logo.gif" or "John's logo" have it say what the logo might actually say i.e. "Welcome to John's Page." This is how you add the alt tag, to work on the same example. And remember for purely decorative graphics which add no content to the page or those gazillion lines that you may have scattered on your page put alt="" . This way the blind won't get to hear unnecessary alt tags like "This is a line" after every 3 or 4 lines. 2. ONE LINK PER LINE - Try not to put your links in paragraphs. Have one link on each line. Screen readers read an entire line of text at a time. So multiple links in one line can confuse the blind. Screen readers also do not say that there is a link. Blind people have to search for them. So make sure that the links are easily identifiable by the context of the paragraph. Rather than saying something like "Go to Joe's Page" and letting "Go to" be the link, it will make more sense to the blind if you let "Joe's Page" be the link. If you do not like the look of your page with a link per line, then you can always add an option of a text only index. A text index consists of a separate page on which you place the links which occur in your index on individual lines 3. FRAMES - Frames are very hard for the blind to navigate. Always provide a no frames option. It does not take a lot of work since you already have your pages done. All you need to do is link to them as separate pages from an index page. And make sure that you provide an entry point from where the user can choose whether to go to your frames pages or your no frames pages. This way the blind can choose from the beginning which way they want to go. IS THAT SO FUCKING HARD ?
I have become, without really intending to, an advocate for the handicapped, perhaps partly because I've been working poor since 1991 and was all but forced to retire early because of very-common age prejudice. This has made me send a fair amount of commentary to many different Web sites about their inaccessibility to The Rest Of Us. I collected some URLs to help Web page designers get a few clues. Surprisingly, one who not only got clues, but started redesigning, found (in his opinion) most Web validators to return with "gibberish" (if I recall his comments right). He also wasn't impressed with Lynx documentation on the Web; he might not have known where to look. (Query from uninformed Web page designer: "How do you write in Lynx?" (as if Lynx had its own language!))
Our society is splitting (not down the middle!) into the very well-to-do and The Rest of Us. I feel I'm definitely one of the latter, and try not to be resentful or have a (wood) chip on my shoulder. (Si would be a different matter.) Nevertheless, I do feel rather peeved when effectively slapped in the face by some more bad Web design.
This lawsuit is welcome, to me, because it will call attention to the inaccessibility of many Web sites, or should!
One startling example of misapplication of the ADA is that new cabins built on the Appalachian Trail were required to be built with handicapped-accessible rest rooms! No matter that there are miles of the Trail from the nearest wheelchair-accessible point; Absurdity Rules! Sorry if I ramble. Really wanted to blow off some steam about this. Too big a sleep debt to write better comments.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
Midnight hacker in 1960 (BMEWS, Colo. Springs); Philco 2000 assembly-lang. programmer, 1961; mechanical analog computer technician, mid-1950s
Only a few voices here are saying "fuckthe blind" More of them, if you were actualy read the posts, were saying "You cant legislate my web site" FORCING everyone to confrom to ONE SET OF RULES is what the creative force of the net is NOT ABOUT. Who the hell are you to DICTATE that everyone conform to your verison of "proper" web design. You are as bad if not worse than the "web designers" you rant against. Your goverment mindset of "lets legislate everything to conform to the ONE TRUE TEMPLATE" is what breeds bland sameness. Goverment employees are prime examples of this. They are not hired or rewarded on merit, the whole GS grade system is set up on Time Put In. A warm body thats does a bad job for years gets to rise above folks who actualy know waht they are doing. Following set procedures and letting your creativity be ruled by Standards and Practices groups is the very thing that is making the net CRAP. Those "web designers" you rant against are simply , blindly, following another set of "Templated Rules" while you seem ready to follow another. Your both a bunch of zombies. Wake up and think for yourselves.
No. The web is not a visual media. Sorry to break your little delusion there. Some people have twisted it a lot to try and make it one, sadly.
I just want to point out that if you use ad banners (a thoroughly dispicable practice, IMO) on your personal site, it might indeed count as "commercial". I link to Amazon through their associates program. Am I commerical too? Who knows.
The blind suffer and so are beyond criticism. Anyone who does so much be a heartless bastard or a bigot. Blah, blah, blah.
And yes, my web site is just about the most blind friendly one there can be. 99% of it is just black text on a white background.
It's too bad for your theory that the percentage of people with serious disabilities who are working has actually declined slightly since the passage of the ADA.
The idea behind the ADA is a good one, the implementation flawed. The gov't classifies over 40 million people as disabled, which is clearly a joke and which makes light of people with real disabilities: the paralyzed, those with missing limbs, the blind and deaf.
As a compassionate society, we should want to care for the less fortunate. As it works out, the ADA has mostly been for whiny people without bona fide disabilities suing over their sex addiction and stuff. While few of these prevail at trial, the cost of litigation is substantial. Often it's cheaper to settle.
And let's face it, money spent by private businesses to meet ADA mandates is a tax. If the gov't had passed a multi-billion income tax increase to fund wheelchair ramps, elevators, etc, there would have been a revolt. But by simply mandating that businesses pay for it, people never knew what hit them. We should be honest about the real costs this program to the taxpayer.
My solution:
- Restrict ADA to bona fide disabilities
- Make sure it is presented as charity, not as a matter of civil rights.
- Apply some realistic benefit/cost tests
- Focus on the actual needs of the disabled, versus BS technical and legal requirements.
OK- I won't actually do a haughty rant pretending to _believe_ that caption, I think it is as indefensible as the one it parodies- but dig it- most of the browsers out there _are_ IE, and guess what? Most of the ones that aren't are still Windows! If you (we) linux people seriously expect that you can scorn a little faction, a relatively rare special interest group just because you don't feel like making even a pretense at an effort- well, quick karma will do you in faster than you would believe possible, and who's going to speak up for you when non-Windows users are not allowed to vote or have bank accounts because all is computerised and minorities are inconvenient? Who do you expect will help you- ADA? Better get a grip on what democracy really is before you're run over yourself.
The spoken word came first, and you use it yourself, I bet. Forget this obsession with the primacy of visual text, it is nothing more than a weak paraphrasing of all the expressions, overtones and richness of the spoken word- to which a blind person might be considerably more sensitive than you are, making you the crippled one.
Text is nothing. Written language is a cheap hack- anything expressible in it can be expressed with the spoken word, which was around first, and continues to see more use on a daily basis.
_You_ are behaving like a loony. Perhaps you might consider not behaving that way.
When lynx users can browse anything again. Slashdot does well, as does CNN, but beyond those, a *lot* of the net is gone today (at work at the Univ. of Kansas, 100 metres from where lynx was written)
Ever since netscape 1.1 brought about many pages that were useless to me (a lynx user) I've wanted to get a blind person to go to that site and sue. I don't know anyone who is blind well enough to work with them on this, but I've wanted to.
In the end I won't link sites that are not lynx accessable. (Unless they are "My favoirte pictures", or user friendly type things where the pictures are the reason to visit. Come to think of it though, many of those sites are more lynx friendly then others. (Dilbert is very lynx friendly, if you have enough site to load the graphcis you care to see)
Fortunatly /. has always been lynx friendly, and theirfore blind friendly.
No thanks, I only smoke baboons!
(Hey, given my alias, I *have* to participate in this thread...)
"Only two more days to the fort. I can just see the look on Major fFolkes's face now."
"My, you've got damned good eyesight!"
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
there is just a LITTLE differnce between the making the net usable to a blind person and making visual art enjoyable to a blind person.
Note that you could make a bas-relief style engraving of the picture, and by touching that the blind could get some sense of the paintings.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I wouldn't mind seeing some more readable corporate sites. I remember when Netscape 1.1 came out, and I started seeing pages that weren't readable by *sighted* people (lousy backgrounds and textcolors) let alone the blind. More ALT tags would be good, and maybe a little bit more explanation in places. I like to know what I'm clicking sometimes.
However, this shouldn't be legislated, no one should get sued over bad web design. How hard is it to be courteous and make a text-only version, or to design your page correctly from the start?
No, what happens now is, people avoid badly designed or ugly sites. That's good enough for me. I've gotten complements on my ALT tags from people who browse the site I maintain. All of the graphics don't translate well, but I've made an effort to see that the site isn't incomprehensible or mindlessly repetitive without them. It isn't that hard to do, if you design it with that in mind from the start.
---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
ATMs (at least in the US) use a standard menu structure and the same configuration of buttons.
Not so.
I've been to 3 ATMs in the last 2 days. All of them had different screens and a different menu layout. I don't see how a blind person could deal with this without having someone read the menu for them.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
On the ones I used, the confirm/cancel buttons were done correctly, but the transaction type screens were different and one of them had an extra screen before the transaction type. Do the ATMs up north prompt you for English/Spanish text?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I guess that rules out any kind of national standard ATM menu interface.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Username: slashdot-wizard Password: slashdot
--
I've just read through most of the reponses here, and people don't seem to get it.
The ADA are not making an issue about web site design, the web browser or the OS.
Their point is that the PROPRIETARY AOL inferface is so badly designed that it doesn't support "accessability" options, even if they're built in to the OS.
How ever much you may hate MS, the current OSs support a variety of "accessability" options (high contrast colour schemes, huge fonts, "stickey" Alt and Ctrl, text-to-speech) which mean that every app written properly will be usable by our less-than-able brethren. Even most web sites are OK, as these benfits filter down through the browser (even Netscape).
This sig left unintentionally blank.
...it's about the crappy proprietary (closed source) AOL interface, which doesn't support the "accessability" options of the OS.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
No, why should anyone care about anyone. Heck, lets leave bikes in front of every door and not hold the door for old people. Or why should I care about that kid that lost sight of his mom in the crowd on the subway. Handicap parking lots? I don't need them!
/mill *sigh*
These people shouldn't even be on the internet. People, btw, are they even _real_ people?
First, if the car is foreign, the passanger can then use the ATM, even if blind. (Don't assume EVERY car on US roads has the steering wheel on the same side.)
Second, what happens if a blind person wants to get cash, after dark? If the bank's closed, the 24-hour ATMs are the only place they can go, and the drive-through's are easily foot-accessible.
As for software interfaces - the interface SHOULD be seperate from the background work. That is good design, aids testing and improves portability. Whilst shoddy coding isn't a hanging offence, yet (just wait until the year 2000, and nothing happens), if the disabled wish to sue manufacturers over programming stupidities, more power to them! I've NO objection to software companies being forced, one way or another, to produce code of merchantile quality.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Whilst you -can- get speech synthesisers for computers, which can "read" web pages, these won't work on web pages which are largely graphical with no meaningful ALT tags. As a -lot- of web pages put text into GIFs and JPEGs, even the best such package is going to barf out completely.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The blind, and (for that matter) the sighted are being bombarded with web-pages which are over-graphical and for which there is NO alternative. This puts a strain on the networks as well as our eyes, and therefore on our pockets.
(Who pays for the Internet? Not the corporations, but the end-users. The fatter the pipe they need, the more comes out of your pockets, in corporate tax. Not directly, but through other products you use. You'll never be able to trace it.)
The totally blind use speech synthesisers. Not a problem, where ALT tags are used, and text pages are available.
The partially-sighted may use speech synthesisers, but probably just use larger default fonts. Not a problem, if the page doesn't grab control and use microscopic text on a clashing background.
The "average"-sighted can see the page "clearly", except when it's green text on a yellow background.
"So, avoid those who don't use good designs!" you say. Not so easy. In an increasingly digital world, you can't even pay your bills by going to the store anymore! It's all centralised. (A bit stupid, as computers allow decentralisation! But, that's what you get for living in a world full of idiots.)
So, the only realistic way to pay is by post or computer. Post is unreliable - missing, stolen or fire-bombed mail is not unusual, and berserk postal workers aren't merely an urban legend.
That leaves computer. So, you go to the website for your phone company, or the IRS, or whoever. Their site is utterly illegible, badly organised, and impossible to follow. You can't pick and choose who you pay - it's not like you get to use the services and then opt to give your money to someone else.
If the sites aren't usable by the blind, near-blind, or even sighted, those companies can make it =very= difficult to use services we should be able to take for granted. In the colder parts of the world (eg: the mid US, northern England, Scandanavia), heating isn't an option. It's either there, or you're dead. No if's or but's.
Whilst we're not (yet) at the point where electronic payments are mandatory for services, that WILL happen. Maybe not this year, but within 5-10 years, cheques will be extinct, and all major transactions will be online.
If ANY segment of society is excluded, by the time that happens, that segment of society can write it's collective will. It'll be extinct or nomadic (such as the Travellers) within a year of such a switch.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If a blind doesn't get a truck driving job because they are blind, then do they have the right to sue the employer?
No. The ADA prevents discrimination in employment against qualified disabled people who could do the job with reasonable accomodation. A ramp, elevator, or modified working hours could all be reasonable accomodations. A blind person would not be qualified for a truck driving position since they could not get a drivers license. If you're interested they're examples of court cases and a DOJ Q&A on the ADA.
The part of the ADA that is being applied to AOL is that commercial property must be accessible by disabled people. If you consider AOL's online real estate to be commercial property, and there is a reasonable accomodation that can be made (through use of ALT tags, etc) to make the property accessible to the blind, then I don't think it's unreasonable in the context of the law. You may well argue that the law is unreasonably vague or unnecessary, or even unconstitutional, but be that as it may, it has been sucessful at achieving it's main goal of making the US a more decent place to live and work for disabled people (and skateboarders).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I was going to pass on this one until you started SHOUTING, since the subject is discussed above. But here goes.
The ADA requires braille on walk up ATMs. This seems reasonable to me, especially since the marginal cost for adding braille new ATMs is close to zero.
Banks specify braille on all ATMs to save a few bucks and avoid hassle in ordering spare parts. Ergo, your drive up ATM has braille. Is that so horrible?
As for blind people not being able to see the computer screen, that's the point, they can't, but they can read the text once it's passed through a translator of some kind. Most of the important information online is text, and HTML is certainly text based. Is it so much for the largest content provider on the internet to represent in text form that can be reasonably represented in a text form.
Look, if blind people start suing for the inability to view porn, I'll be on your side, but I don't see that happening.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
If she is a qualified employee, you should build the ramp or make other accomodations that don't require her to go into that room. If it is too expensive to build the ramp, you can get assistance. If it is still too expensive you don't have to. You can get free technical assistance from the DOJ.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
For example: if a significant blind-persons' agency were to cry foul to the news media, I know of many, many people that would boycott non-compliant sites. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that someone would write browser plugins to help the tech-impaired to verify such sites before viewing them. Not visiting sites cuts into ad revenue, and it will hurt them.
I think enough media attention would force all the major non-compliant sites to redesign -- just to avoid bad publicity.
Posted by the Proteus
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
First off, the ADA is about providing for people with disabilities, not designing for them. I've seen some pretty moronic posts about how the 'Net is going to have to be all text and no images to satisfy the blind. Have you ever seen Sneakers?! Don't you know that a man doesn't have to see the porn to realize that Playboy is a great magazine? The web is, after all, a text-based medium and can still be presented as such, even if you can't see your favorite Flash program.
With that in mind, sure, using ALT tags is a great step. So is understanding how forms are put together. Do you ever wonder why Hotmail's label for it's login name is above the entry box? It's because blind readers read the text in the order it sees it. If you put the login textbox first, it reads, "(edit)", then you enter whatever, then "login (edit)" where the second edit is the password and then "password blah blah". It makes sense to put it in order and doesn't really harm the design.
And finally, Microsoft and other companies have put some effort into making their operating environments accessible for blind people. AOL could do the same. AOL is more than just the web site. It's also a proprietary service that has an incredibly graphics-rich interface. I don't know if the blind can use this interface, and I bet that that is even more of a problem then their web site.
The blind don't want AOL to get rid of all the cool stuff that us seeing people enjoy, they just want the door opened to some of the fun. If you think that means ruining your party, then you need to take a step back and think about how you would feel in the same situation.
Everyone's encountered websites that are totally unusable even if you can see. What recourse do we have then? If the blind have a right to sue a site because it's hard to use, I want the same right.
Oh wait, last time I checked TEXT was VISUAL. You can not FEEL the web, you can not HEAR it, or Taste it, or smell it. You can SEE it, or someone/thing can see it and translate it into sound for you. But it is inherently visual.
Last time I checked, the web was a bunch of electrons going over some wires. You can't SEE, HEAR, TASTE, SMELL or TOUCH those electrons. Oh sure, you can get some software to translate it into text or sound or braille, but it's inherently electrons.
:-P
Causation can cause correlation
Please tell me you're being sarcastic...
Braile displays are rather common (ever watch Sneakers? Whistler uses the same thing many blind people use computers with), the most common one from what I remember being the Telebrailer. There are also many, many speech synthesis programs out there, I've played with a couple of the free (beer) ones and they were pretty good for text displays.
What, the DOD is suing AOL for not writing all of their code in Ada? Oops.. sorry, I just had a flashback there. Never mind..
--
Jake
No so. I have seen ATMs that have braille keys and touch screens for everything else.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I truly sympathize with those people who have physical limitations that I'll hopefully never have to personally deal with.
However, I also fully believe that people have the power to vote with their wallets. Don't like AOL? Don't use it! If they don't want your business badly enough to cater to your personal needs, then deny them the use of your money.
I'm sick of the USA's twisted legal system being raped by lawyers. While I don't have any great feelings for AOL, I 100% stand behind their right to support whoever the hell they want to. If they don't want to invest the extra manpower in adding limited-vision support, then that should be their decision to make - not the federal governments.
Freedom? P-shah. The tort system is taking it from us, and far too many of us seem to be happy about it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Maybe we should limit the lawyer's cut to 10% and they pay court costs.
I can see it now: "Forcing a plaintiff to pay court costs is a restriction of Constitutional rights, because it limits the ability of the underpriviledged to be protected by the court system."
My idea is this:
Sue for whatever dollar amount you want. You are entitled to collect any actual damages awarded by the court. All punitive damages, howerver, shall immediately be submitted to the federal government to be added to the General Fund.
This way, people who truly have been wronged by obscene negligence still retain the ability to hit a mega-corporation in the wallet, but there is no longer a personal financial incentive for doing so. If your kids die because your car split in half as you drove down the highway, you can still make sure that similar defects never happen again. No more 12e6 dollar awards for spilled coffee, though.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Sorry to correct you:
most part of the information sent through the
web is ASCII. Download a web page and check the
content.
It wouldn't be difficult to offer web pages
which can be accessed by people who are blind.
If your Lynx browser can access your web page,
then a person who is blind can too.
--
imagine what _you_ would do without a
decent interface to access the Net?
--
Allow me to explain for those that don't understand: HTML allows one to author a web page using human characteristics like HEADER, EMPHASIS and CITATION. Instead, the WYSIWYG world decided that it would be better to have lame tags like ITALLICS, BOLD and BLINK which have no meaningful translation for blind people.
HTML is even designed to allow for a "browser" to construct the page, knowing where the TOC is and what the logical order of documents are; it would be VERY EASY to write a blind "browser" if everyone used these tags instead of stuffing every piece of information in a table with nonsensical tags (yes, I am very guilty of this as well).
