You are correct that it is to an employers economic advantage to purchase ergonomic equipment to further their employee's well being, (ergo workstations being cheaper than workmen's comp) but since many employers are stupid and short-sighted, I welcome the government forcing their lazy butts to provide me with a safe workplace.
Hats off to your company for being proactive and making the employees productive and happy. It is more than likely your company will not have to worry about the new regulations. OSHA only performs an inspection if someone reports a violation of the rules. If your workers are happy and RSI-free, you have nothing to worry about.
In economically depressed areas or industries, (like textile manufacturing) the market- forces "quit your job" approach doesn't work at all. If I have a choice between possibly (say, 20% chance) of crippling myself for life at my job or not being able to feed my family, most people would take the job, dangerous though it might be, every time. I would much rather have the government force companies to provide for my well-being before I am injured, rather than forcing them to pay workmen's comp after the fact.
I don't understand what all this whining is about costs. If market forces would indeed eventually force companies to spend money on improved working conditions to reduce workmen's comp, then OSHA is merely hurrying up the process a bit. What is wrong with that?
One only has to work at the downright evil working conditions during the height of the industrial revolution to see where market forces failed us. The rates of injury and death in factories and mines were astronomical. Workers then were more than free to sue, but obviously that didn't work too well.
I don't understand how you could be philosophically opposed to the very idea of OSHA. OSHA as an agency also does a LOT more than just specify handrail spacing, stair height, and a bunch of other admittedly nit-picky regulations. They are the force behind the "Right to Know" rules, which require employers that use toxic substances to provide employees with information about those substances. If you were injured by said chemicals, and did not know otherwise that the chemicals were harmful, how would you possibly know that your injuries were caused by them? (Especially if the chemicals were just mystery bottles of "stuff" making ID impossible.) OSHA also mandates lockout tags, forcing heavy machinery to be disabled while it is being worked on.
About your comment saying that OSHA was only for places where people are at risk of significant bodily harm: While not life-threatening, RSI can be (and often is) a permanently disabling injury that can completely disable your wrists and hands. Disablilty payments are small compensation for being unable to hold a toothbrush for the rest of your life.
The reason for this is the legal principle that employers should not have a workplace that causes injury to the employees if the injuries can be easily prevented. Since the damage is already done by the time symptoms appear with many cases of CTS, regulations to prevent these injuries from happening in the workplace make a lot of sense. For many typists not in the IT industry (like secretaries), the "take this job and shove it" approach can be a disaster if the job market in your area is not exactly thriving. I don't think it is too much to ask for employers to purchase ergonomic workstations and I/O equipment.
As an analog to this situation think about a coal miner in Nowhere, WV, where the job market is in the toilet. If the only jobs avail. are in coal mines, do you think it is right for a mining company to negelect basic safety measures simply because the employees are free to quit if they think they have an unacceptable likelihood of dying? Yes, you won't die from typing too much, but you can suffer crippling injuries that are not too expensive to prevent.
I would think that a major attraction of this gadget would be that you could use it on the car, subway, etc. (Okay, maybe not NYC's Lexington Ave. line during rush hour, but you get the point.) However, if you have to put it in your lap (i.e. no tray tables), unless it has some sort of locking mechanism, it is going to fold itself up. Makes typing kind of tough.
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.
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.
If you are reading Slasdot, you probably aren't considering running for public office, but you can do your part to make the world a better place.
The following ditty is a document that can be found in the back of almost any textbook on Engineering Ethics. You can tell from it's language that it was written a while ago, but its' message still is relevant.
"Faith of the Engineer" by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
I AM AN ENGINEER. In my profession I take deep pride, but without vain-glory; to it I owe solemn obligations that I am eager to fulfill.
As an Engineer, I will participate in none but honest enterprise. To him that has engaged my services, as employer or client, I will give the utmost of performance and fidelity.
When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public good. From special capacity springs the obligation to use it well in the service of humanity; and I accept the challenge that this implies.
Jealous of the high repute of my calling, I will strive to protect the interests and the good name of any engineer that I know to be deserving; but I will not shrink, should duty dictate, from disclosing the truth regarding anyone that, by unscrupulous acts, has shown himself unworthy of the profession.
