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?

Comments

Re:Give me a break.

[JordanH]

• And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the ./ people who are 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 couldn't agree more.

I'm generally pretty conservative, but I just don't see the ADA as being a burden on society. The intent is that society will benefit by allowing handicapped people to function as productive members of society. Anybody have a problem with this?

Now, there are people who try to abuse it. Like the policeman who was fired because he couldn't make a comprehensible report and claimed to have "Disability of Written Expression" or the people who tried to claim that they were discriminated against because they couldn't perform certain jobs, like being a pilot, that required a certain standard of uncorrected vision.

The geeks whining about special accomodations or comparing this to something we might see in a "Harrison Bergeron" world are pretty clueless. I've known productive blind computer programmers. As others have mentioned, there are OCR devices that will read a computer screen.

I, for one, am disappointed that the Web is as much a visual medium as it's become. I like to think that the Web is best when it's a information, primarily written language, medium. I'm not looking forward to the day when high speed access turns it the Web into just Interactive TV.

In so far as the Web is written language based, simple accomodations, like ALT tags, and command-based systems so that people can navigate without the need for visual cues, are all that's needed. It wouldn't be hard to do and everyone could benefit. If more sites were Lynx accessible, we'd have a Web that was more useful to people with slow connections and simple character based systems, too.

There's a lot of hyperbole about all of this. From the link in this story about the guidelines the Federal Government is adopting, you can find this document that really explains what the Fed is doing. A particularly interesting extract is:

• 9) Are there any exemptions to the technology accessibility standards?

  A Federal agency does not have to comply with the accessibility standards if it would impose an undue burden to do so. This is consistent with language used in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other civil rights legislation, where the term 'undue burden' has been defined as "significant difficulty or expense." However, the agency must explain why meeting the standards would pose an undue burden for a given procurement action, and must still provide people with disabilities access to the information or data that is affected.

Is this too much to ask? That we make some effort to give people with disabilities access to information?

Someday, someday soon perhaps, the Internet will be a necessity. You may need it to apply for Government services or licenses. You might need it to access the future version of Libraries. Do we really want to make decisions now that closes the Internet off to people with disabilities?