I hope the lawsuit is successful and that it raises awareness about how information SHOULD be organized. Perhaps /. could only allow real tags instead of the patentedly lame I, B, etc. (they do allow EM, STRONG and BLOCKQUTOE, tho')
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Wow, the ignorance on this issue is astounding. Here's yet another clue (one of many being handed out today ;)
The HTTP protocol was around BEFORE graphic browsers. That's why we have things like TEXT browsers. No mousy mousy, no clicky clicky. Windows isn't the only OS, and IE isn't the only browser.
Regarding the images you sell online.... you can make the ALT tags very descriptive. It's that simple. To say that no blind person is interested in your photos is stupid. Some DO like to decorate their house, as they DO actually have friends that =gasp= VISIT them. Have you ever spent time and talked with a blind person? They are very interested in many things you would think they would not be.
I sang along side a blind person in choir (way back in high school.) He always made it into the top choirs, and sight read well (braille is more useful than I thought!) He had a good ear, too (maybe that's how he did the sight reading... you can build something I like to call "music premonition," where the next note(s) seem obvious... I never did ask him how he did it... he sang well, had braille for at least the text, and that's all I cared about.)
I met a blind person in a computer store, trying to buy one of the new airplane power adaptors for his laptop. He knew computers well enough to think the standard was bullshit. Oh, he also happened to be competing in bicycle races as a professional athlete, which is why he had the laptop.... he travelled alot.
People like THAT impress me. To them, there are no barriers except those artificially placed by the likes of you.
[snip]
Wrong and wrong. You should have quit when you were ahead. The Jim Crow laws were just one small cog in the mechanism of institutionalized racism. There were plenty of instances of non-governmental organizations and individuals pushing segregation.
It wasn't governments that created contractual bans on selling houses to blacks. It wasn't the government that declared certain businesses "white only". It wasn't the government that went out and lynched people. These issues were every bit as important to the Civil Rights movement as Jim Crow.
Your view of history reeks of Limbaughesque revisionism.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
The ADA mandates equal access to facilities. That means things like wheelchair ramps, larger bathroom stalls with handrails, elevators, and so on. However, one you have access, the responsibilities of a business vis-a-vis the ADA end.
An art museum can be required to install wheelchair ramps, but it cannot be required to make Braille versions of the paintings. A steak restaurant can be required to have handicapped-access bathrooms, but I think few would argue that they should be required to have vegetarian dishes for those not allowed to eat red meat.
Blind people have access to the AOL website through whatever software they're using (and if they don't, it's not AOL's responsibility to provide such software), but any benefits they may or may not derive from that site are not covered under the ADA. Access can be legislated, but benefits cannot.
-- Old Man Kensey
Yeah, think about that one for a minute... how you would go about getting cash from your bank if you were blind? Like others (and myself) have mentioned, having a taxi or a friend take you to a drive-up ATM is a very safe and efficient method.
What's up with these spurious lawsuits? A company should be able to do whatever they want as long as they aren't somehow predatory or it cuts people off of essential services. 1. AOL is by no means essential. The nationwide '911' system is essential. AOL is entertainment for the weak minded. 2. AOL is a corporation. Cutting out the blind harms marketshare, so it's in AOL's interest to maximize that. If they haven't done so already, it's obviously impractical for their purposes (or they haven't got to it yet). 3. If AOL doesn't have these capabilities, someone else can come along and provide them. Is AOL to provide concessions for every single kind of disability? It may sound cruel or something, but to be perfectly honest, this is AOL's business. Boycott their service, etc. but don't sue them. That's just cheap. As they aren't a monopoly and don't provide an essential service, it's their right to provide whatever they want (in my opinion). I may not like it, but online accessability online isn't as easy as slapping a ramp down in front of a building...
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Anyone remember the scene from Sneakers where Whistler had that braille terminal...very nice....and does anyone else see the irony of blind people sueing to see something that has historically been a graphic oriented medium....point and click is just a little difficult when you can't see to point...of course i can understand the alt tags being used, etc, etc, not to mention the character/speech programs...why not have a program that "describes" that could be intresting...okay....i'm done now...bye bye
With XML you can create a page with the content, then create style sheets (XSL) that display the content differently for different platforms. A site created with XML could adjust to new regulations merely by adding or modifying one file...
well that just means you have a pretty dumb web reader. It shouldn't be too hard for someone to design one that ignores all that stuff. Because if you're expecting everyone to use alt tabs and 100% proper html then you're not blind-just crazy
---
Personally, I like nyc because there are still a million places that a person on crutches (let alone a wheelchair) couldn't access. There needs to be some crazy whacked out sites like whatever hell.com or something (kind of preposterous in the first place). But if a group is preposterous enough to call themselves america online (Hey I had an account back when the fam had geoworks ensemble), they should try to at least be somewhat compatible with some of the accessibility standards.
"This page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status." is what bobby says about www.aol.com. Sure, not that many sites are (including the venerable /. in full-on mode, but I bet the stripped version passes (check your user config)), but the major service providers should at least think about making their sites accessible to all.
Of course this goes against free enterprise or something, but hey this is the good ol' U. S. of A. goshdarnit. Let the people complain.
I know my homepage rocks in w3-mode, and hence emacspeak, but I don't think a single blind person has ever checked it out.
Oh yeah, check out www.ssdp.org, the times they are a changin'.
The ADA only applies to sites/companies in America. All of the companies/sites I work for are outside the US. I still think we should use ALT tags for the diabled. But will american laws ( and lawsuits which can get pretty silly), Start having an effect on where we build websites.
-- I doubt, therefore I might be.
So they did have at least some communication with AOL before suing
You're right. My bad.
The lawsuit is NOT about the AOL website, it is regarding the AOL *online service*. Basically the blind group is arguing that AOL is a "public accomodation" (despite not being a physical place), and as such should be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their main complaint is that because AOL uses graphics for just about *everything*, with no corresponding text that can be easily read by a screen-reading OCR program, and no keyboard shortcuts for many common actions, that it makes it unduly difficult for the blind to use. Thus they are suing AOL to make them create more blind-friendly software/service.
Though, as far as I can tell by the article, the group didn't first petition AOL for changes, but rather just decided to sue instead. Grr...this country is too damn litigous. It seems rather ass-backward for someone to sue first. Why not just ask for changes first, and see if AOL will agree to them? It would make business sense for AOL, especially from a PR perspective, to make the requested changes (provided they're not ridiculous...but adding some text shouldn't be a big deal). Then if they don't, go about seeing if they're covered by the ADA (whether they are or not isn't exactly clear).
AOL has also said that some of the changes they were planning already. So they may very well become accessible regardless of the lawsuit.
Anyway, later all...
-Stradivarius
Ever heard of a screen reader? Way to display your ignorance; how you ever got a default rating of 2 is beyond me...
Actually, bold and italic tags are deprecated in HTML 4.0... learn CSS!
'a "text-only" version of every radio station broadcast'
Uhhhh.... hmmmm... I'm speechless.
Oh god... move me to a free country...
--
Both of the totally blind people I've worked
with could differentiate US currency by feel,
even old bills. They were *very* careful about
it, but good at it.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
$1.00 bill for a $20.00 bill and then switching them back te next day before she noticed.
I didn't realize how hard-up for friends you right-wingers were.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Actually a good friend of mine is going blind, so I have been able to observe him interacting with the web over the past 5 years and also how he has dealt with discrimination, and more annoyingly government meddling. Personally I don't believe the government has the right to enforce the ADA on any private citizen, property, website, etc. I believe that a business has a right to conduct itself as it sees fit and seek out those customers that it would like to serve. I feel it is the job of people like myself, and others to apply social and economic pressures to these firms that keep out the handicapped. The government's role is not to regulate our social interactions or force our businesses to operate in a manner that the gov't sees fit. Personally, my friend and I have dreamed up many ways of making technology more accessible and come up with ways to use existing technology. If we all say that we truly care about the handicapped, then we do not need legislation to force us to take the appropriate actions.
Stuart Eichert
U. of PENN student/FreeBSD hacker
Stuart Eichert
So -- it's legitimate for government to do this? Says who? On what philosophical basis is this sort of nonsense thinking founded?
This sort of nonsense thinking is founded upon the preposterous notion that the state somehow has a "duty" or "obligation" to improve the lifestyle of the disadvantaged at the expense of those who are not similarly disadvantaged. This is insane.
You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't.
Actually you'd be mistaken there. The right to own private property IS a constitutional one, and it is this that is the foundation for the free market.
On the other hand, your ridiculous premise that the state must "require accessability so that diabled people can live some sort of independent life" is NOWHERE to be found in the U.S. Constitution.
Let's review: private property rights are raped by the ADA, which has no constitutional foundation.
Which means that you are wrong.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
This is precisely why the ADA is a regulatory abomination. It is an evil, immoral "law." It is tyranny.
The whole thing is preposterous. The simple and unpleasant fact is that people have different abilities and disabilities. That's life. It is not the responsibility of any government to FORCE me or anyone to change how we do business/live our lives for the sake of "accommodating" people with *any* disability whatsoever.
You and I are (or should be) free to *choose* to make accommodations for those with disabilities. It is tyrannical to stick a gun to my head and compel me to do it.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
the principle of protection for the disabled is exactly rooted in the democratic principles you are extolling.
The disabled have the same rights protected by the Constitution as everyone else -- no more, no less. The Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to interfere in intrastate commerce (which the ADA does). The Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to dictate the terms under which a business owner makes hiring decisions. This is a form of statism and it is utterly antithetical to the Constitution.
If an otherwise disabled person has skills which would be useful in my business, then I have an economic decision to make: whether it will be profitable for my business to make such accommodations as are necessary for that person to be employed by me. I do not hire people primarily for their benefit. I hire people primarily for the benefit they will provide to my business.
If (whether because I judge the costs of accommodation to be too high, or because I'm a bigot) I choose not to hire the disabled person, I forgo the benefits that I might have enjoyed from their talents, and I face the prospect of my competition gaining a potential competitive edge. In short, I suffer at least one (and possibly two) economic losses.
If I am able to find an able-bodied person capable of performing at the same level as the disabled person, then I am free to hire either one. Right? You don't mean to suggest that I have some sort of ethical responsibility to prefer the disabled person, do you?
The Constitution affords the disabled person the same right to compete with other potential employees. The Constitution does NOT grant the federal government the power to force potential employers to hire *anyone*.
The freedom to employ someone implies the freedom to NOT employ someone, doesn't it?
Please note: I am not intending to say anything about the ethics that employers ought to consider in there hiring practices. My point is that the Constitution doesn't make the kind of promises that the ADA does, and so the ADA is unconstitutional. They had disabled people in the 1780s. The founders knew it. They could have said it if they meant it. They didn't. The constitution could be amended if people don't like it, but ignoring it is tantamount to overthrowing the rule of law.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The constitution is simply there to tell you what basic rules any new laws have to follow.
You don't know what a constitution is, do you? Well, sadly, you're not alone. Our fine government schools have failed to pass on even this rudimentary knowledge about our form of government. A constitution is the set of rules that a government must follow. A constitution gives said government only the powers it specifically declares, unless it states otherwise. And in this case, the U.S. Constitution most definitely states otherwise. Here, for your edification, is the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. (empasis added)
Get that? The Constitution says: if it ain't in here, it belongs to the states and to the people. So what you said is not just wrong. It is EXPLICITLY wrong.
Consequently, unless you can demonstrate for us all where it is in the Constitution that your "government mandates of handicapped accesiblilty" [sic] may be found, you have no case. None. The Constitution FORBIDS it unless it's in the Constitution. And the "power" (described in the ADA) to force business owners to "accommodate" the disabled is most definitely NOT in the Constitution. Period.
If Jefferson were alive today, he would waste no time in organizing an effort to bring the consitution up to date, particularly with reference to guns.
Ha Ha! That's funny! Oh...you were serious. Hmmm. Unfortunately, you also don't understand the 2nd Amendment and the arguments that were made for it at the time.
government protection of the handicapped is abstractly inferred by the observence of inalienable rights for American cicitzens
Those inalienable rights (found in the Declaration of Independence and not in the Constitution) were these: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. From which of these do you infer the notion of government protection of the handicapped?
which I think fairly imply that the handicapped should be able to use a public washroom in dignity.
I have no problem with this. I have a problem with the federal government attempting to impose this on the whole country. It's unconstitutional. If the states want to do so, that's a different thing -- but the federal government has no such constitutional power.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Too late :-)
you will find that your statement is entirely false.
I made a number of assertions. Which one is false? All of them? Ha!
Your vision of a pure, unregulated market
What "vision" of mine is that, pray tell? Have you not been reading? I have said three times before in this thread (this is the fourth) that I do NOT advocate what you call a "pure, unregulated market." Nor do I care particularly what Teddy Roosevelt did in this particular discussion. My point has been this: the ADA is unconstitutional. Read the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the staes respectively, or to the people."
In other words: if the Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to dictate the terms under which employers hire employees, then the federal government may not do so. If the Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to dictate to businesses who their customers will be and how those businesses will serve their customers, then the federal government may not do so. End of discussion -- unless you can provide for us the text of the Constitution which does provide that power.
But you can't, because it's not there.
I wish you people would stop quarrelling with these idle opinions about what seems right to you. I might even agree -- you'll never know. That's not the point. The point is what the Constitution says it permits. And it does not permit the federal government to pass idiot noxious laws like the ADA.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Proof please. Of course they did. The extent to which they did so was much less than today.
Firstly, medical science could not get them to adulthood. Secondly, if they were lucky to get to that age, they were left to the whims of their family.
The first is true -- far fewer of the disabled lived so long as they do today. The second is mostly true, in that charity was private rather than public -- oh that we could return to that system! But the suggestion that none of them were able to work at all is simply ridiculous.
Drop your comparisons to the eighteenth century - they make no sense whatsoever.
Then perhaps I wasn't clear. The point is this: there were people in the 18th century who would have been in the exact same economic predicament as our present class of disabled people. The founders of this country surely knew this. Knowing this, they could have actually written a constitution which includes the powers that the feds illegally assert today in the ADA.
But they didn't do so.
I'm amazed by your antipathy to historical argument. Don't you think that history has anything to say about our present conditions?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is a federal law. It is unconstitutional.
I know it's bad form to attack one's spelling, but given the facts that a) you call me a drug user and b) you call me a moron and c) your particular screed was laced with rather egregious errors, I decided to meet the ad hominem with an ad hominem. No more offense intended than you intended for me. :-)
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Well, you *also* said (and this is what I jumped all over -- at least, this is what set me in a foul mood because I misunderstood you):
You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't.
But anyway, this is neither here nor there. As for me not objecting to a state ADA-type law: I would not object on the grounds of the U.S. Constitution, no. But I would *strongly* object to it if I lived in such a state. Aside from the question of whether states may constitutionally do so, it is a broken and defective goal as I've stated in other posts. It's both economically and potentially technically impossible to so arrange any business so that literally anyone having any "disability" whatsoever can access it as "easily" as those without disabilities. It is therefore irrational and foolish. Nor do I see how it is a "reasonable" regulation of any business to dictate to them whom they must accept as either customers or employees.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
A democracy protects the interests of a minority against the will of a majority.
This sounds very noble, but it doesn't work. Why? Because business owners are a minority in this nation too. Only a small fraction of people actually employ others.
Where is their protection, hmm?
The result of what you are saying is this: a bazillion (that's a technical term for "lots and lots" :-) little "minority groups" all seeking protection from the will of the majority. This is a recipe for grinding a free society to a pulp. It can't work, and we shouldn't try to make it do so.
By its very nature a democracy -- i.e., direct majority rule by the people themselves (which we do NOT have here in the U.S., by the way) -- ALWAYS tramples on whoever's not in the majority. ALWAYS. It's inescapable.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
It has a climbing wall, which isn't accessible by paraplegics and the like.
But seriously, I'm all for site design that is usable by the largest audience possible. Personally, I like pages that work when you turn the grapics off. What I fear is how rediculously far things could go if legislation is used to force this down our throats.
This also may be touchy on first admendment grounds. Will commercial artists be forced to create braille descriptions of all their works?
Yes, it's a wonderful world we live in...
...until you suddenly find yourself blind.
Contrary to what Polit-Korrekt disliking Rush Limbaugh says, making the on-line world accessable to blind people is a worthy thing. You might even benefit because Lynx would be more workable, and Lynx is a damn sweet browser.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
On whose chest read the prices of ale
whereas on her behind
for the sake of the blind
were the same, except printed in braile.
Chuck
(probably mangled the 2nd line)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Well, those who said that all of the non-graphical elements of CSS2 were (point|use|worth)less were apparently wrong....
-rozzin.
Also people should be allowed to make a cost-benefit analysis. If it would cost $10,000 to build a ramp so 5 disabled persons can get into a store, the store owner should have the right to choose not to build that ramp.
...
Yet the ADA forces businesses to make more expensive accomidations to avoid having disabled people feel bad.
Untrue! The ADA only calls for "reasonable" accomodations. If it would cost a small business $10,000 to install a ramp, the store could argue (and would probably succeed in arguing) that it would NOT be a reasonable accomodation, and thus the business would NOT be forced to do it.
Several points on your post...
1) The web is visual only in so far as you are only LOOKING AT IT. You do know that sight is only one sense, that a web site can be heard...and in a few instances the bad ones can even be smelt a mile off.
I run a web site for Old Time Radio fans. Many of these tend towards the aged set, god lovem. A few are blind or have a tough time reading. I try to make all the OTR pages readable by TextToSpeach programs (like Readtome or even MS Agents)
2) Its not hard at all, in fact its nearly idiot proof to make a site readable by those without eyes. Alt tags, descriptions, common sense descriptions.
3) As you point out though not every web site is for every purpose and there are many web sites that are sight centric. This is not a bad thing, not at all. I love a well designed page. Unfortunately I would say about 90% of the "web designers" should be classified as legally BLIND simple on the basis of their works.
Akari Kerasua said once that he was going to stick to filming in Black and White until such time as he felt he understood the basic premises of film making, that color was something in addition to telling a story on film. Look at some of his works. In an age when TECHNICOLOR was touted above quality his black and white films are masterpieces.
So too with websites today. Everyone is running around making their sites LOOK all flash and POW and bangwhizzo...but the content is piss poor and the techniques used in the flashbang are not learned well enough to even make the fluff look good.
I will fight for the rights of anyone to make a fool of themselves, but Id rather they learn from their mistakes and use the tools that best suit the tasks at hand. Many web pages are contextual but they are hampered with the NEED to "Keep up with the Jones'" in flash and tech.
Using tech as a substation for creativity or content is the sure sign of a weak minded web creator. Inflated egos on knowing a simple set of page layout tags, uses for the color mauve and truly missing the boat on what the web is (ie another in a long line of ways (mediums) to get ideas from one mind to many (paper, telegraph, radio, tv, etc )
Many sites could benefit from closing their eyes and reevaluating what they get out of their creations.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Well its not JK this time making the idiotic statements, but it should be.