Since the Age of Stone, human progress has been conditioned by the genius of my professional forbears. By them have been rendered usable to mankind Nature's vast resources of material and energy. By them have been vitalized and turned to practical account the principles of science and the revelations of technology. Except for this heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be feeble. I dedicate myself to the dissemination of engineering knowledge, and, especially to the instruction of younger members of my profession, in all its arts and traditions.
To my fellows I pledge, in the same full measure I ask them, integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and devotion to the standards and the dignity of our profession; with the consciousness, always, that our special expertness carries with it the obligation to serve humanity with complete sincerity.
While I compliment the author on his deep insight, I think he is reading a bit too much into very short interview. Bill G said the same things that you could get from the MS PR dept. He may not even believe half the things he says, (just like any polititcian), but he sticks to the party line. What is the harm in claiming the MS made the internet into what it is today? Sure, nobody with a clue believes it; but the interview isn't targeted to people that would know that, and you can be sure that the BBC isn't going to air something later that points out how stupid his answers were. The interview was a bunch of practiced answers to questions he has been asked before, nothing more.
It has long been the policy of the State of California to not enforce gambling debts. Even if this woman had traveled to Vegas, and blown her credit card while in Nevada, her bank would be prevented from attempting to collect while she was a resident of California.
The precedent for this is Hamilton v. Abadijian which states "The owner of a gambling house who honors a check for the purpose of providing a prospective customer with funds with which to gamble and who then participates in the transaction thus promoted cannot recover on the check." While this doesn't mention credit cards, it is naturally extensible to them. If you went to a Vegas casino, you can be damned sure they won't take a credit card or a check if you are from Calif.
The grounds for such a ruling is that it is against the laws of California to allow gambling, and therefore debt incurred while gambling is uncollectable within California. The contract to pay said debt enables an anction which is illegal, and contracts to carry out an illegal action are unenforcable. It should be noted that it would also be perfectly legal for the online gambling house to refuse to send any winnings to California since the contract is unenforcable, no matter who owes what to whom.
The judge had no choice but to make this decision, as the law is fairly simple and straightforward. While not every state has laws against gambling (or they might have special laws stating that out-of-state gambling debts are legal), there is not a state in the US that will enforce contracts for conduct that is illegal within its borders.
The moral of the story: The online casino should have done its homework, and looked up this woman's address first.
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You are correct that it is to an employers economic advantage to purchase ergonomic equipment to further their employee's well being, (ergo workstations being cheaper than workmen's comp) but since many employers are stupid and short-sighted, I welcome the government forcing their lazy butts to provide me with a safe workplace.
Hats off to your company for being proactive and making the employees productive and happy. It is more than likely your company will not have to worry about the new regulations. OSHA only performs an inspection if someone reports a violation of the rules. If your workers are happy and RSI-free, you have nothing to worry about.
In economically depressed areas or industries, (like textile manufacturing) the market- forces "quit your job" approach doesn't work at all. If I have a choice between possibly (say, 20% chance) of crippling myself for life at my job or not being able to feed my family, most people would take the job, dangerous though it might be, every time. I would much rather have the government force companies to provide for my well-being before I am injured, rather than forcing them to pay workmen's comp after the fact.
I don't understand what all this whining is about costs. If market forces would indeed eventually force companies to spend money on improved working conditions to reduce workmen's comp, then OSHA is merely hurrying up the process a bit. What is wrong with that?
One only has to work at the downright evil working conditions during the height of the industrial revolution to see where market forces failed us. The rates of injury and death in factories and mines were astronomical. Workers then were more than free to sue, but obviously that didn't work too well.
I don't understand how you could be philosophically opposed to the very idea of OSHA. OSHA as an agency also does a LOT more than just specify handrail spacing, stair height, and a bunch of other admittedly nit-picky regulations. They are the force behind the "Right to Know" rules, which require employers that use toxic substances to provide employees with information about those substances. If you were injured by said chemicals, and did not know otherwise that the chemicals were harmful, how would you possibly know that your injuries were caused by them? (Especially if the chemicals were just mystery bottles of "stuff" making ID impossible.) OSHA also mandates lockout tags, forcing heavy machinery to be disabled while it is being worked on.
About your comment saying that OSHA was only for places where people are at risk of significant bodily harm: While not life-threatening, RSI can be (and often is) a permanently disabling injury that can completely disable your wrists and hands. Disablilty payments are small compensation for being unable to hold a toothbrush for the rest of your life.