This sort of litigious morality is one of the many things hamstringing the creative and innovative from achieving a level of excellence.
Making a website compliant with the ADA is not a bad idea for many web sites. It would benefit the website by getting more traffic, by looking over their code to make sure its not bloated beyond belief (have you ever looked at Front page code?)and would have the added benefit of being a nice thing to do.
BUT, and believe me I got a big one, LEGISLATING this as a demand is just the thing to stop things dead in their tracts. I will be the first one to say that much of the websites out there are pewp, but the right to make pewp is one of the very cornerstones of the American being. [1]
Forcing AOL to be ADA compliant is simply a way to bolster legal fees, court time and press coverage. The blind will get little out of it.
Rather than this tact the blind people themselves should contact web sites and ask them to be made more readable. I have had this happen to me already. I run a web site for Old Time Radio fans. Some of them are blind. I gladly made my page more friendly to their needs. I get email when something is added they cannot parse, in fact I have a list of things to do this weekend for that very end.
No one is forcing me to do this, no great police force is banging down my door shouting "Drop the mouse and step away from the PhotoShop screen!" I do it myself and would expect others whose web sites are important to the blind to do the same.
If a site is not made more accessible to the blind then they should protest it, harangue the web site operator (much the way people bugging me for my spelling and typos:)- ) This is something that is already in place, is already being done and is already a part of how some websites work.
In this way we become our own feedback loop. In this way we keep the government from encroaching on yet another part of our lives that it has no inherent right to encroach on. Those that would bring the force of the government to bear in this issue are the true enemies of a free society.
I am no fan of AOL but this is one action against them I can not approve of .
[1][Yes I am making this American centric. That is who I am and the way I am reading this argument. For all the ECCers and Pacrimers out there who have a problem with that...I am who I am, you are who you are. When you want to change me, come and bring it on.]
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Looking to make your site a bit more freindly folks with a disabilty? Try these links http://www.webable.com/ --A great site for all manner of resources on the subject. Go there and explore http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/ http://lunch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/tom/tom.html ---Is your site useable for folks without 20/20 vision? http://lynx.browser.org/ http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ ---browsers to use for testing
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Looking to make your site a bit more freindly folks with a disabilty? Try these links
http://www.webable.com/
--A great site for all manner of resources on the subject. Go there and explore
http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/
http://lunch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/tom/tom.html
---Is your site useable for folks without 20/20 vision?
http://lynx.browser.org/
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
---browsers to use for testing
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Sorry about that.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Great points. One of the things many of the more narrow minded posters to this thread neglect is that there is no way to LEgislate all the "helpfull" things they want without creating a facist state. I know lots of them probably see no problem with that, but I do. How we are defined as a society is more shown by how we act on our own rather than how we are legislated into action. If the only reason we do soemthing is because of a law then we have lost the battle to a free and open society. The accessability needs to come from within, not without. There are many methods now to traverse guis, read web pages and make a site more accessable to the blind. There is no need for a Federal Law to be inacted to make these work. IF a segment of the populations need redress to being areed from an source of information or a venue of experssion then this is already covered by laws and also by thechincal methods. Those who are too short sighted and reactionary to look into these methods need to reacess their own vision and motives.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
If what im reading is correct, the arguemtn would only hold any water if AOL was the ONLY source of access for the blind to the internet.
This is not the case. There are many many ISPs in the nation that have accessable entry paths to the net.
To say that the only venue for the Blind to get to the net is AOL is not only inane, it is a lie; one i hope the judges who hear this case point out.
No one is forced to use AOL. On the webit is often the case that AOL users are themsleves "net challanged" and as such it would be possible the last place a disabled person should look for access.
PPP connection via windows and linux can esily be scripted once and used byt the blind. Even easier is DSL or other persistent connection.
Once on the net blind users can then get around the web via a wide array of web browsers made specificaly with the disabled in mind.
If anyone here had looked you would see the Windows operating system comes BUILT WITH tools for the diabled. Of course though this being slashdot no one will cop to that and will probably flame me for mentioning it.
If you look on the site mentioned earlier
(www.webable.com) you will see slew of tools and documents about this subject.
Eduation before egotization.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
I dont think many people would argue with your point that the blind, or any disabled persosn, should get access to all that the able can get to.
What this case is about though, and we are talking about this case not the blind in general, is the litigation of a company to be forced to change their content. It is a claim based on several false assumptions, ones I would have thought salshdot readers would be able to pick up quickly.
1)No one forces the blind to use AOL for net access. It is not the only access available.
In the market place for ISPS AOL is simply the common dumping ground for lackluster users and the net challanged. Why any group would seek to force their way onto this mess of an ISP is another matter all togther. Treating AOL as the whole of the net is wrong, has always been wrong, as amazes me who many slashdoters lost that fact in this debate.
2)It is simply a lawyers run at making more litigation and a goverment stab at more control into your daily life.
3)If this is what you consider aid for the disabled I would think you would be all for the solution proposed by Kurt Vonegut. IF anyone in our society is blind, everyone must where glasses to make their sight the same.If one person is unable to sing well, no one should.
There is a line between making the world better for those with less, this is not one of them. In the future you need to choose your fights better.
Thanks for playing though.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
from http://www.cast.org/bobby/ For www.slashdot.org --- Priority 1 Accessibility This page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Below is a list of 1 accessibility problems that should be fixed in order to make this page accessible to people with disabilities. 1.Provide alternative text for all images. (1 instance) P1 - Manual check There are some checkpoints that an automatic program like Bobby cannot examine. These 5 item(s) are presented below. You will need to be able to respond affirmatively to these items as well to obtain Bobby Approved status. 1.Ensure that descriptions of dynamic content are updated with changes in content. 2.If any of the images on this page convey important information beyond what is in each image's alternative text, add a LONGDESC attribute. (49 instances) 3.If you can't figure out any other way to make a page accessible, construct an alternate version of the page which is accessible and has the same content. 4.If this table contains data in rows and columns (i.e. a spreadsheet), have you identified headers for the table rows and columns? (35 instances) 5.If any of the images on this page convey important information beyond what is in each image's alternative text, add descriptive (D) links. (49 instances) his page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Priority 2 Accessibility Bobby Approved status is assigned on the basis of Priority 1 items in the Web Content Guidelines. For a higher level of accessibility you may also want to examine Priority 2 and Priority 3 items. No Priority 2 items that Bobby is able to detect have been found, but you should examine the list of items that require a manual examination below. To achieve conformance with Priority 2 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items. P2 - Manual check In addition to the items that Bobby can examine there are 11 Priority 2 issue(s) presented below for which Bobby cannot make a determination. To achieve conformance with Priority 2 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items. 1.Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels). (11 instances) 2.Have you grouped related form controls and labeled each group? (4 instances) 3.Style sheets should be used to control layout and presentation wherever possible. (35 instances) 4.Mark up quotations with the Q and BLOCKQUOTE elements. 5.Did you avoid using movement where possible? (37 instances) 6.Make sure that text, image, and background colors contrast well and that color is not used as the sole means of conveying important information. 7.Do not use pop-up windows or change active window unless the user is aware this is happening. (1 instance) 8.Associate labels with their form controls. (11 instances) 9.Do labels of all form controls immediately follow its control on the same line? (15 instances) 10.Have you provided a linear text alternative for all tables that lay out content in parallel, word-wrapped columns? (70 instances) 11.Only use list elements for actual lists, not formatting. Priority 3 Accessibility Bobby Approved status is assigned on the basis of Priority 1 items in the Web Content Guidelines. For a higher level of accessibility you may also want to examine Priority 2 and Priority 3 items. No Priority 3 items that Bobby is able to detect have been found, but you should examine the list of items that require a manual examination below. To achieve conformance with Priority 3 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items. P3 - Manual check In addition to the items that Bobby can examine there are 7 Priority 3 issue(s) presented below for which Bobby cannot make a determination. To achieve conformance with Priority 3 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items. 1.Furnish keyboard shortcuts for form elements. (11 instances) 2.Use the ABBR and ACRONYM elements to denote and expand abbreviations and acronyms. 3.If this table is used to display data in rows and columns (i.e. a spreadsheet), have you provided a summary of the table? (35 instances) 4.Consider adding keyboard shortcuts to frequently used links. (272 instances) 5.Include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas. (15 instances) 6.Specify a logical tab order among form controls, links and objects. (15 instances) 7.Identify the language of the text, and any changes in the language. Browser Compatibility Errors The following section contains a list of 5 browser compatibility errors. Browser compatibility errors help to determine when HTML tags and their attributes are not compatible with certain web browsers or HTML specifications. Problems here do not mean that this page is necessarily inaccessible. Browser compatibility errors do not affect the accessibility rating of a page. 1.Required attribute ALT is missing from tag IMG for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance) 2.Unknown attribute LENGTH in element INPUT. for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance) 3.Attribute BGCOLOR in element TABLE needs a valid color. for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance) 4.Unknown attribute WIDTH in element INPUT. for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance) 5.Unknown element name NOBR for browser(s): HTML4.0 (5 instances) Download Time The following three-column table gives download time statistics for the images, applets, and objects on this page. The first column contains the URL of each item, the second column the item size in kilobytes, and the third column the approximate download time for each item when using a 28,800 baud modem. At the end of the report, an arbitrary delay of 0.5 seconds is added for each file to account for slow-downs caused by HTTP connection times. Total 74.45 K 20.68 HTTP Request Delays -- 10.00 Total + Delays -- 30.6 Bobby finished.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
from http://www.cast.org/bobby/
For www.slashdot.org
---
Priority 1 Accessibility
This page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Below is a list of 1 accessibility problems that should be fixed in order to make this page accessible to people with disabilities.
1.Provide alternative text for all images. (1 instance)
P1 - Manual check
There are some checkpoints that an automatic program like Bobby cannot examine. These 5 item(s) are presented below. You will need to be able to respond affirmatively to these items as well to obtain Bobby Approved status.
1.Ensure that descriptions of dynamic content are updated with changes in content.
2.If any of the images on this page convey important information beyond what is in each image's alternative text, add a
LONGDESC attribute. (49 instances)
3.If you can't figure out any other way to make a page accessible, construct an alternate version of the page which is
accessible and has the same content.
4.If this table contains data in rows and columns (i.e. a spreadsheet), have you identified headers for the table rows
and columns? (35 instances)
5.If any of the images on this page convey important information beyond what is in each image's alternative text, add
descriptive (D) links. (49 instances)
his page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status.
Priority 2 Accessibility
Bobby Approved status is assigned on the basis of Priority 1 items in the Web Content Guidelines.
For a higher level of accessibility you may also want to examine Priority 2 and Priority 3 items. No Priority 2 items that Bobby is able to detect
have been found, but you should examine the list of items that require a manual examination below. To achieve conformance with Priority 2 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items.
P2 - Manual check
In addition to the items that Bobby can examine there are 11 Priority 2 issue(s) presented below for which Bobby cannot make a determination. To achieve conformance with Priority 2 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items.
1.Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels). (11 instances)
2.Have you grouped related form controls and labeled each group? (4 instances)
3.Style sheets should be used to control layout and presentation wherever possible. (35 instances)
4.Mark up quotations with the Q and BLOCKQUOTE elements.
5.Did you avoid using movement where possible? (37 instances)
6.Make sure that text, image, and background colors contrast well and that color is not used as the sole means of conveying important information.
7.Do not use pop-up windows or change active window unless the user is aware this is happening. (1 instance)
8.Associate labels with their form controls. (11 instances)
9.Do labels of all form controls immediately follow its control on the same line? (15 instances)
10.Have you provided a linear text alternative for all tables that lay out content in parallel, word-wrapped columns?
(70 instances)
11.Only use list elements for actual lists, not formatting.
Priority 3 Accessibility
Bobby Approved status is assigned on the basis of Priority 1 items in the Web Content Guidelines. For a higher level of
accessibility you may also want to examine Priority 2 and Priority 3 items. No Priority 3 items that Bobby is able to detect
have been found, but you should examine the list of items that require a manual examination below. To achieve
conformance with Priority 3 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to these items.
P3 - Manual check
In addition to the items that Bobby can examine there are 7 Priority 3 issue(s) presented below for which Bobby cannot
make a determination. To achieve conformance with Priority 3 guidelines you need to be able to answer affirmatively to
these items.
1.Furnish keyboard shortcuts for form elements. (11 instances)
2.Use the ABBR and ACRONYM elements to denote and expand abbreviations and acronyms.
3.If this table is used to display data in rows and columns (i.e. a spreadsheet), have you provided a summary of the table? (35 instances)
4.Consider adding keyboard shortcuts to frequently used links. (272 instances)
5.Include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas. (15 instances)
6.Specify a logical tab order among form controls, links and objects. (15 instances)
7.Identify the language of the text, and any changes in the language.
Browser Compatibility Errors
The following section contains a list of 5 browser compatibility errors. Browser compatibility errors help to determine
when HTML tags and their attributes are not compatible with certain web browsers or HTML specifications. Problems
here do not mean that this page is necessarily inaccessible. Browser compatibility errors do not affect the accessibility
rating of a page.
1.Required attribute ALT is missing from tag IMG for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance)
2.Unknown attribute LENGTH in element INPUT. for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance)
3.Attribute BGCOLOR in element TABLE needs a valid color. for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance)
4.Unknown attribute WIDTH in element INPUT. for browser(s): HTML4.0 (1 instance)
5.Unknown element name NOBR for browser(s): HTML4.0 (5 instances)
Download Time
The following three-column table gives download time statistics for the images, applets, and objects on this page. The first
column contains the URL of each item, the second column the item size in kilobytes, and the third column the approximate
download time for each item when using a 28,800 baud modem. At the end of the report, an arbitrary delay of 0.5
seconds is added for each file to account for slow-downs caused by HTTP connection times.
Total
74.45 K
20.68
HTTP Request Delays
--
10.00
Total + Delays
--
30.6
Bobby finished.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
A few people I know ARE blind. I know what they go thru. In the old time radio circle its not uncommon for the vision of the user to be bad or gone.
Its not fucking easy but they have more options now than EVER.
Lots of folks here are just getting into this topic TODAY and thinking they know it all. GO educate yourselves first.
Have you looked at the options available to you should you go blind, deaf, or loose a limb. Hit www.webable.com for starters.
Then, after you looked there and got some programs...
Tie one hand behind your back for an hour and use your computer.
Blindfold yourself, go browse the web. Serach for oldtime radio shows. Download one. Listen to it .
Ive done this and talked to folks who have no choice in doing it. Things are working, pages can be had, there are resources out ther and rather than seek litigation more work needs to be done on them.
Would you rather sit around and write another cool KDE theme , draft legal documents to halt people working on web pages...or do something about it?
Legal action against AOL is the lamest solution i can think of.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Pardon me for my ignorance, but how does a blind person use an ATM, without being able to read the screen? What good are braille keys if you don't know which key to push because you cannot read the on-screen menus?
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Wow... way to miss the point.
The point is, as a group of excluded people, geeks should have a bit of perspective about the issue of exclusion. Instead, they cry foul. Which makes their whole "woe is me, I live in the hellmouth" rant hypocrasy.
It's about inclusion. You know, reading ./, you hear a LOT of whining about how geeks are excluded by society. You hear an awful lot of handwringing about how being different causes geeks to be ostracised, be left out.
./ howl their outrage. This makes me sick.
./ readers take for granted, you smack them down. You cry "PC!" You ask why they should be accomodated. "What are blind people doing on the web."
And yet, here we have a group of people suing to force a company to stop excluding them, to simply make some allowance for the fact that they have different needs. And the geeks of
Listen, the visually impared are much more exluded from this society than being a geek will ever buy you. They can't drive. They have limited access to movies and TV. They have a hard time using computers in the first place, because so much software depends on a GUI. So, when all they ask is some changes be made to websites, so they can reap the benefits that you
The Internet is too important to exclude any segment of our society from. Making accomodations for them is not hard work... it just takes a bit of planning. If AOL is unwilling to do that, and the folks bringing this case can argue to the courts that this is as exclusionary as building a mall or a hotel without wheelchair access, then more power to them.
Frankly, the response to this issue here revolts me.
Ironic choice... O'Reilly does have books on CD, which are probably more amenable to
./ people who are
being used with a speech synthesizer. Most other publishers don;t do this.
Books, unlike websites, can by and large be scanned and read aloud by equipment
available to the blind. So, your analogy is bogus.
The issue here, as the issue is with architecture, is that changes to accommodate the disabled
are worth the hassle so that they can be included. People are just too lazy to do it. Unlike physical buildings, it's not a big deal to rearrange a web site after its built. The issue is not a few ALT tags though. Try browsing with Lynx, and image if you could only read the page,
top to bottom. However, *some* effort should be put into making a web site accessible to the visually impared, when that site is as central as AOL, or Amazon, or other major commercial sites.
And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the
whining about Political Correctness. We're not talking about some pointless argument over
semantics. We're talking about locking out a portion of our community, a portion of the
community that is already excluded from so much in our society, from the explosive growth
in our economy and society taking place on the Internet. For a group of people who whine
so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this
attitude is utter hypocrisy!
I can certainly understand sadness at the widespread lack of concern for persons with disabilities.
As for myself, I have tried to design my HTML to be nearly as useful without images as with. Not only do I like being accessible to as many people as possible, it's also good design, and is easier to search.
I can even understand a law like the ADA if it applies to government buildings and services.
When we start applying such laws to private enterprise, however, we cross the line and our actions become illegitimate. To require private citizens, individually or corporately, to perform various actions, rather than simply to refrain from those actions that harm or threaten others, is tantamount to part-time slavery.
It's true that private solutions don't work 100%, but generally speaking they work better than government solutions that often have a negative value -- that is, cause more problems than they solve.
In this particular case, I'm not incredibly upset, because the extra time required is pretty small, but there is still the principle of the thing, and that irks me. Once again, our government has usurped power unto itself, and by establishing this precedent could become a great danger to everyone -- able and disabled alike.
The good news is, private enterprise is already getting near to finding a solution, not to how to allow the disabled partial access to various parts of the world, but how to allow the disabled full access to all the world -- that is, the recent and expected advances in medical science are darn near miraculous. In another twenty years, either better AI, better medical science, or both, could very well make this debate obsolete, either by AI being able to render almost any page into an understandable format, or by curing virtually any disability.
It does not follow, however, that if a person objects to the ADA, they must not have any compassion. Personally, I've put over 80 books online, in plain ASCII, partly with the understanding that this would be an ideal medium for the blind. I did that at my own expense and with my own time. I do not believe that my compassion extends to forcing others to do as I wish. That sort of compassion I can do without.
Alan
Commercial sites will take an increased interest in pure text and alternate browser site usage in the coming years because of the vast market for hand-held web devices that require streamlined, text based UI. WAP (or similar, TBD) awareness will be a significant concern for any clueful web business.
Groups advocating the interests of the disabled would do well to align themselves with WAP or other similar initiatives. In this case the disabled community can have an extremely effective market impact by way of alliances with other extremely powerful groups -- like Telcos. Why go down a regulatory, litigious path when there are much stronger cards to play?
It's AOL's choice as to which consumers they support. That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice. Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
:)
There's a *big* difference between the Civil Rights movement and the ADA. The Civil Rights movement was primarily about ending *government* discrimination against blacks. The public schools and public bus systems were government owned, and Jim Crow laws forced many private store owners to discriminate against blacks.
It is true that someprivate businesseswould have discriminated without the actions of the government, but without those laws forcing everyone to do so, those business owners would have been at a disadvantage in the marketplace because they would not get black business. Had I been in Congress in the 60's, I would have voted against the '64 Civil Rights act, because it violated the right of property owners to decide who they wished to do business with.
But in spite of this, the focus of the Civil Rights movement *was* discrimination by government, which I support. The ADA, on the other hand, is about forcing private business owners to do business with people they otherwise would not choose to. It is a fundamentally misguided law, forcing the costs of disabilities on whichever business a disabled person decides to frequent, and denying business owners the right to weigh the costs and benefits of serving disabled customers and hiring disabled employees.
It may be that the government should help the disabled, but if so those costs should be borne by society as a whole, not simply on those businesses that happen to displease a disabled person's lawyer.
Also people should be allowed to make a cost-benefit analysis. If it would cost $10,000 to build a ramp so 5 disabled persons can get into a store, the store owner should have the right to choose not to build that ramp. There are probably other stores that that person could visit, and they could probably get someone else to go into the store and make purchases for them. In many cases, this is much cheaper than building a ramp. Yet the ADA forces businesses to make more expensive accomidations to avoid having disabled people feel bad.
If the government wants to help the disabled, the best means to do this would be simply to give them a welfare check for the average additional cost of living for a person with that disability. This distributes the costs equally among members of society, and it allows market forces to determine the most efficient way of providing these people with services. AOL will have to decide how much business is lost to blind people, and if that cost is larger than the extra membership arising from it, they will not do it. The blind will then have to go to a different ISP, or to hire someone to read those pages for them. If only a small number of blind people use AOL, it is wasteful to force them to spend millions of dollars to clean up their site. Besides, blind people shouldn't be using AOL anyway. Nor should non-blind people, come to think of it. AOL sucks
Resources:
Hmm...I'm not a member of AOL. I don't pay any access fees to AOL. And yet if I go to http://www.aol.com/ I can see their Web site. IANAL, but that seems pretty public to me.
Is that audio clip available online anywhere?
I work at a Web design company that has a legacy in multimedia CD-ROMs and graphic Web design. We have recently moved into more content driven sites. A few coworkers and myself have been lobbying hard for taking accessibility into consideration when designing and building our Web sites. We've had little success in making changes.
I believe that hearing a screen reader read an inaccessible site would make the problem much less abstract, as it seemed to for you, and hopefully convince more of my coworkers to give a damn.
Are you trolling on purpose, or are you really this dense?
HTML (electronic) documents are separate from their eventual presentation no matter what that presentation is. Do you consider the glass screen in front of you, where electron beams illuminate coloured dots part of the Web? is the collection of magnetic ones and zeroes which at some point stores these "words" part of the Web? If I choose another font than the one the author saw when they wrote a web page - do I disconnect myself from the Web?
The Web is visual.
No it is not. Some of the various presentations of web content are visual. Have you ever used a search engine? Do you think they work by painting "pictures" of the web pages before deciding what phrases should select them? Have you at all any idea about the technology?
No, it does not - unless the document author doesn't know HTML. There is no need for "text only" when HTML has good support for "text and (text or images)" in the form of e.g. ALT. Saying that there is a need for a "text only" version of a page is the same as saying that you need to make different coffee cups for left- and right-handed people.
If the original publisher opts not to publish a book in braille format, isn't another publisher free (as in speech) to publish a braille version of that book? I seem to recall something like that...
pooptruck
I would agree that the blind would be better off using an ISP that can resist putting so much crap between them and the Internet. The law, however, says they have the right to make the mistake of choosing AOL. The Americans With Disabillies Act says that all businesses must be accessible to the disabled. In the past, that's only been applied to brick-and-mortar businesses, but the plaintiffs are arguing that it should be extended to online businesses, at least as far as to force them to actually read and think about the links you provided.
I get SOOO sick and tired of the "disabled" (yes, I am NOT using the sill-ass PC phrase) trying to get every place accessible to them! Not that I am defending AOL (don't get me started on them), but IMNSHO no one should be forced to make anything of theirs "handicapped accessible"! If a place like AOL, or McDonalds or even Sears wants to not make things handicapped accessible, who cares? No one is forcing them to go there or use their products!!! Sure it would be *nice* for these places to make it easier to be used by the handicapped, but why enforce it? Can't use AOL because you're blind??? So sorry... try someplace else... can't find anyplace else??? So sorry, but it's not like a hospital! You aren't going to be left for dead if you can't use AOL. It's not like AOL is a life-or-death necessity.
I sympathize with the blind, the deaf, the parapalegic, etc... I really do. I know that if I were in their shoes I would be miserable; but I still do not think that places (especially websites) should be MADE to cater to every single demographic. That's like saying that there is too much of the color red on their site, and since some people are red-green color blind they should not use those colors. Pretty soon people will want every aspect of our lives determined by a standard (whether it is a religious, lifestyle, or access basis, it is ALL scary), and that, dear readers, is a frightening thought.
Already I'm seeing comments posted to the effect of "who cares" or that this issue is "ridiculous."
I personally believe that this topic will only gain importance in the years to come, as our society more towards a more net-centric one. Hackers/Crackers everywhere were crying out when they heard that Kevin Mitnick would be forbidden computer access in any format whatsoever after his release. If we don't make the internet and computers in general more accessible to the disabled, we are condemning them to the same future as abhor for Mitnick.
As the web and other visual interfaces become superflous, a growing percentage of the population is being left behind. I'm not sure that sueing AOL is the best way to bring about a solution, but I feel it is important to bring more attention to this subject.
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
-- E. Hubbard
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
As I read it the ADA probably applies to computers/websites (Section 401). The ADA seems to require technology services (such as AOL or, say the New York Times) not to be available directly to the blind, but to be available to a "telecommunications relay service". Such a service might be a computer voice system but it need not be. A toll reader service would qualify and if IIRC, such services exist. Even the existence of braille displays should qualify. In conclusion, I don't think AOL is in violation of the ADA any more than a roadside billboard or a television nature show is.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Most of us "nerds" (many of whom glory in that term!) had to put up with being shut out of the mainstream. Does that mean we have to keep up the idiocy?
Uh, you do read Slashdot, don't you?
Regardless of the fact that "geeks" should have learned from their experiences that gratuitously shutting people out of the mainstream is idiotic, they mostly haven't. Instead, all they've "learned" is that they want to take their own turn screwing somebody else. Hence the attitude toward newbies and end-users, and the cocky "fuck you, I'm all right" nonsense that we're seeing here.
Grow up, people.
Don't hold your breath.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
So, tell me - if everything were driven by the almighty dollar as some of you are suggesting, then who would have insisted that black people had a right to be served at a white-owned diner just outside of Montgomery?
I'm willing to bet that most of the Rand-ranters here would nobly and courageously stand up for the owner of the diner and his precious, unalienable right to refuse to serve black people.
They have no grasp of the consequences of that kind of crap, but they're young and naive and they worship absolutes: "If government interference can, in one single case in one single area, be demonstrated to be bad, then all government interference in absolutely anything must necessarily be a pure, unmitigated evil."
If "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", then IMHO libertarians are the proof . . .
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Typical liberal ad homenim response. The ideas expressed in Harrison Bergeron were hardly unique; yet, instead of pointing out something you would consider a better exmaple, you're content to denigrate the author.
Then again, I guess you can do whatever you want when you're an AC.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
So, what do text-to speech converters do with misspelled words with syllables omitted, like "inconvience", "incandent", "nutrious", and many others? This is the one most-compelling reason to once again set up my Amiga 1000, just to see what happens. (Understandable text-to-speech included as standard, late 1985.)
Install festival on a linux box instead; it's fun, it's easy, it runs on cheap hardware. Admittedly, it'll be bloody slow on your 386, but it calculates the sound first and then plays it, it doesn't calculate on the fly so even on slow hardware like your 386 the speech should come out okay.
To answer the question, for the most part, you get pronounced-as-spelled. Though, with festival at least, it wouldn't be hard to add misspelling correction functionality. It already converts '----' into 'line of hyphens' and '====' into 'line of equals' and so on.
More annoying is words like 'read.' "I like to read science fiction" becomes "I like to red science fiction" instead of "I like to reed science fiction."
I set my MUSH client up to pipe everything to festival. It was cool. A little perl and some named pipes were necessary to make it non-blocking. I think it would be trivial to tee lynx into festival but I haven't actually tried it, the redraw-efficiency of curses might make gibberish out of it other than the initial draw. Still, source exists, it'd be an easy hack to make a for-the-blind lynx/festival combo. (Of course, blind computer users probably want a speech synthesis card if they can afford it... the slowness of soft synthesis is painful).
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Let's just forget for one moment that blind people can ride as PASSENGERS in automobiles. If a blind person is in the rear driver's side seat s/he can use the drive up ATM and how else do you expect them to do this?
Secondly, it's cheaper to design and build as few different types of machine as possible. It's cheaper to design a generic ATM and adapt it to fit each individual scenario than it is to design and build 4-5 different types of ATM.
At the Carnegie science center in Pittsburgh they have a transparant ATM. That probably cost a pretty penny to make.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
ATMs (at least in the US) use a standard menu structure and the same configuration of buttons.
If you learn once, you've learned for all of them.
You're just SOL if the guy who stocked the ATM puts 5's in the 20's bin.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If someone is addicted to cocaine can they sue a company for not hiring them?
After all addiction is now defined as a disease in the US. Diseases are disabilities.
How about suing the state of California to allow smoking in public bars again, after all they're discriminating againse addicted people under the ADA.
Is stupidity a disability? Can morons sue companies that make products where are "too hard" to use?
This can go on FOREVER! What we need is a supreme court decision that says that the ADA is unconstitutional.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Maybe the banking industry has recently changed their practices but I've used ATMs in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas and they've all been the same.
On the right side of the screen there are buttons. The bottom one cancels, one button up confirms.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I have a friend whose mother is totally blind and when he was a kid he'd get "loans" from her by switching a $1.00 bill for a $20.00 bill and then switching them back te next day before she noticed.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It wouldn't fly here if a bank had english/spanish prompts on the ATMs. Perhaps in places like New York where there is a greater Spanish-speaking population than we have in Pittsburgh it is done (I don't know for sure). Bad things would happen if a bank did that.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Not at all. The banks could encode a language preference on the card itself. If you prefer english, poof you get english, or spanish or german, or french, or sanscrit.
I guess the banks think it would be too expansive or something like that.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In most countries, yes. That's what happened in the US. After a long, hard effort the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed.
It was passed nine friggin' years ago, and people are still ignoring it. (And/or spinning silly horror stories about supposed implications without having the slightest clue what the fuck they're talking about.)
If this has any resemblence at all to other ADA cases I'm familiar with, disability rights activists have spent years trying to encourage AOL to change, offering possible solutions that benefit the "temporarily able-bodied" as much as they would benefit themselves, doing everything short of offering AOL an elbow and leading them gently across the road.
Given how bloody difficult it often is to take on and push through an ADA case, AOL has probably been insistently oblivious and or stupidly stubborn.
So blind people want to use AOL, and they're frustrated because AOL is not accessible to them.
Understandable. I mean -*sheesh*- I'm left-handed, and I get pissed that most desks in lecture halls are for right-handed people. And that's not a big deal. Being cut off from the Internet is.
"But," you say, "blind people can use the Internet without using AOL."
Right on. Anyway, what kind of market are we talking about here? Sounds like there's a lot of money to be made by an ISP that specializes in serving people with impaired vision.
I may have just found my calling.
It would take some real genius to create a client-side program that can parse HTML (esp. with frames and layers) and make it readable to blind people.
And, dammit people, why the hell don't you use ALT tags?!
Before the PC crowd gets on it's high-horse, I'd invite everyone to read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's quite a commentary on Political Correctness as it is being more and more implemented in the US.
The short story can be found in the Vonnegut collection "Welcome to the Monkey House". I'm sure it's available in braille, large print and audio-book as well as the traditional paperback.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Good point, and sensibly presented.
My initial post WAS overly reactionary, but at least I got second post. [slaps self with halibut]
It's too bad that AOL can most likely defend itself from the requirement of accessibility by claiming that there are alternatives. Bear with me, I've got a point...
Such a move on part of AOL would result in bad press, a call for boycott (which I would honor, if I were a subscriber) and a loss of revenue for presenting an insensitive/corporate image. They won't go to court over this for these reasons, more than for the potential loss of the fees that visually impaired subscribers are willing to pay. [ramble-ramble]
The worthwhile part is this: The money-driven initiative for making PDA and cell-phone accessible web-sites holds a lot of promise for those with visual disabilities. The technology is either existing, or in rapid development. And if AOL and other sites want the business of the movers and shakers who surf from their StarTacs, then there's absolutely no reason not to use that exact same technology to make the web more accessible to the blind (legally or otherwise).
Now, does any slashdot reader have the experience to comment on the applicability of mobile-enable web sites to such usage? How are sites modified for mini-lcd display? Sanity check, anyone?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
They don't have a braille version of every book they publish. It's blatant discrimination.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
First off - I suffer from a very strange eye condition that causes temporary blindness, also I have extremely poor vision so this strikes a bit close to home with me
But.. c'mon.. this is unrealistic. A subscription based porn website is a commercial site -- how are they supposed to make their content available to the blind?
Using ALT tags should be done regardless, and also a layout that allows easy access to people with disabilities -- but a lawsuit and a government regulation is just way to excessive. People should do it for the customer base, etc. If you want blind people to visit your site, than it will be available, otherwise it's not.
I think it's up to the site whether they want to have it easily accessible by many groups, not the government. Just seems like YAGRI (Yet Another Government Regulation on the Internet)
So much for freedom, I see it slipping..
-= Making the world a better place =-
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I understand the hearing impaired will soon be suing all of the major radio networks for failing to make their products accessable to the hearing impaired.
It is about the AOL service. The whole GUI client they have to connect to AOL. This is what is inaccessbile not the website.
Q.
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice. Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out.
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice." Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out. I'm surprised it took this long for a lawsuit.
We used to have a blind user on my ISP. She used lynx or www through a Braille terminal. She hated graphics-heavy web sites without alt tags.
If we are willing to say that the blind have a right to a chance, well, yes, they have a right to accessible web sites. It's not like you can't use alt tags.
(My site is, to the best of my knowledge, quite legible, even to blind people.)
I'm all for it. Why? Because, even though I can, for the most part, see, I don't like sites that demand that I turn on eighteen different security-weak plug-ins, and download a megabyte of content, just to get a bloody paragraph of text.
I'm all for simpler, more accessible web sites, and I personally do think the expectation that a page be accessible to the blind is a reasonable one.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Text isn't visual. I sent email to a person I know. I saw the email, when I was sending it, because I used a visual editor. She never saw my email, even though she received it and wrote back. She felt my email as a series of dots on her fingertips.
Text is *not* the same as visual content.
Why do you think the web is visual? Not because *it* is visual. Because *you* are.
Don't let your experience blind you to the way the world works when you aren't looking.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
This is gonna come as a shock to you, but it is possible for a blind person to sit in the car with a driver, and use the ATM. See, many cars have an advanced feature we call "more than one window".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You've missed the point.
The reason deaf people don't complain about not being able to listen to CD's is that the *fundemental* content is not, *by its nature*, accessible.
Contrast this with the desire to understand *textual* data. We have here people who *understand text*. We have textual data. We are hiding that data in a specially encrypted form, so that only people who can decrypt that form can see it.
That's how the ADA has been interpreted. It's not that you have to allow a quadriplegic to be a flight attendant, it's that, if you've got a building that *could* plausibly have a ramp, not just stairs, you have to do that.
Don't believe me about the encryption? Tell me why it is that you can't read the obviously visual content below without some kind of help:
1100101
1100001
1110011
1111001
101100
100000
1101001
1110011
1101110
100111
1110100
100000
1101001
1110100
1010
Representation is important, but it doesn't change your message, it just makes it easier (or harder) to see your message.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Think about how alt tags work. If I can see your image, I won't be seeing the alt tag.
So, if I'm loading images, I'll get the effect you wanted, and if I'm not loading images, I'll get a better effect than I would have otherwise.
All win, no lose.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
What utter bullshit! You might as well argue that books are, "by definition", visual, so let's throw out Braille since it's obviously impossible.
What is "visual" about the web? People have chosen to represent what is fundementally mostly *verbal* data in a visual way. That is a poor choice, not an intrinsic character of the data.
No one's complaining that they can't see the pictures; they're complaining that the text is all pictures of text.
If you made a point of taking *every* picture that had text in it, and using that text for the alt tag for that picture, you'd probably find that people found pages a lot more accessible.
At that point, the only way you'll have inaccessible content is if you do all-graphical buttons with icons - and you'll find out that sighted people get screwed by them too.
Words are good. Since you need words, why not make the words *visible*?
The whole thing about Quake 3, games, etcetera,
is frankly *STUPID*.
THINK!
I mean, really. THINK. Put concepts together.
What is Quake trying to "communicate"? It is trying to communicate a visual thing. What is the IRS web site trying to communicate? Data. Text.
The complaint is about text being hidden, not about things that were never verbal to begin with.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You take a few million of those electrons, and believe me, you can *feel* them. Ow!
"This post consists entirely of electrons that have killed someone at some point in history."
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
A good point.
I'm wondering if Kintanon is one of those people who "sees" words. I'm a heretic; I "hear" words. When I read or write text, I *HEAR* the words. So, of course, it doesn't seem like a visual medium to me.
It's really easy to forget that your primary means of interacting with the world isn't the only one.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You're right, alt tags would be good...
So wouldn't it be reasonable to expect people to
put said alt tags in their pages?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
What an amazing coincidence that someone young and not at all disabled should be able to see that we don't need any accomodations for the disabled.
Give it a while, kid. Wait until you find a way you're not perfect, and start looking for ways to get around it. It's a real eye-opening experience.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
No one said you had to be able to get *EVERY NUANCE* of the page. They said you had to be able to get through it at all.
And, I'd point out, these people may not *have* other choices; AOL is very widespread, not everyone else is.
What if they want access to AOL's local content? AOL spends a fair chunk of money building content you can't get unless you're a subscriber.
I notice that you've lost the original point, so now you're arguing with straw men.
Give it up. Your knee-jerk reaction was wrong. Get over it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
crud... last line should read "only to not create..."
I really ought to find out what this "preview" thing everyone's talking about is...