The reason for this is the legal principle that employers should not have a workplace that causes injury to the employees if the injuries can be easily prevented. Since the damage is already done by the time symptoms appear with many cases of CTS, regulations to prevent these injuries from happening in the workplace make a lot of sense. For many typists not in the IT industry (like secretaries), the "take this job and shove it" approach can be a disaster if the job market in your area is not exactly thriving. I don't think it is too much to ask for employers to purchase ergonomic workstations and I/O equipment.
As an analog to this situation think about a coal miner in Nowhere, WV, where the job market is in the toilet. If the only jobs avail. are in coal mines, do you think it is right for a mining company to negelect basic safety measures simply because the employees are free to quit if they think they have an unacceptable likelihood of dying? Yes, you won't die from typing too much, but you can suffer crippling injuries that are not too expensive to prevent.
I would think that a major attraction of this gadget would be that you could use it on the car, subway, etc. (Okay, maybe not NYC's Lexington Ave. line during rush hour, but you get the point.) However, if you have to put it in your lap (i.e. no tray tables), unless it has some sort of locking mechanism, it is going to fold itself up. Makes typing kind of tough.
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.
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.
If you are reading Slasdot, you probably aren't considering running for public office, but you can do your part to make the world a better place.
The following ditty is a document that can be found in the back of almost any textbook on Engineering Ethics. You can tell from it's language that it was written a while ago, but its' message still is relevant.
"Faith of the Engineer"
by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
I AM AN ENGINEER. In my profession I take deep pride, but without vain-glory; to it I owe solemn obligations that I am eager to fulfill.
As an Engineer, I will participate in none but honest enterprise. To him that has engaged my services, as employer or client, I will give the utmost of performance and fidelity.
When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public good. From special capacity springs the obligation to use it well in the service of humanity; and I accept the challenge that this implies.
Jealous of the high repute of my calling, I will strive to protect the interests and the good name of any engineer that I know to be deserving; but I will not shrink, should duty dictate, from disclosing the truth regarding anyone that, by unscrupulous acts, has shown himself unworthy of the profession.
Since the Age of Stone, human progress has been conditioned by the genius of my professional forbears. By them have been rendered usable to mankind Nature's vast resources of material and energy. By them have been vitalized and turned to practical account the principles of science and the revelations of technology. Except for this heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be feeble. I dedicate myself to the dissemination of engineering knowledge, and, especially to the instruction of younger members of my profession, in all its arts and traditions.
To my fellows I pledge, in the same full measure I ask them, integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and devotion to the standards and the
dignity of our profession; with the consciousness, always, that our special expertness carries with it the obligation to serve humanity with complete sincerity.
While I compliment the author on his deep insight, I think he is reading a bit too much into very short interview. Bill G said the same things that you could get from the MS PR dept. He may not even believe half the things he says, (just like any polititcian), but he sticks to the party line. What is the harm in claiming the MS made the internet into what it is today? Sure, nobody with a clue believes it; but the interview isn't targeted to people that would know that, and you can be sure that the BBC isn't going to air something later that points out how stupid his answers were. The interview was a bunch of practiced answers to questions he has been asked before, nothing more.
It has long been the policy of the State of California to not enforce gambling debts. Even if this woman had traveled to Vegas, and blown her credit card while in Nevada, her bank would be prevented from attempting to collect while she was a resident of California.
The precedent for this is Hamilton v. Abadijian which states "The owner of a gambling house who honors a check for the purpose of providing a prospective customer with funds with which to gamble and who then participates in the transaction thus promoted cannot recover on the check." While this doesn't mention credit cards, it is naturally extensible to them. If you went to a Vegas casino, you can be damned sure they won't take a credit card or a check if you are from Calif.
The grounds for such a ruling is that it is against the laws of California to allow gambling, and therefore debt incurred while gambling is uncollectable within California. The contract to pay said debt enables an anction which is illegal, and contracts to carry out an illegal action are unenforcable. It should be noted that it would also be perfectly legal for the online gambling house to refuse to send any winnings to California since the contract is unenforcable, no matter who owes what to whom.
The judge had no choice but to make this decision, as the law is fairly simple and straightforward. While not every state has laws against gambling (or they might have special laws stating that out-of-state gambling debts are legal), there is not a state in the US that will enforce contracts for conduct that is illegal within its borders.
The moral of the story: The online casino should have done its homework, and looked up this woman's address first.