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
By writing PROPER HTML, you specificy the meaning and arrangement of information in your page. If done correctly, all that information should come out just fine in IE, Netscape, Lynx, or in blind-aware web browsers. Each of these is free to interpret the HTML according to the standards as set by the W3C, and render them to the user.
Whether this means speaking text aloud, rendering them on a brail display, or creating a bumpmap of images is irrelevant. It's not AOL's responsibility to create blind-specific content, only to create content that (through poor coding) expicitly excludes the blind.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
I remember when lynx was my main browser. Worked fine. Most sites can be made at least somewhat accessible. http://www.cast.org/bobby/ gives good guidelines to do so. Windows can actually be used by people with various disabilities. Check out the control panel accessibilities sometimes. It could be better, but then it _is_ windows so what do you expect?
If Bill can try, so can AOL. For all I know they did try. I have never tried to use AOL with a text reader. They should make it handicap accessible, within reason. I got my company to add alt tabs to graphics on its page. Not an expensive thing, but it makes a big difference.
Remember, we may well join the visually impaired as we grow older.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
I love closed captions that are now built into my TV. I use them quite often. So do plenty of my friends. They would not be there without government interference.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
This lawsuit is just plain stupid, and is probably the brainchild of a slimy lawyer who's lookin to buy a new beamer.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
To find out more about making your web site accessible for the disabled, here's two useful links.
Bobby - This web site scans web pages to see if it may pose a problem for the disabled.
Viewable With Any Browser - This site is running a campaign to make the Web a useful communication medium by making it accessible to as many different browsers as possible. This may appeal to Slashdotters. It would by implication vehemently oppose proprietary extensions to HTML, such as those perpetrated by Microsoft and Netscape, which must be a Good Thing.
It is important to remember that the blind are a part of our community, and would like to participate as equals as much as possible. Although they can't actually see images and other graphic coolness on web sites, they have access to voice synthesizers and similar technology that renders web pages and other computer-based information in a form that they can use. That's why ALT tags are important.
(I attended a 21st birthday party once where there were two blind people in attendance. The slam dancing was interesting. Apparently the blind attendees enjoyed it immensely.)
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
If anything should be done, it should only be the responsibility of the page designer to make the webpage accessible to anyone with a reasonable browser. Then a visually impaired person can adjust their personal settings of their browser to make the page render correctly for them! sites that refuse to be compliant with standards should be destroyed tho'. hmm. just a thought.
For instance, if mailing lists are public accommodations, for instance, then they must be held up to the rigorous free speech standards of the First Amendment.
I'm sorry, but this is just silly. A public accommodation is not necessarily an instrument of the government. A restaurant owner cannot be held liable for the fact that a Mob boss ordered someone's execution over spaghetti bolognese. There is already a good deal of case law regarding the liability of electronic discussion forums, and it does not mean that owners or moderators are responsible for content.
It is not at all clear to me that the outcome of this case will have ramifications beyond what the ADA requires. I would certainly be interested in hearing from someone with a background in law.
AOL will probably argue that it needs to rely on an image-heavy layout in order to stay competitive, but that's a hard thing to actually prove.
It's worth noting that some of the most successful sites on the web, such as Yahoo, use images only sparingly. I don't think it will be difficult to demonstrate that designing a site for accessibility does not mean sacrificing either content or competitive advantage.
I don't understand all the hoo-hah. According to the NYT article, on which this entire discussion is based, an AOL representative claims that prior to this suit they were already working on access to people with disabilities, including support for text-reading products. If this is for real, then there is no merit to the lawsuit.
AOL does deserve a raspberry for not already providing ALT text or "text only" versions of their sites, though.
-Terry
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Speaking of that, trying to navigate /. and happypenguin on lynx is no fun at all. Freshmeat is pretty good. Anyone remember the good ole days when people offered a low bandwidth text page? sigh.
on the other hand, when i went to some random page
which used frames on lynx i got quite a funny message; instead of "use a a better browser" it said "hello inferior komputa." teehe
when Push Comes to Shove
In the long run, making your site accessible to those with disabilities is a Good Thing.
My concern right now however, is the "cost" of doing so. And it isn't just money:
1) There are not adequate technical standards for making a web site "accessible". Anyone who tries is basically rolling their own.
2) Because of adequate technical standards and guidelines, often one must compromise the visual quality of a site in order to make it accessible. (No FONT tags, limited use of tables, no frames, limited use of CSS, limited use of images...)
3) Then there is the time and money overhead. In the Internet world, what company can afford to hire specialists that know how to do all this, and can afford the time to let them fix up an existing site, or add overhead to the development of a new site?
Rather than filing a lawsuit, I'd rather the ADA assisted the W3 define some extensions to HTML to help with the issue. Or perhaps, at minimum, an XML language to define accessible content, or for describing how to interpret a site...
Imagine an XML language that let's you define how your site works, and how to understand it... Then create a file in root called blind.xml... You'd probably need to mark up your HTML a bit with naming tags as points-of-reference for the browser to use in correlating the XML description with the HTML... But I think such a thing has a lot of potential. It could overcome the need for the major browsers to implement a new HTML spec... And tools to support it would be fairly easy to make...
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
Dear lord. What is wrong with this country? I'm moving to Finland. Following this line of logic I should be allowed to sue all sites published in another language... I'm not able to read them with my disibility:
I'm mono-lingual
If people don't want to make websites viewable to everyone, good for them. When they start making wheelchair ramps stair accessable, then I'll be happy.
--
RumorsDaily
That's not important, though. What IS important is that you don't see deaf people complaining that they can't listen to CDs. No offence to any 'hearing impaired' (or whatever the politically correct term of the week is for people who can't hear), but this makes me angry. It really does.
Actually, I have a friend who is deaf, mute, and blind who likes to "listen" to music. She can still feel the sound, so louder is better. Also, she spends a lot of time on MUDs, with her braille terminal.
I'm not saying that everything should be reduced to the least common divisor, but there is a lot of pages on the web that if reduced to only information, would disappear. If the pages with actual content could present it in a form that blind, deaf, and over 65 could access, the world would be a better place.
What's next? Sueing every software manufacturer who has a WIMP interface, since people with no hands can't use a mouse. This is the same act that leads to us having braile at drive up ATMs (think about that one for a minute...)
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Whenever you hear a (U.S.) politician ranting about getting people off welfare, he, she, or it will almost always say something like, "Every able-bodied person should get up off the couch and get a job." The qualifier is there because people with disabilities are the last "disadvantaged" group in this country that most people still think it proper to support with their tax dollars. I've often wondered why this is the case, and the best answer I can come up with is that most people understand that everyone is one car accident or serious illness away from joining the ranks of the disabled.
Now consider that the vast majority (I've heard figures as high as 80%) of people with disabilities want to work but aren't able to do so, for reasons that typically boil down to lack of accommodation. So instead they sit at home collecting Medicaid, etc., when they could be earning a wage and paying taxes instead.
So forget all the arguments about justice and taking care of each other. Just remember that in the long run, it's much less expensive to provide the reasonable accommodations that give people their independence than it is to support them in dependency forever. Also remember that you too are one illness or accident away from looking at the world from a whole 'nother perspective.
And if you believe that the ability to make use of the net is crucial to life in the modern world, including being able to get and keep a job, then go add those ALT tags.
I'm surprised to see all of the dismissive comments in this forum. A well-designed Web site can allow blind people to perform tasks they couldn't do on their own in the non-online world. Those paper mailings don't come in Braille, but online text can easily be read to the user by a program. Keeping in mind a few design tips can help to make your site more usable by everyone.
I'm not sure if AOL could correct their problems this easily, but web creators using HTML should:
1) use ALT tags for your images. It doesn't take long to type in a brief description of the image. And this also helps the low-bandwidth among us who like to cruise with graphics off.
2) avoid plug-ins unless they're essential or you can't express the information any other way.
3) avoid Java applets of scrolling text (or at least offer an alternative non-Java page)
I'm sure there are many more ways, but these are easy to do and when you start receiving mail from blind users who thank you for making your site accessible to them, you'll feel great.
Isn't this what it's all about? Access for everyone!
There are more issues than just blindness, which is a big one, but many sites use inordinately small text, or colors that are not distinguishable to those who are color blind. Anyone who makes a web site should really check out The W3.org Accessibility Site. They really are good rules to follow, and do mean that your site will function right in lynx, netscape, hotjava, and every other god forsaken browser.
The thing that you have to remember is that besides porn, most of the reason that people use the web is to get access to information that really is just text. The IBM Homepage Reader that I have tested my stuff with is really pretty cool. I spent a whole day with my monitor off browsign the web with very little trouble.
Having Stephen Hawkins read you slashdot is a really cool experience. :)
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
Many of the people here are mis-interpreting the ADA. It states that places of public acommodation must be accessible where it would not be an undue burden to do so. That's it.
1) Yep, this does mean that most commercial web sites could be required to be made blind accessible. This is the same reason that stores must have wheelchair ramps, and theatres have seating for the disabled.
2) Publishers do not have to publish braille editions for the simple reason that it would indeed be an undue burden. This is a fundemental part of the ADA. It prevents ridiculous suits from succeeding.
3) It would not be an undue burden for AOL (or for that matter, and business not of trivial size) to make it's interface accessible to the blind. With AOL's large size, it is relativly trivial to implement an interface that is keyboard accessible, as the effort required to do so would be a drop in the bucket compared to their total revenues. For mere web sites, coherent ALT tags are not particularly difficult.
4) Railing against the tort system is a lame waste of bandwidth. From first glance, it looks like the organization involved made several requests of AOL, which were ignored. They perceived a violation of the ADA. While this particular interpretation of the ADA is somewhat debatable, it is not outlandish. Since their requests were ignored, they took the next logical step of filing a lawsuit. If you think the law is stupid, than write your congressman to have the law changed. The courts are in place to enforce the rule of law, not change it. (Unless of course the law is in conflict with the constitution.)
Unfortunately, the libertarian politics that are dominant on the web have not yet taken over the world. Deal with it. That is what democracy was invented for.
1) No they don't have to do any silly voicetech stuff to get their software to work. They don't have to describe, pixel by pixel, how the perty pictures look. They need to add text tags to the picture buttons (ala tool tips) along with functional keyboard shortcuts. HotKeys are not exactly a ground-breaking innovation that would take legions of computer scientists years to develop. This would make the site accessible by the blind using equipment and software AOL wouldn't have to buy for them.
2) For a section of AOL called "Picture Gallery" or something like that; it wouldn't have to be accessible. Of course the blind aren't going to get anything out of it, duh! But for things like chat rooms, IM, etc. (where the important content happens to be text), access for the blind makes sense. For a publisher to issue a braille book requires a lot of special equipment, and a total redesign of every book published. For a website to make itself accessible, it simply must be designed intellegently to begin with.
3) Making a website compliant doesn't have to involve a multi-million dollar redesign. The website simply must be remotely usable in Lynx. Accessible sites aren't that tough for a well-designed website, and many commercial sites, i.e Amazon, already have text-only versions (as opposed to just ALT tags). Now if a company designed their website poorly to begin with and it will take millions to work it out, tough. Igorance of the law is no excuse for violation. If a restraunteur builds a multi-million dollar restraunt and forgets to put in space for wheelchair ramps, and needs $4M of renovations to install them, that is just too damn bad. It would have been a lot cheaper to do it right to begin with.
If you look at many websites that use imagemaps, many of them have a list of the links represented in the image map at the bottom. That would be a reasonable accomodation, and relatively simple to accomplish. Yes, an accessible design does involve more than alt tags, but it is not that hard to accomplish if you think about it ahead of time, which is the desingers responsibility to do so.
4) If I read the original article correctly, they did not respond to organization involved. While it wouldn't be outlandish for AOL to ignore a single user, not paying attention to the communications of a fairly large and powerful orgnaization was probably a mistake.
When I said that people should write congress about the law, I was addressing those that said AOL would be merely ignoring a potential revenue stream, and that AOL should have the right to do so. Accessible design for a public accomodation is the law and Congress is a proper forum for changing the law.
I was going to post something Informative about how ALT tages might not be enough for a site to be accessible, but... well, I will first, but there's more to be said.
1.
ALT tags might not be enough. The accessibility guidelines used by Bobby, a web page accessibility and HTML compliance analyzer, includes a number of things like "don't use tables for layout purposes", "don't put two links next to each other", and "don't use color to convey information". They also request that any page using non-standard tags, effects, and any plugins have a "text only" version, and any charts or table images have text description links.
After my page was panned by Bobby, I had a chat with the admins there, arguing that the guidelines placed too many limits on web page designers, and that blind users should be using Lynx to view the Web (makes sense??).
But apparently, the problem is that blind people with computers get the same crappy software by default that non-bline people get, namely Wintel with either NS or MSIE browser, and using a screen reader on top of the graphical browser to read the page. These things also expect browsers to do things like underline links (and not underline non-links), so that it can tell the blind user that the text is a link.
The admins at Bobby argued something about not forcing blind people to use a certain piece of software, but I still dont think that position is the most utilitarian solution for anyone.
That having been said,
2.
I'm shocked, frankly, at the depths to which the allegedly upper-crust and in-all-ways-superior readership of Slashdot has fallen in the comments on this story. Of the 12 comments rated above 2 when I started writing this one, only about two or three were in any way objective or respective.
To illustrate this, my favorite(?) quote here today is "What are blind people doing on the net anyway?"
Great. Definitely not the words of an intelligent, respectable human being. And definitely not what I am supposed to expect from Slashdot readers.
I don't normally say this, because I know it's obvious fl*m*b**t, but I think most of today's posters, as well as those who up-moderated them, could stand a few hot pokers in the eyes.
You're also ignoring a number of successful IT professionals who are blind. I wonder if there are any blind, probably Lynx-using readers of Slashdot, and where they are now.
It's okay to vilify Bill Gates or Steve Case. But
blind people did not make concious decisions to be blind, and most don't even really know what "seeing" is. Bill and Steve know what not being a self-interested bastard means, and even how not to do it. Therein lies the difference.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I just wrote a rant about this for another story. Totally agreed here. Maybe we should limit the lawyer's cut to 10% and they pay court costs. Of course to do anything to change the system to limit these things would have to be done by and against lawyers, so that might prove a substantial obstacle.
+&x
But the blind shouldn't try to force AOL. If they want to use the Internet they can use it quite efficiently without AOL. If the blind were a bit more geeky (or at least a couple of them were) they'd figure out the truly amazing part of the Internet and bring all those blind folks together. News for Ears, Stuff that Reverbs, or some such. Suing is not the answer and only adds more overhead for everyone else, which screws up the market trmendously.
+&x
I've never understood why people who spend good money on creating a web site don't make it available to as many people as possible
Simple - the people who are spending the money don't know - the people who design it are not the people who are spending the money.
The people who are spending the money usually only see what the designers want them to see, then they pay for it (if they like it.) Then, later, MAYBE (if they're clueful enough) they might see the page in another browser, or someone might complain to them.
90% of the time, they have no idea that someone won't see it exactly the way they do (because of a different OS, interface, browser, or even screen resolution.) It's amazing how many businesses I've seen with horribly-designed sites that think they're wonderful because they have an internet site.
It's the designers that are to blame (the ones who design sites in a paint program, and have everything as GIF images.) Since the designers only show the customers what they want them to see, the people spending the money have no idea.
Maybe a ruling will actually make some websites usable :) . I often feel like I have to be some kinda of high concept design artist to navigate some of the UI's that web sites are putting up these days.
Seriously, I think that the legal battle that is pending here is a pretty big, if it gets taken too far. I can't possibly see how compliance to this won't present and "undue hardship" on the offending businesses, not to mention that is there any other way to actually make a website, that is based on graphics and text in the first place, any different? There is a serious current limitation on what can be transmitted already due to bandwidth and various protocol problems. I guess you could have audio too, but what else? Maybe they should be targeting the broswer and computer makers to add functionality to their machines and software beyond what is alreay being done. AOL does make software (sort of) and so this could be a first blow in that arena.
should be interesting.
-colin.stefani
Settle down folks. I think you all are making way too much of this. Essentially, this is a suit to make AOL come up with more text oriented pages instead of graphic laden ones. IE, essentially make a page compatible with older versions of programs like Lynx. Yes, this does cause a problem with a lot of fancier features that use fancy interfaces. Most of the blind who do surf use text to braille or synth speech converters. All they are asking for is some text pages that allow them to surf, listen, buy, etc like everyone else can. Is this easy to do, probably not; but there is no reason why it can't be done. [Of course, I don't see them sueing doubleclick to make their ads ADA compliant] I know there are times when I would prefer a text only screen because the graphics laden ones are so slow. AOL will settle out of court by making a bunch of text only interfaces. That is pretty much the only reason they are being sued. Besides, would AOL do anything if it wasn't sued? [BTW, I doubt /. needs to worry about being sued. It's layout appears that it would probably be compatible, for the most part, with the converters.
Get this straight, this IS NOT a tort suit. Money has nothing to do with this. So all of you bozo's who want to pull the lawyer card can just go jump in a pile of AOL CD's! This is simply a suit to force a company to comply with a law. No money! Debate if the law is good or bad all you want; but don't whine about money because this has nothing to do with it! The Spanish Inquisiton was more tollerant then some of the folks here. I put this question to all of you, why SHOULDN'T the blind have access to AOL? I doubt I will get an intelligent answer to this question. I'll sum up the standard answers from /.'s on this right here:
1) Because
2) They suck!
3) They use MS.
4) They use AOL! [DUH]
5) They should have used Linux.
6) Government sucks!
7) You suck!
Ok now that we have those out of they way, can anyone come up with an inteligent answer to this question?
It is totally possible and common for blind people to have software that reads the text to them. That's why it is important to include alt tags and provide some form of non-gui navigation.
There is actually a lot of software and hardware out there.
For example:
http://www.artictech.com/
- bridgette
We can either require accessability or leave it to market forces.
There simply aren't enough disabled people to have the kind of market impact needed to make accessability a high priority. No one's gonna go out of buisiness because they've lost the blind or handicaped consumer (well, except for disability related products)
So, if we leave it to market forces, perhaps a few nice companies will make themselves accessable, and disabled people can hunt around for the few places with ramps, braile and wide bathroom stalls. Or we can require accessability so that diabled people can live some sort of independent life.
Running a buisiness requires a licence granted by the state (not the feds). The law has been like this for some time (at least 150 years) so it's not like there is an unalienable right to run a buisiness in a given state. In fact, at the turn of the (last) century, there were cases where states revoked licences from buisiness that were grossly negligent (i think it was over worker safety).
You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't.
- bridgette
If permission to run a buisiness is granted by a state, then it can also be taken away, so it is entirely possible for states to enforce an ADA. I believe you said somewhere that you would have no problem with a state ADA law either.
Now, I didn't realize until this thread that the ADA is enforced by the feds, and that is odd, to say the least. But I'm not all that concerned with the state vs. federal power struggle. It seems that the states' rights issue is *very* important to you. That's cool, but I think that you're looking for a debate that isn't there. I never claimed that the federal govenment has rights not granted in the constitution, nor do I want to.
I do like the general concept of the ADA and would vote for something simmilar if it were raised as a state referendum.
Anyway, if you want to see an interseting article on states revoking corporate charters check out:
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/charter/death.h tml
You'll probably hate it :)
- bridgette
I know this is percieved as "political correctness", and maybe it is, but are there other angles that can benefit us all?
Imagine, if you will, a World Wide Web where everything was delivered in a, say, XML format where enough "structured content" information was delivered to a browser that the browser could reasonably read the content to a blind user (who could ask for things like "read section headings and/or headlines from this page".
What else could you possibly use this for...? How about a dynamic browser that you can configure to do things like "hide all "Article" content" so that sites like Slashdot would show up as just headlines. How about asking your browser to display no images, but still having enough structure information to display the page correctly.... The blind will end up pushing the Net back into what it was intended to be: an information delivery mechanism, not a hypertext ad magazine.
Clearly content structure is not universal, and not every site is a collection of articles like Slashdot, but I think the example is powerful enough to merit finding a way to make the general case work....
The Straight Dope explains Braille on ATM's
I think this is a good thing. There are too many websites which are totally unusable by the blind. It doesn't take a lot of effort to make a site usable by everyone, and as a bonus, it also makes it usable on palmtops and the main desktop browsers have a more pleasurable experience (Don't know what that icon is over there, mouse over it, and get a popup help)
For example, try to browse www.lotus.com with lynx - it's unusable.
I'm a part-time photographer selling the occasional black & white print. Does the ADA apply to me also? If so, how would I comply?
It applies to all businesses. You have to make reasonable accomidations. If you have a online catalog, you should put descriptions of the photographs with them. This allows a blind person to buy a photo for their friend. As a bonus, it would also mean that your pictures might get found in a search engine.
That's the silly thing about people who complain about the ADA and making accomidations, almost every one will also have benefits for non-disabled people too, without major cost, and often without any cost at all. For example, my apartment is one which is designed as an accessable apartment. What does this mean? Basically, it means that the lightswitches are lower and the power sockets are higher than in a conventinal apartment. Costs nothing for the builder to do, but means that someone in a wheelchair can reach them.
Nearly any web page that's made "correctly" with valid HTML 4.0 should be at least minimally accessible. This was part of the design requirements for the HTML specification.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
Suffice to say, your company's example is not typical, and disabled people are not somehow living high on the hog compared to the rest of us. In fact, unemployment and thus poverty is the rule of thumb among the disabled, and I think even staunch enemies of the Democratic party (how did they get involved anyway?) agree that the presence of a disability should, all things considered, not disqualify someone from educational or employment opportunities.
And that, in a nutshell, is what the ADA is all about. It's not a perfect law -- as you have noted from the abuses -- but when applied correctly it actually works quite well.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
The three biggest problems with text-only sites are:
So, please, don't assume that an accessible site has to be a non-graphical one!
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
As we move into the future, though, all documents are now originally available as electronic formats, and will continue to be so. This means that the amount of work necessary to make that book or newspaper into an accessible format -- as well-formed markup that can be interpreted by a speech synthesizer or printed on a braille printer -- will be trivial.
C'mon, we're all slashdotters here, looking forward to the future -- this is part of it. Electronic delivery of content is something we should all support!
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
It's an amazing age we live in. A blind man, with no help from anyone else, can go shopping in a bookstore and find a birthday gift for his sighted niece. Before the Internet, that had never been possible for any blind man in the history of the world.
As much as the Internet improves your life or mine, it has at least that potential to reshape the world of your visually impaired relatives. You may want to see about getting 'em hooked up for the web!
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
Hope this helps!
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
As for the black and white prints, the pictures themselves are obviously not going to be accessible to someone who can't see them. But you can make your site accessible in case someone with visual disabilities may have a reason to locate you. (For example, they may want to find a print about a specific subject -- say, Half Dome in Yosemite -- that their cousin, a rock climber, would like.)
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
An exercise I teach in my online course on web accessibility asks the students to turn off their images and surf around the web a bit. Nearly every site they visit is barred to them, even some sites by disability organizations!
You may want to try a similar exercise yourself. I sense from your posts that you don't know much about this issue, and this would be a good way to increase your knowledge base. You could also visit the AWARE Center site.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
With every well-thought out technology, there's a way to account for those who can't use it.
Do you know how to do it for Shockwave? If not, please don't assume that your ignorance will result in vast restrictions on private businesses!
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
You're obviously intelligent and articulate, but through no fault of your own, you're ignorant about the existence of blind web users, and you don't have any concept of how to create web sites that can be used by them.
You say that you wish there were a way they could use the web -- and it turns out that way exists. The specifications that make the web work are actually a form of enabling technology, that make the content available to everyone if used properly.
E-Rock, could you (or anyone else who feels as you do) do me a favor and investigate the Guild's AWARE Center website? I'd like your opinion on the content and how it's presented; I have had little feedback from someone in your situation, and would therefore like to know what you think about the issues raised and the way the techniques for accessible web page creation are presented.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
In other words, if you're an incompetent web designer, yeah, it might be hard for you to make a good web page. By definition, an inaccessible page is a broken web page.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
Accessibility is about inclusion not limitations. As such, you can use anything you like as long as you do it correctly and provide accessible alternatives.
If anyone ever tells you that to make a site accessible, you have to remove something -- send 'em to me! I will set them straight. They're simply wrong.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
As a way of bringing yourself up to speed on this topic -- since it seems that apart from disliking Jakob, you don't seem to know a whole lot about the subject -- you may want to read up on the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are certainly the web industry standard (de facto or otherwise) for accessibility.
Reading those over would help you know a little what you're ranting against. You can find the WCAG linked from the Web Accessibility Initiative homepage.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
LONGDESC really should only be used in cases where there is more info in the picture than just what's in the ALT text. In most cases, this means you don't need to use LONGDESC, and ALT will suffice just fine. Very few sites have images that require LONGDESC; Bobby may be a bit confusing when it suggests otherwise.
Priority 1, 2, and 3 conform to "MUST", "SHOULD", and "MAY." In other words, for minimal accessibility, you "have to" do the priority one requirements. The rest can be considered recommendations of varying import, and it's really up to you to make your choice on what's most important to you to do, based on your time and ability to do them.
Bobby presents several "manual check" options that you quoted above. In my opinion, you have passed all the manual checks for priority one. This means your page can be considered "accessible." You are able to answer all the questions with an "affirmative" answer, and therefore you pass. (Well, I'm assuming that you'll add ALT text to your AREA hotspots, etc.)
(By the way, using tables for layout is okay -- and since you're not using them for tabular data, you don't have to worry about that particular Bobby question.)
I hope this helps you understand what Bobby can do for you -- it's identified where you need to add essentials, and it gave you a set of questions to consider.
--Kynn
PS: One confusing thing about web accessibility is that it's not an on-off switch. You can't say easily, "this is not accessible, now it is." Rather, you can talk about the continuum, and about striving to make the site as accessible as you can. If you can't make it any more accessible than you have -- and "can't" may include "not enough time" or "not enough funding" -- but you've given it the old college try, then you've done your best and that's all that can be asked of you.
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
Also, some guy named Kynn will be speaking too.
You can watch this live in streaming media, or archived once the event is over, by going to the InterLab page at SLAC. It starts in just less than a half hour, so that may be too short of notice for some of you -- my apologies!
--Kynn
PS: Neither I nor Cynthia have direct control over the streaming multimedia aspect of the session, so I am not sure if the presentation will actually be accessible to users with disabilities! Oh, the ironies of the web...
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
You're really pulling all the stops out on this one, aren't you? I bask in the glory of your ignorance.
Read the article. It tells you why they are filing suit. It's not a frivolous matter at all.
There is no legal precedent for this because all previous suits of this nature have been settled (read as: paid off) out of court. In this case a group of people have decided to stick it out to set a legal precedent.
"The law requires businesses and other organizations to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities in order to provide them with access equal to that enjoyed by others."
Have you ever used Lynx? Did you know that the web began as an all-text medium and is still designed to be an all-text medium? There are conventions for coding in HTML, whether people decide to actually follow them or not. Those conventions (if followed) allow disabled users to peruse the content of sites as easily as someone who is not disabled. Just because you don't notice such things doesn't mean they are not there.
I, for one, can understand this group's concern. Web authors have been ignoring accepted HTML practices more and more, which in turn is shutting off more of the disabled population from participating in and acquiring knowledge from this wonderful resource. They picked the biggest and best known provider for good reason... because they want to be heard, and they want their suit to have a real impact.
The ADA protects the disabled from being excluded from society. IMO the internet is a valuable resource which these people should not be excluded from. It's become a fundamental tool for many of us, and it should be no less for someone who can not see. I'm in agreement with this because I feel that if they don't take action now, it may be too late to later.
LouZiffer
For starters, there's Lynx. That browser have been with us for a looooooong time. It also gives a good representation of what a web site looks to a person with a braille-enabled browser, or a browser that uses speech synthesis. You also get a quick indication of how your site will "look" when a search engine's robot comes by. If site authors used Lynx more they'd probably figure out what all this fuzz is about.
There's also several resources available regarding accessibility on the web. The HTML 4.0 spec has quite a lot of information regarding how to make your site accessible for everyone, not only those with a graphical browser. With CSS level 2 you have "aural style sheets" which enables you to suggest presentational information for users with speech-synthesis. Add to that the Web Accessibility Intiative and Jacob Nielsen's Accessible Design for users with disabilities.
Usability for other people than those with graphical browsers has been around for years (that Nielsen-article is old). But when you look at people's attitude there's no wonder why sites look like they do. Nobody gives a damn anyway... I think that's scary.
But, even though this has been a case for quite a while it doesn't mean I believe that the blind can sue AOL. As others have mentioned, if AOL hasn't gone out saying it's accessible to the blind they, in my opinion, don't have a case. They can ask AOL to create a site they can use, but they shouldn't be able to force AOL to do so. With the amount of publicity this gets AOL might feel it's good PR to create a site usable for the blind, maybe simply because they don't want to lose the case. In my opinion it's only the government and other official sites that should be required to be accessible to everyone.
The 'net is in my opinion well suited for being accessible for the blind. Provided they have the right aids mail, news, and to a certain extent, the web, is quite easy to use (since most of it is text). We shouldn't simply lock them out saying "this is a graphical medium, it wasn't ment for you" or anything like that.
This is just another case of people who have too much time. I have relatives in my family who are blind who could care less to use a television much more than a computer. Apparently there are too many people out there who can't take problems upon themselves to solve them.
It also isn't like AOL is the only internet service provider. These people could setup emacs-speak and use somebody else to browse the web. The web just doesn't translate all that well from a visual medium to sound or something else. Geeze...
There are plenty of deaf students at the college I went to and I didn't hear any of them complaining. Well okay, it was their neighbors ( like me ) who were complaining because they were being idiots and playing the bass too loud. Nothing better than being shaken out of your bed at 3 am in the morning to Snoop Dogg, especially when it isn't being played with any mid or high range.
Honestly though, it is impossible to cover every possible variation for a disability or similar problem. If a person was born that was blind, deaf dumb, leperous and couldn't taste or smell I swear somebody would sue in their place because this person was denied the ability to read slashdot. Argh!
This space for sale
Face it, capitalism doesn't solve everything. The disabled are not a large enough market share to matter to someone like AOL, or a large number of other corporations either.
/.er believes, then yes, the blind (and the deaf, and many other people with disabilities) have a right to be part of it.
/.ers who think the market should solve it: Get real. The market is great for many, many problems, but there are times when society as a whole has to protect what it believes in. I believe in freedom for everyone.
This, in fact, is what the government IS for.
We make a lot out of the fact that we don't want the government running our lives, telling us how to run our own business, etc. Fine. But it does have a place, and that's to protect those that need it. If the Internet is as big a part of the future as every
But there's simply not enough of them to make noise with their dollars. Folks, money ain't everything. Sometimes there are things that should be required because it's the right thing to do. There are a number of situations where we MUST rely on the government -- pollution, for example.
So all you
Don't you?
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Yes, but sometimes lawsuits are the only way to get the folks in charge to take things seriously.
According to the article, the National Federation of the Blind has tried working with AOL for years, and AOL has rebuffed all their friendly offers of assistance.
The ADA has been on the books for years -- these requirements shouldn't come as any surprise to AOL. So why did they make their interface completely inaccessible? It's not that difficult to either add ALT tags or come up with an alternate interface that's more text friendly.
Designing computer programs that are inaccessible to the blind and visually disabled is just plain stupid -- if you want to make communicate a message or make money, why shut out your potential audience/customers by making your services unavailable? It's not difficult. Provide text equivalents for images, make sure users can navigate by keyboard instead of requiring mouse use... And these features benefit more people than just the blind.
But accessibility isn't just a good idea. It's the law. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law in July, 1990, mandates:
"No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation."
Assistive technology for the blind has been around for a long time. Kurzweil Reading Machines that translate the printed word into speech have been available for more than twenty years. However, with scanner prices dropping and recent advances in optical character recognition and voice technology, it's possible to install this kind of system on ordinary off-the-shelf PCs.
As with printed material, screen readers that translate the information on the computer screen into spoken word, have been around for decades.
On September 9, 1998, the Wall Street Journal had an article titled "Blind Web Users Campaign to `See' More of Cyberspace" (page B1) A quote: "In 1996, the U.S. Justice Department stated that the Americans with Disabilities Act, a groundbreaking law requiring government and other public facilities to make themselves accessible to the disabled, may apply to the Internet. To some, that has raised the possibility that disabled users could sue Web site operators who fail to make that site accessible." Last November, someone filed an ADA complaint against the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in San Francisco because their site wasn't accessible (http://www.examiner.com/981112/1112blind.shtml)
Meanwhile, the FCC Telecommunications Act of 1996, Section 255, says "A provider of telecommunications service shall ensure that the service is accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities, if readily achievable."
Resolving the technical issues is becoming much easier. Over the last year, the computer industry has become aware of accessibility issues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which provides the guidelines defining HTML and other Internet specifications, has set up a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to make the web more accessible (http://www.w3c.org/wai/). IBM Special Needs (http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/) not only develops products like the Home Page Reader, a new voice-enabled browser that does not require special hardware for speech synthesis, but also provides information on accessibility for other developers. Even Microsoft, whose Windows GUI displaced many blind computer users, now has full-time staff devoted to "incorporating disability-friendly features into its software" (Wingfield, 1998). The Center for Applied Special Technology has created a free program that can analyze web pages for accessibility to disabled users and generates a report rating the site in several areas. Web pages that pass Bobby's analysis are entitled to put an "approved" icon on the page. The URL is http://www.cast.org/bobby/
Frankly, I think it's about time. As the baby boomers start to age, this is going to become a much bigger issue. Better to get things correct now than have to go back and change it later.
I think the total lack of understanding of HCI issues exhibited in the discussion here begins to explain the state of graphical (or other) interfaces under Linux.
Current screen readers convey bold and italics fine (never mind and ). They do frames with varying success. They still can't tell you what's in the picture.
Not exactly plain text, and this should have been obvious to you.
Moreover, the lawsuit (you should have read the article) doesn't have to do with AOL's HTML, but rather with that god-awful, browser-like access-application-thingee of theirs.
Make it lynx compatible.
Once you do that, the blind can use braille printers, speech synthesizers and even move around the screen having the computer report what character is at each character cell if necessary.
I had a friend who had a speech synthesizer card and DOS TSR programs in his laptop that let him use the computer with headphones. Once he got the stoned virus but didn't know it because the speech synthesizer code wasn't loaded until CONFIG.SYS. He used his computers to play MUDs. Also, he used EDLIN to write code because it is not visual, but line-by-line control, enter-something-get-a-response type of program.
When I was working making web pages for www.nmsu.edu we had to make it compatible with lynx. Besides being a good idea, it make it so the blind students could print course catalogs and other things on the braille printers in the computer center. It's also good for Linux users when they aren't running X.
The way I see it, the trend to purely GUI interfaces is not positive for everyone. A large group of people are getting locked out of computing.
Whoa. Before you start trashing M$, find me a WYSIWYG tool that DOESN'T churn out heaps of trashy, unmodifiable-by-humans code. If you're going to mention FPE (which DOES suck, yes) at least have the decency to mention Netscape's (what is it... Composer?) software which is equally bad. Furthermore, while IE is not fully W3C standards compliant, it is exponentially more so than ANY of the .01-version-differentiated versions of Netscape out there.
On the other hand, I'm a hardcore Lynx user and it would be hilarious to see all these corporations who design Lynx-unfriendly sites have to change their ways.
Of course the best solution would be if everyone voluntarily made their pages Lynx-friendly and the government restricted itself to, say, what it's empowered to do by the Consititution (though I suppose a case can be made with the Interstate Commerce Clause if there were money changing hands). (I am talking about the US Federal government here.)
-- $SIGNATURE
With many Lynx-unfriendly sites, such a combination would probably sound something like this:
"Image. Image. Inline. Inline. Image."
"Banner. Gif. One X One. Gif. Bullet. Gif. Customer Service. Bullet. Gif. Contact us." (etc)
Some people should be ashamed of their shoddy web design.
-- $SIGNATURE
Kill all of the babies that have disabilities. :) Of course this means that I would have been killed as soon as I emerged from the womb, but I'm willing to sacrafice myself for the greater good.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Where I work (as a web designer), we've known for about 4 months that as an arm of the Federal Government, we'd have to comply with ADA. To put it plainly, I'm not worried about it. We should be able to do it easily.
Our compliance has to do with the Electronic Freedom of Information Act, which says (in a nutshell) that we've got to make all of our public information available electronically, whether it's running an FTP site, mailing people disks and cartridges, or (what's been easiest for us) running a web site.
Since we have to reach out to every citizen we can anyway, I don't mind having to do it. We're operating under a base user standard of Netscape/IE 3, and even that could go down, so it's not like we're pushing the envelope anyway.
That being said, I know full well that our compliance with ADA and America On-Line's compliance with ADA come from separate premises, and I can't say I agree with ADA having to comply with ADA electronically. Instead, I'd rather see technology rise to the occasion to give the blind an opportunity to see AOL pages (and other private pages) as close as possible to how they actually exist on the Web.
That way, we all move forward with technology, and we help to stem the tide of Web TV, proprietary HTML, and all of the other "advances" that actually hold us back.
As much as I'd like (like many others) to stick it to the big, bad, monopoly ISP with the draconian AUP, this actually hurts EVERYONE. AOL is not a provider of public information. They're a private company, and there's no EFOIA hanging over their every move like there is at my shop.
If ADA can apply to AOL's website, it can apply to any other company, and like it or not, a piece of tech's potential for filthy lucre to be made from it (for a company) is a large indicator of whether something survives. If in the midst of developing VRML, for example, people who used it for real-estate home tours had to check themselves every minute for access to the blind, I promise you there would be no real-estate home tours online.
As another example, how fun would gamespot.com be in ADA-compliant mode? What about the game companies themselves? Must Quake 3 now have an option to aurally describe each environment before it ships?
And that leads to the crux of my argument against: a significant and unassailable portion of the Web, even of computing in general, is visual. Blindness, by definition, means the inability to accept visual data. You do the math.
This makes about as much sense as deaf people suing radio stations for ADA non-compliance.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
I meant, AOL having to comply with ADA. ADA naturally complies with itself.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Somehow, I don't think that Alt Tags are the end of it.
Even then, Alt tags can get in the way of the rollover effect we were trying to perpetrate. What are they going to do, sue us for rollovers?
If this holds, what the standards for accessibility should and do end up being is going to be a major point of contention for a long time to come.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
This is what I got from Bobby, the ADA-checker another kind soul was kind enough to point us to (someone moderate him up, please):
1. Provide alternative text for all image map hot-spots.
That makes sense. So far, so good.
2. Ensure that descriptions of dynamic content are updated with changes in content.
Referring to the part of my page where the bot drops the last updated date. A pain in the ass, but probably doable with a little Javascript-mangling.
3. If any of the images on this page convey important information beyond what is in each image's alternative text, add a LONGDESC attribute.
Blow it out your art-school-ability-test ass, Bobby. A picture is worth a thousand words, and I'm not going to make people wait while I repeat all 1000 of them in text.
4. If you can't figure out any other way to make a page accessible, construct an alternate version of the page which is accessible and has the same content.
That's what the Alt tag is for, *if* I decide to use it. That's also why I took the picture, so I wouldn't have to write a Flaubert novel describing each image on my page. I pity any art museums, and the poor schmuck who has to interpret Mapplethorpe online for ADA compliance.
5. If this table contains data in rows and columns (i.e. a spreadsheet), have you identified headers for the table rows and columns?
If I'm using tables for visual layout, which I am, it's because the HTML I'm allowed to use doesn't allow me put things in the visual place I want them without it. TH tags (describing nothing, in centered, underlined/italic text) would blow my layout. And the use of tables for layout (as opposed to DHTML layering, or frames) is already a concession to usability I had to make in light of the tech of my audience.
That was the "Priority One" list of Bobbyisms.
Here beginneth Priority Two:
1. Style sheets should be used to control layout and presentation wherever possible.
2. Mark up quotations with the Q and BLOCKQUOTE elements.
3. Did you avoid using movement where possible?
4. Make sure that headings are nested properly.
5. Make sure that text, image, and background colors contrast well and that color is not used as the sole means of conveying important information.
6. Have you provided a linear text alternative for all tables that lay out content in parallel, word-wrapped columns?
7. Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels).
Finally, a summary of Priority Three:
1. Links that are in an image map should be duplicated in text elsewhere on the page - I had about 5 of those, and it's a valid criticism.
2. Use the ABBR and ACRONYM elements to denote and expand abbreviations and acronyms. I'd never used those tags before, but it sounds like a hell of an idea, especially for a government agency.
3. If this table is used to display data in rows and columns (i.e. a spreadsheet), have you provided a summary of the table? Again, referring to my use of tables as layout.
4. Etc., etc.
As you can see, it's a big job to comply with ADA, and the bigger your site, the bigger it gets.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Go back and read the Old Man's post. Access, not benefits.
1) Nope, it could actually be an undue burden to have to redesign the AOL interface, which is highly visual, to comply. Not to mention that the "access" mentioned here isn't clearly defined. The blind already have access to the Internet. Technically, they already have access to AOL, even though they can't actually *see* that they're there. Some of it's text; a lot of it's images. As compared to the building analogy, if you enter the building, you've got access, even if you don't see that you do.
2) What makes you think that redesigning a multi-million page website for compliance isn't as much of an "undue burden" as printing works in Braille? If it is, then this lawsuit is as frivolous as the one you described.
3) As above, www.aol.com and members.aol.com are not "mere websites," and the AOL software has a hard enough time functioning to it's own spec, not to mention the months it might take the crack computer scientists to write functional voicetech, keyboard shortcuts, and anything else it might need to comply. Being a "big company" doesn't seem to have helped them at all in that respect. And then you have to define what's a "big enough company to handle ADA compliance without significant loss." Like it's been brought up before, it's about more than just ALT tags. I don't think the courts want to set a rule; they'll just wait until people get sued, and decide a case at a time.
4) If AOL thinks it's right, it doesn't matter how many times they had to tell the organization involved "No." And if AOL thinks it's a bullshit lawsuit, there's a fine line between debatable and outlandish. There's nothing wrong with the law, so the junk about writing your congressman doesn't apply, but the question is whether it does or doesn't apply to AOL, and the place to argue that IS in the Courts. It's also the place, incidentally, to argue whether or not it's a bullshit lawsuit.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Actually, if you'd RTFT, you'd notice that I'm going to be working on bringing a federal government website into compliance, and as you're probably well aware, being as educated as you are, it's not just alt tags and text-menus at the bottom. That ACRONYM tag alone is probably a month of work for me by itself, easy.
For starters, we'll probably have to Bobby-proof our entire site (thousands of pages, with hundreds of authors and developers) to Priority Two, or even Three, but then again, that's just an educated guess. We'll find out for sure when DOJ proclaims from on high. Keep in mind that if DOJ was smart enough to simply comply with W3C spec, which you're right to infer is not nearly the pain in the ass, they wouldn't have to *write* as much as they've already spent months doing. And W3C spec won't apply to AOL, either, especially not their client software.
As for AOL, they've got at least as big a website as we do (don't even get me started on members.aol.com - cat-herding for 3 million, anyone?), and they're even more visual than we are.
So while I appreciate your polite attempt at 'bringing me up to speed,' I'm doing just fine on my own, thank you.
I DO dislike Jakob, but I have reasons for it, not the least of which is having met him. He's derisive, snobbish, and fascist in his beliefs. That I disagree with him on principle is separate from that.
But from up there in the W3C stratosphere, you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
...textbook fascism.
You're allowed to own things on paper, as long as you own it and use it the way the government tells you to.
There is no legitimate reason to point a gun at the heads of every US citizen and corporation to make them install wheelchair ramps on their websites and braille on drive-through ATM machines.
Down with the ADA!!!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
... is that the banks buy those things in bulk, and they tend to use the same components in all their machines. It doesn't make sense for them to go out of their way to buy a non-braille keypad for drive up use.
- Have a picture
What's really being fought here, and don't let the lawyers trick you into thinking otherwise, is whether or not the web is a foray of a private organization into the public eye. If the courts agree that it is so, and award this case to the prosecution, expect to see MUCH more regulation of website content.
For instance, if mailing lists are public accommodations, for instance, then they must be held up to the rigorous free speech standards of the First Amendment. Owners of the mailing lists will be responsible for activities that take place on them -- and will have to buy mailing list insurance (!!!) And yes, if websites are public accommodations, then they will have to comply with the ADA...which means all good websites and mailing lists will move offshore to more liberal servers.
*sigh*. Isn't the 'net grand?
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
I've know several who do. I used to work at Berkeley Systems, who made a screen reader for Mac & Windows that allowed the blind to use those OS's.
(Called 'Outspoken', it was even able to read the old GPF dialog on windows 3.1! Take that!)
What it could NOT do is deal with images that portray text. They worked by intercepting the low level 'DrawText' type calls, and just keeping track of the parameters and z-order.
Think of the $$$ you save by not buying a monitor. (it even used different voices for different UI components. )
rbb, codeboy
Sarcasm at it's best! At least I hope it was sarcasm...
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Alternatives don't just mean alt tags. It can mean presenting the information in an alternative form. Or it could mean the death of Flash, which wouldn't bother me none.
See:
W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
for more info about accessibility.
Interestingly, they recommend graphical alternatives to text as well, for those who can't read.
--
"You despise me, don't you?"
"You despise me, don't you?"
"If I gave you any thought, I probably would."
Whether or not businesses should be forced to make reasonable accomodations (and whether or not the federal government is even remotely capable of defining reasonable) are questions for another time.
If a site does have crummy HTML or relies on Javascript (which I normally browse without due to security holes 1 through 3000), I will usually just go elsewhere.
Sometimes, if it's a site that features data I really want to see (ex: http://www.usskiteam.com/ has online access to national rankings, and I like to peruse them, so I have emailed the webmasters and suggest they convince using CGI instead of a half-arsed CGI/Javascript mess (using ASP, of course). No dice, but I had to try). My point, you ask?
It's worth emailing the webmaster. Occasionally they're completely ignorant and a pointer to htmlhelp.com will work wonders. If that doesn't work, going elsewhere would be my first choice.
On other occasions, I will bother to work around the problem (ex: at laxtv.com, a site that is probably down again, Javascript was required for the site to work. I read the Javascript, figured out the redirect URL myself, and went to it manually. Then I bookmarked that page, and I had access to the tv schedules and video feeds I wanted. In that case, mail to webmaster@host bounced. Gotta love professional web desgin.)
It all boils down to one key question: what is the information worth to you? Is it worth dealing with a registration scheme? Or is it only worth it if you can get in with a standard id such as slashdotid/slashdot?
The ADA, and this lawsuit in particular, is an attack on freedom. The plaintiffs are attempting to short-circuit the market, short-circuit AOL's freedom to provide the services it chooses at the rates it chooses to customers who like these offerings by forcing AOL (by means of Government intervention, backed by the use of physical force) to coerce AOL to meet the demands of a particular group of consumers.
The fact that some people are blind, unable to fully access media that most people are able to does not constitute a claim on the time, money, and energy of producers. Arguing that AOL should be forced to develop and provide special services to any group that claims to need them effectively destroys the company. When the government begins making business decisions for a firm, the firm essentially becomes a new wing of the federal government.
For more on the moral defense of producers and innovators like AOL, see www.moraldefense.com. For a moral defense of Microsoft, see microsoft.aynrand.org. --Blake
If a gov't site is inaccessable to somebody in the general public (so like any particular disability, including using some really screwy browser on a vic 20 :) they have nobody else to go to for that particular service/whatever.
However if a commercial site is inaccessable to somebody in the general public, they do not have to go there, and can go somewhere else that is accessable to them.
I thought thats how capitialism was supposed to work?
Need a Catering Connection
Record it?! What the hell are blind people doing on the net anyways!?!? I guess they MIGHT have someone or something reading the websites to them, if it's a person that person can take care of the clicking and what not. If it's a program then what are we supposed to do about it?
How exactly do you make a non-physical, text medium accesible to a blind person?! There is no sound on the web, you can't touch it, taste it, or smell it. How exactly do they propose that this be done?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Reading through some of the adolescent libertarian wannabe bullshit I've seen here tonight makes me sick and just plain sad. Grow up people. Quit bitching about the ADA, you or someone you love may need it someday! As for web page design, measures to improve accesibility generally make sites better, you get sites that are easier to navigate, available to people who aren't using the latest hardware and software, and load faster when you keep things simple. There are some good links on accessible web design posted here, thanks to those of you who put them in with your helpful comments.
http://leb.net/blinux/index.html
"The purpose of BLINUX
is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system
for the user who is blind" -- from their homepage
They've been around for a while now, and they're definitely worth checking out if you're developing nearly any applications. This is perhaps the first time I've ever been happy to hear about a lawsuit. (did you hear that AOL lawyer backpedaling?)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Does this mean that (if this gets by) no commercial sites can use Shockwave or Flash? I'm not familiar with either much, but I imagine that you can't throw alt tags onto it.
Interpret this as a good or bad thing, whatever you wish.
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
Think. I know it is hard, but...
Many newspapers have braille editions, and I can think of a few phone-services that read the day's headlines. Many books have audio editions. Radio broadcasts usually have scripts that can be purchased.
I hope the suit is won.
(and I hope /. is next - right now at the top of my screen is iCab's "Filtered Image" icon, and the alt text "Please click here". HELLO? If I couldn't see the size of it, I wouldn't know if it were an ad banner or a "This page has moved, please click here" link.)
Use alt tags. It is not that dificult.
And the excuse that the web can't be navigated by the blind is pure BS. It would take me 5 minutes, maybe 10, to write a bunch of AppleScripts that work with iCab and Apple's speech recognition and text-to-speech to make the web useable without looking at the screen. (of course, I'd have to be able to see to write the scripts, but...)
Insert wit here.
Someone's going to need to draw the line somewhere. If a blind doesn't get a truck driving job because they are blind, then do they have the right to sue the employer?
Of course not. I'm not against the blind, but I think they are being very stupid. If AOL doesn't support blind people, then boycott it.
I doubt this lawsuit will go through anyway as it was stupid to begin with.
These are the same people who protest the movie 'Mr. Magoo.'
As for the 'government at work' arguments, read the article this, is a civil lawsuit. I don't want to smack the blind on the back of their collective heads and say, "Too bad," but this is just overstepping the boundries of accessability. The same way the braille ATM does.
Do they really expect proprietary AOL software(crap) to work well with their speech synths? If anything this more proof that AOL stinks, especially for the blind. Try a different ISP, you'll like it.
The foundation for Nacrolepsy are filing a lawsuit against /. user gad_zuki! for writing posts that aren't interesting enough to keep them awake.
a text version of radio/tv broadcasts--- its called a transcript, you can get them for almost every major broadcast or parts of broadcasts
how do you describe music to a person who has never heard, its a moot point, why would the transcript need to go with the broadcast, that gets beyond the whole resonable accomodation i talked about in another post, everything would have to be either scripted or on a big delay for it to work, unless you know people who are super fast and accurite typers , there is always closed captioning on tv too
Nobody, that's who. If there is a market for blind-sensitive web (or any other) materials, then there is big money to be made. If AOL doesn't want that money, that's their problem. If Govt. steps in here and regulates, you'll dramatically increase the cost of doing business on the web, and hence kill lots of innovation. If you're a company, you'll have to get lawyers and experts to OK every single HTML page you post. That is an outrage.
Can your IM do this?
Unfortunately, Mr Maurer, the President of the National Federation of the Blind, does not have his email listed on the NFB site, but the general email for them is: epc@roudley.com.
IMHO people filing stupid lawsuits like this one should have as much public feedback as possible.
If people used HTML the way it was intended, as a Hypertext Markup Language, these problems wouldn't arise.
BTW, I'm currently developing a site (www.comuno.com) that should be accessible to anyone. At least, it works with Lynx.
Most of the comments against this suit are really criticisms of the ADA and how it encourages "silly pc crap." Unfortunately, the ADA is wrong even if it didn't encourage the silliness. Here's why.
Say I'm confined to a wheel chair. I need to get into some store. Why do I have the *right* to force the owner to make a ramp for me? Even if the owner doesn't pay outright he does through taxes (and so does everyone else). What gives me that right? He's not responsible for my being confined to a wheel chair -- why must he pay the costs associated with the disability? Sure it would be nice and courteous for him to do it, but government should not be about forcing people to be courteous.
The bottom line is that the non-disabled are not responsible for the disableds' diability. Sure, it's sad and unfortunate and makes life more difficult, but one man's situation is not another's responsibility *unless* he caused it -- i.e. a man hitting another with a car and paralyzing him.
I believe that those responsible for something should pay. If anyone wants to argue about "we are all responsible for each other" that's fine -- we can argue about that until our fingers fall off. But if we agree that only those responsible for something should pay for it, then the ADA is wrong -- because it makes certain people pay for things they are *not* responsible for.
RL
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
I'm not insensitive or anything to the subject... I feel blind people or anyone with any disability is 100% equal to you and I, but this is ridiculous. Is there some software that allows blind people to surf the web and like it disagreed with AOL's html mark up, so now they are getting sued? I don't get this at all. Anyone want to explain?
SuPz.orG
Wow. /. readers have a lot of interesting stuff to say... or at least some interesting ideas. Even if I disagree with them... wow... This is ridiculous... a lot of you out there are just completely unaware about this... that is pretty sad.
/. readers think that knowing computers is a necessity in the 21st century (heck even today). How many /.ers think that every man woman and child should have some level of computer literacy. How many /.ers think that the internet is going to become an integral part of every-day life to every single human (eventually)? How many slashdotters realize that there are people with disabilites people out in cyberspace who have yet another obstacle to overcome with the internet?
i sabilities.htm
Normally
How many
Get out from your cubes, look around, you will find tons of resources for people with disabiliies on the web...Here are just a few.
www.atacces.org/design.htm
www.webable.com
http://ww w.the-park.com/volunteer/safehaven/specialneeds/d
For those of you who are not curious enogh to read through some of the design specifications on webable (probably the best I listed), you have to understand where people with disabilities are coming from.
For starters, they are PEOPLE - first and foremost. Like all people, they have the right to go to any public place they would like to - including on the internet...
Gasp! yes, there are people with disabilities - even vision disabilites who can type. Just think, they can find their way to the bathroom every morning, they can make themselves, breakfast, and - Gasp - they can even use a computer. For the first time people with disabilities are getting to interact on a large scale as equals...
or not...
A large number of high profile pages have begun to use more and more graphics, which
#1 take a long time to download
#2 are sometimes improperly used to convey a essage
#3 frequenlty over-enhance a web page for difficult manuvering.
#4 hide content, block content, and otherwise convey different content than the rest of the page.
In addition, most standard screen readers (what people with visual disabilities often use in conjunction with a browser) cannot read drawn words - but they can read accompanying captions - something which many web developers have begun leaving out...
So here's what we've said to the comunity of people with disabilites: Here, have access to the web, have resources, have all kinds of stuff... but any of the cool stuff - that's just for us "normal" people.
Do I think that AOL should be the one sued? Probably not. However, someone as highly visible as AOL needs to smarten up and take the initiative to help people with disabilites. Someone like AOL though _does_ make an effort to create a family environment (though I still despise them). The sad thing is - if your family has a person with visual disabilities, your out of luck.
You say you want a revolution?
Duuuhh I have dduuuh an IQ of uhhhhh 6. Duuuuhhh I can't figure Duuuuuh stuff out. Duuuhh Who can I uuuhhh sue?
What is the world coming to? The next article we see is going to be DEAF SUE RADIO CONGLOMS FOR LACK OF ADA COMPLIANCE. This is ludicrous. There are some things I can't do, like sing...but I'm not going to sue the Kereoke guys if they don't want me to sing...as a matter of fact I think they would be doing the right thing. We all have our weaknesses and advantages and we can't sue somebody just because they aren't equal in every aspect. I'm going to sue the blind people because they can hear better than me (and they are going to be rich after this frivolus lawsuit). Think I'm upset? Well, yeah...I guess it all comes down to the fact that I think this is complete BS.
might involve OCR to read more graphics, and make them available not only to blind users, but also to search engines, etc. Of course this would take some massive computing power to add one more layer of processing, but that's not too far off. Features such as this might ne a nice add-on to sighted users as well - much like the motion picture industry's revolution with "talkies" in the 30s. There was an experiment done at a televised sporting event (I think it was an NFL game in the 60's - dunno) where they showed the game with sound, but there were no commentators. People flooded the phone lines to complain.
- passion
...could involve OCR to read more graphics, and make them available not only to blind users, but also to search engines, etc.
Of course this would take some massive computing power to add one more layer of processing, but that's not too far off. Features such as this might be a nice add-on to sighted users as well - much like the motion picture industry's revolution with "talkies" in the 30s.
There was an experiment done at a televised sporting event (I think it was an NFL game in the 60's - dunno) where they showed the game with sound, but there were no commentators. People flooded the phone lines to complain.
- passion
This one boggles my mind. What the hell could you do to make you're web page accessible to the blind? How the hell are they using the computer in the first place?
You have to have access ramps on buildings, fine. Automatic doors, fine. Braile on shit the blind couldn't get to, fine. But unless there's a braile monitor out there, they're screwed. I wish they weren't but they are.
Shit like this makes the need for tort reform (or removal of idiot panels [juries] from the process) more and more obvious.
What's next? I get a legal notice from these people saying my personal business is in violation because my website doesn't comply with their specifications?
I'm going to do whatever I want, regardless of what they tell me, online or off. Screw this.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Next they will want to sue camera manufacuters because they can't take good pictures. 'Course autofocus may have taken care of that.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions.
The simplified browsers of the wireless WAP world are certainly a good step in this direction. Though not intended to help the blind and near-blind, they provide that `simple web page layout' so necessary for text-to-speech and automatic braile technologies to be able to work effectively.
Microsoft has invested heavily in developing accessible software .
There are some Linux projects, such as BLINUX and the command line interface is an advantage in this context.
However, Microsoft has been much more active in this field.
I completely agree that the web should be a vailable to the blind, but there's going to be a point when it just can't be done. How do you take a sight completely in Shockwave and convert it? If we make it a legal obligation for sites to be available for the blind, then much of the innovation on the web will be gone. As things more farther away from plain HTML, we are going to reach a point when it just isn't feasible to make a sight for the blind. Yes, it's a sad thing, and it will be a lose, but it's just something that I think will happen.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Used to be a couple of years ago after logging onto AOL blind customers could alt tab the spam launcher and bring up webspeak or a browser of their choice. Most blind folks chose a text homepage as their default.
My main gripe with AOL (other than the spam launcher) was that they didn't support third party mailers like pegasus or eudora. I am guessing it would be difficult for a blind person to run the spam gauntlet to get to their Email.
Seems to me that in the spirit of reasonable accomodation AOL could make some minor changes and maybe provide a copy of Webspeak and a text mail interface for blind folks.
Adding Alt. tags would help, but since AOL is over 60% graphics I bet most blind folks would be happy if they could just get to their Email and put on their socks for newsgroups,ftp and the other text based web content.
How much would it cost to make the more popular web sites PC?
If all that money were put towards research into restoring peoples sight I'm sure it would do much more good.
There have been some interesting developments in this area in recent months (capturing the images a cat can see from its optical nerve) and I am sure we could have artificial eyes within a decade or two if enough money were put towards it.
Long before the invention of the IMG tag, universal access was a vital part of the HTML spec -- the spec didn't actually define the presentation of content, just its semantic structuring. Presentation and syntax are supposed to be separate, and the loss of handicapped access is only one of the punishments inflicted on the public by intermingling the two. (There's a very good discussion of these issues in David Siegel's article stumping for the adoption of CSS.)
There are two questions that have to be asked here:
1. Is access to AOL an important part of public life?
This is debatable only to the extent that you focus specifically on AOL's terrible, spammy services; if you use AOL as a stand-in for internet access in general you have to answer yes. Nobody would argue today (especially not on slashdot) that access to internet resources is not significant.
2. Are there reasonable steps that AOL could be taking to make it easier for handicapped users to access their services?
This is a little touchier, because it focuses on the question of what is reasonable design. AOL will probably argue that it needs to rely on an image-heavy layout in order to stay competitive, but that's a hard thing to actually prove. (When you add images, how many users do you add because they're impressed by the flashiness, and how many users do you lose because they're annoyed with the long download time? Both numbers are hard to measure.) And yet, the extent to which blind users lose access to AOL's sites as a result are generally much easier to substantiate: I think it'd be pretty easy for a lawyer to demonstrate how AOL sites are completely unusable for the blind.
I'm all for this lawsuit. Not simply because it's another thorn in AOL's butt (though it is), or because I think we should do what we can to make life a little easier for blind people (though we should). But because I love spare, trimmed-down HTML, and I long for the day when 40-something marketing directors stop treating the Web like it was TV or a magazine. If this suit is successful, it'll get us one day closer to the day when the user, not the producer, controls the presentation -- and that will benefit everybody, blind and sighted alike.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but if you're taking legal advice from some guy bullshitting on some web site, you deserve what you get.
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
And I say sue the PC manufacturers for not having built in braille terminals, and sue the doctors for not fixing their vision, and sue their mother for giving birth to a disabled person, and sue their father for the inferior gene pool. jeez when is it going to stop!!!!!! No one can start a buisness for the threat of being sued. People should pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and get on with life the best they can. I think the act of sueing some one should be left to those who have actually recieved premeditated and malicious harm from another. PERIOD. Not to mention another subject of how lawyers rape the system with these kind of suits, but thats another subject.
I am a huge supporter of a widely supported HTML/CSS standard, accessible web design, ALT tags, Any Browser/Any Resolution/Any Color Depth web design. Just because someone else doesn't have exactly the same system configuration you do is no reason they shouldn't be able to access the content of your site in some fashion. The web is about communication, you know? Personally I think it's just plain foolish for any business to turn away potential clients just because they're lax. "It is too much hassle to make a curb cut. We don't really need business from paraplegics anyway," or "Bah, ALT text is for wimps. We don't need the business of any blind people." It amounts to the same thing.
However, I really hope this lawsuit fails utterly. You can't legislate everything that people do. Pretty soon there will be laws against talking too quietly, too loudly, or slurring, because people with hearing impairment might not be able to make out what you say. :P I could go on with examples, but I'll spare you. :)
This country (USA) is too PC for its own good. Harrison Bergeron, indeed. I've never liked the PC movement. I find that biblical principles suffice. If you love your neighbor, you'll do things for him without being mandated by law to do so.
CT
Constitutionally Correct
This lawsuit is going to be as powerful as blind people suing Ford for making cars for the blind. This just won't happen.
I don't see a lot of merit with this lawsuit at all, I'm sure we all consider this a bit silly.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Hey, I try to make my site easily readible by the blind and others, but in some cases it is simply next to impossible (for example I have audio recordings that I simply don't have the time or money to produce written transcripts accessible to the hearing impaired).
To legally require me to do so is silly. Nobody requires the local newspaper to issue a Braille edition. If I want to create a cutting edge site and leave out the "ALT" tags, that's my right and forcing me to do otherwise is an unconstitutional breech of my rights.
I don't believe Hypermedia is a right for anyone, until it is AOL is simply denying itself business. There are plenty of other providers out there who offer usable web pages for handicapped access.
but
If I were "AOL" (Steve Case?) I would have made some sort of effort to offer up usable HTML awhile ago just to avoid this sort of thing. It isn't all that difficult if you practice it from the get-go but man it is a BITCH to go back and repair!
Anyway it just makes for good PR, but I do not believe it should be a law, it is far to difficult to enforce and in the end will screw over more people than it might help - besides like an earlier poster said - are they going to sue every book publisher who does not carbon all of their books into Braille? I doubt it.
On a side note, I will be starting up my new "disabled access only ISP", yup - all text based and audio enhanced CSS and XML . . . "
" -- ow my brain hurts again -- "
What's next? Sue the Museum of Modern Art! I can't view these great works of art just because I'm blind? Why not?!!? You should make them accessibly to everyone!
Sue Adobe! I can't properly use the marque tool if I can't see!
Sue every movie theatre! The movies are shown so that only those with sight can view them!!
Sue Sony, Virgin, and every other record label! I can't properly hear the artist's music if I am deaf!!@
Maybe I'm taking this too far... but I think it's the other way around.
I was just wondering, if AOL claims to be accessible to the blind, and it isn't? If AOL does not claim to be accessible, what's the deal? It is not accessible to a new immigrant from Romania who does not speak English either. Should he sue them? As for government agencies, if the only place where they provide information is on the Web, then they should be sued, not just by blind, but by everyone who doesn't have access to the Web. If WWW is just one of the many places where the info is published, that's too bad, use other source of info... And NYtimes servers are down again, so I cannot read the article... First post...
For those web designers out there, ask yourself this question: is there enough text on the page to understand the content without images? Computers can now be set up with special software (why do I have to explain this to the smart people who should be able to figure this out?) that can speak text for those who can't necessarily see the screen, including the text on websites--especially if the data can be saved out as a text file if need be. If a company as large as AOL is unable to provide this service to a group of diabled customers in its proprietary gateway software, then that's what the ADA is for. The deaf community has empowered itself a great deal by the growth of the online society--finally a way for the deaf and hearing-impaired to communicate without being ridiculed. Why then should the blind and vision-impaired be discriminated against because AOL thinks pictures are better than words? ::muttering:: not everyone is white, male, employed, and gifted with multiple computers
Hi!
Thanks for your informative post.
I find the whole blind-bashing thing simply discouraging. A lot of SlashDot readers are youngsters, and kids tend to think of themselves as immortal. But kids also tend to seize the mantle of compassion and respect and decency--they just presume to hold the moral high ground in any conversation.
And what do we see here? Hundreds--hundreds of the best and brightest on the Internet flaming away at the notion that blind people might want to participate on the Internet.
Extremely discouraging to read. I really thought these people were better than that....
My congratulations on your post--a splendid example of shooting off your mouth without pausing to think first.
That you're 21 doesn't surprise me in the slightest. That you have absolutely zero sympathy for people with disabilities suggests strongly that you are white, male, American, and healthy. You don't have any form of disability, and you don't know anybody (or care about anybody) that does.
Someday, possibly, you will grow up....
...and when you do, you may discover yourself falling "through the Looking Glass" as we say, into the world of the disabled. Maybe you'll get married, and your wife will have a car accident when she's pregnant. Maybe you and she will get stupid and do the Natural Childbirth thing--eschewing hospitals for a whole wheat birth experience at home. A swell idea, right up until the baby can't get oxygen. Or maybe you'll have a "normal" birth, only to visit the next morning and hear your pediatrician ask the most ominous question you'll ever hear:
And then you might discover that it's your child that doesn't qualify for heart surgery--because she doesn't fit the Aryan profile. And it's your child that doesn't get to go to school, because she doesn't fit the Aryan profile. And it's your child that doesn't get to play at the park, or attend multiple-story schools, or event use the toilet on an airplane. And then maybe you might discover that there are people out there don't have all the advantages you have.
I have my own reservations about the ADA. It drives me crazy when people who ought to know better use the ADA as a means of extorting money--and frankly, that's what I think this NFB suit is. Should AOL use ALT tags? Yup. Does Shockwave make a website unreadable to the blind? Yup--and companies that make their sites unreadable deserve to have their contempt publicized. But what is happening here is simple extortion: AOL will settle this by becoming a corporate sponsor of the NFB, the NFB will reap thousands (millions?) and AOL will write off the expense as Danegeld. (Coastal villages in Britain used to pay the Vikings off so they wouldn't ransack the town.)
But what really scares me about the ADA is the knee-jerk reaction of reactionary jerks like you. I worry all the time about the eventual backlash against Special Ed funding and Mental Health/Mental Retardation programs, and I wonder when people will start thinking publicly about saving public funds by "euthanizing" these poor, suffering little victims. People like Peter Singer (at Princeton) and the L.A. chapter of MENSA are already saying it. And all they need is the unwitting assistance of a lot of healthy, white, male 21-year-olds with no sense of social responsibility....
Perhaps it is you that should grow up.
I just talked with Betty Harvy of the DC area SGML User's Group and she said that she will borrow the tape from the presenter and will post a MP3 version on the web site in the next few weeks. In the talk a government site was visited (it looks boring.. but sounded great) and a few commercial sites were visited (look great .. but sound awful). I hope this will help.
Also, Harvey Binggam presented last year, his web site is: http://ww.tiac.net/users/bingham/access bl/
Best of luck!
What is funny, is that many of you will have sight problems that develop as you age. From my understanding a large percentage (60%) of blind people had a "normal" life until they were in their 40's 50's or 60's -- at which point they were struck blind due to a stroke...
What makes democracy work is when we stick up for the rights of other people. We do this becuse when people wait until their own rights have been taken it is very often too late. What makes capitalism work is an underlying democracy -- a system which keeps one person's rights from trampling on another's. Many of you are large advocates of freedom. However, when it is not your freedom... you turn a blind eye.
These blind people whom you wish to steal rights from have paid tax dollars which have helped to fund the public institutions which created the Internet. Shouldn't they be allowed to benefit from its existence as well as you?
Two weeks ago, I was at a DC SGML conference where a web accessibility talk was given. It changed my perspective on things. We sat in a room (all 40 of us) and listened to a "web reader" browse the web. It was amazing. When I'm 60 and blind from staring at a CRT my whole life I want to be able to sit back and enjoy the wealth of information on the Internet. The last thing I want to hear is "IMAGE, IMAGE, JAVASCRIPT, IMAGE, IMAGE, JAVASCRIPT, SUBMIT"
Come On! Certainly the minimum we can do is add a few ALT tags to our web site, test with Lynx, and ask Bobby to take a look at it just to make sure... Why you all line up and support a corporation's (a non living being) right to deny access to a class of people is beyond me. In fact, I'm surprised. Especially for slash dot people.
who is more "deserving" of internet access: a few middle-class blind people who live in a wealthy society, whose needs are mostly taken care of, or vast swaths of the impoverished third world who might use internet access for the economic opportunity to feed themselves.
and if there is the majority of people in favor of the ADA, where were all you big-hearted people before the ADA? I didn't see 1/2 the population installing ramps on their own etc. It's all about greed folks, making other people pay for the things you want, and it's about control, legislating your morality and forcing it on other people
Don't misinterpret me, I'm mostly in favor of the ADA, I just don't dress it up in flowery language. It's moral and economic fascism, "making the trains run on time" for my handicapped neighbors because I like them better than I do people halfway round the world, and it's getting other people to pitch in and help with my personal morality because I like my personal morality better.
But, whether you are in favor of it or not, the ADA pretty clearly applies to AOL, though IMHO the truly handicapped are all of the people who use AOL.
Clearly, everyone here believes the web is important, yes? Then how can you possibly defend a position that denies access to the web to a not insignificant segment of the world? I mean, really - is it that hard to just add stinkin ALT tags? What could possibly be the justification for being opposed to making sites accessible to the blind?? Laziness? Some kind of blind faith that govt regulation is always bad? Meanness?
Speech recognition and speech output is a potential answer but the mainstream does not need this so it will not be fully developed and will always be missing some element that will prevent it from being a complete solution.
Take someone to court over this??? Give me a break!
Has anyone tried emacspeak? I've read a bit about it and it seems pretty cool (esp. since it was developed by a blind Unix programmer).
Here's a scientific american story which I felt was neat. And a linux HOWTO. And a DDJ article on the design
I always felt this was a very underrated tool.
w/m
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
Ok....rationalize this for me. DRIVE-UP ATM....braille key-pad. huh? Now these folks want blind-accesible web-pages? Give me a break!! I do completely sympathize with the fact that they may be impaired and I'm not, but come on now people. This is becoming completely rediculous. Yes, it would be nice for those folks to develop some form of braille pad that could automatically pop up those neat little bumps and they could surf using some form of advanced technology, but at the moment that's years off in the future? What on earth does the ADA think they're going to get done here? It is completely ludicrous that they are suing over something as completely lame as a web page not being bling accesible...last I knew, they COULDN'T SEE THE FREAKIN' SCREEN TO BEGIN WITH. Same thing with the ATM issue....every time I pull up to the thing....I think about the same nonsense. Reality-check folks: There's always going to be something NOT to your liking...suck it up, deal with it, and grow up for Pete's sake. I'm a whole whopping 21 years old, and do you see me sue-crazy like the rest of the damned upper class schmucks who don't know what else to do with they're money other than smoke crack and shoot heroin? Fuck all of them. Grow up, and get on with it. Stop impeding the progress of one of the greatest technologically advenced nations in the world with this same old bullshit. The masses have had enough. Give it up you dumb schmucks.
If this discrimination suit is won against AOL, then the only indiscriminate manner of enforcement would be to apply to same standards to all media -- which I guess would mean a Braille edition of every book and newspaper, a "text-only" version of every radio station broadcast, etc. etc. etc. Like I said, utterly ridiculous. Litigous fools.
I am, therefore you think.
Wow - who's the retard? I can only hope you stumble out of bed some morning, maybe in a rush to get to the bathroom, trip over your feet, and poke your eyes out on your thumbs.
I am, therefore you think.
"The future masters of technology must be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the
Imagine a blind person going to a bank. He hails a cab, gets into the back seat on the left. The cab drives to the bank, and the blind guy uses the machine. The cab drives him home and he gives the driver some of the money he got from the ATM. The generic driver never needed to know the guy's PIN and the blind guy didn't have to cope with a lineup for a teller.
Wonderful rantsmanship here. "Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile!"
Anyone could use the "there's not enough of a market for us to help them" argument, and the "if they don't like it let them go someplace else" line of reasoning. In fact, it was used very effectively in the South during the 1950's (does anyone remember "The management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone" signs?)
So, tell me - if everything were driven by the almighty dollar as some of you are suggesting, then who would have insisted that black people had a right to be served at a white-owned diner just outside of Montgomery?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
I'll start coding my web pages in BHTML (Braille-HTML)
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
What's HTML for? Yes it provides a nice hyperlink structure that we all enjoy, but there's another fundamental principle that some of us around here are missing, Structure.
Proper use of HTML allows both the underlying data and it's structure to be conveyed whether on a WIMP system, telnet, speech browser or search engine. Now that we have CSS we can add our nice suggestions for visual rendering without detracting from the structure of the document.
The two greatest enemies to portable Web design are ignorant authors (alt text really does not make the images disappear) and the vendor of certain web breaking packages such as FrontPage Express and Internet Explorer.
--
Calum I Mac Leod
It's amazing there is someone that actualy wants to go through the AOL website... But for the sake of complete fairness I think that any braille they have should be interrupted by commercial messages so as to make the experience as close to possible to the real visual thing.....
The first thing to realise is that you can be legally blind even though you retain some of your vision. I used to work with a guy who was blind, but could see enough to use a 21 inch screen with a high contrast colour screen. Also, remember that blindness can occur later in life, so think about how you will feel if become blind due to disease or accident. As the web becomes more and more important to daily life, the disadvantage suffered by not being able to use it will become worse. Providing a blind friendly web page does not mean you have to provide the same page to sighted users, you just have to provide a useable alternative. Finally, the idea that web pages should be laid out with precise control by the web designer over layout cannot continue indefinately. You cannot dictate what type of browser or screen resoultion a user will have. This will even more pronounced if things like browser capable mobile phones or PDA's become more common. You have to provide content that people can see regardless of their viewing platform, at least if you are a commercial concern.