Comment by nateabele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nateabele | Hacker News Reader

I had a manager once who had a prior career in government. One of their many cynical internal catchphrases was "the conveniences which you have requested are now mandatory".

Anyone with common sense and a knowledge of history knows exactly where this is going. As things continue to move online, internet access and associated technology standards begin to be declared a "public necessity" or some other nonsense along similar rhetorical lines.

You don't even need to look very far for examples. UK accessibility laws (not that they're an unqualified evil, simply a legislative 'gateway drug'), references to 'digital haves and have-nots' from a few US election cycles ago, etc.

I'd really hoped to be closer to retirement before this sort of thing started happening.

Edit for clarity: I'm not saying this is immediately going to turn into some draconian thing, but as a founding member of a standards body[0] with a narrowly-defined intent, I've seen how easy it is for something like this to become a de-facto industry standard that non-experts use to judge things against, even when it's not appropriate.

[0] http://www.php-fig.org/

These are nice analogies and all, but can we please stop drawing grand philosophies out of something just because the people doing it happen to be in a government office somewhere?

This isn't a gateway drug. This isn't a battle between liberty and tyranny. These are web standards, they're generally a good thing, and they're generally overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That's it.

Freedom isn't lost overnight.

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

Are you saying that legislation to make sure people with disabilities or low incomes still have access to services when all the alternatives are shut down is a bad thing?

Of course that's not what he's saying.

Can we please apply the Principle Of Charity as the hosts have requested of us here and not resort to these sorts of rhetorical tricks?

I'm not suggesting the GP is saying having accessible services is bad. I'm asking if he believes legislation to ensure services are accessible is bad. As someone who believes web developers are often lazy and don't just do these things because they should I think the laws are important and necessary, else people will be left out from accessing what they need to access. I'd love to hear a counter argument if there is one.

> As someone who believes web developers are often lazy

There is some of that however what I've found there is more of is "We don't want to provide you the resources in manpower/budget/programmer time to make things accessible".

That and the laws are rarely enforced even WCAG is rarely implemented.

I'd love it if there was a clear bar for accessibility that was legally enforced as then I could say to clients "You have to do this to comply with the law" which is a much clearer "sell" than "You should make this accessible to <foo|bar> and it'll cost <fizz|buzz>" since clients largely don't care.

Now someone will argue that I should just make everything accessible anyway but I have to bill for that time/work/testing which means I'll be more expensive than my competitor who doesn't do that and clients are incredibly price-sensitive.

It's a hard thing to balance.

The internal product I'm currently building will be accessible, not just it passes WCAG checker accessible (which is a horribly low bar) but really accessible, I'm even planning to buy a couple of screen reader software (which is way expensive btw) and using it as part of my integration testing.

That's pretty far from the mark, but being made to provide multiple versions of content to accommodate all ranges of accessibility for anything, not just vital or government services, published on the web could be a pretty difficult thing.

Content without captions spurred a lawsuit by the National Association of the Deaf against Netflix a few years ago. What if your personal website hosted some dynamic content where an uncaptioned sound bite appeared, and you ended up being faced with legal action?

What if the scope were broadened so that all websites required content compatibility modes for color blindness or spectrum sensitivity? Would that responsibility be shared by the browser makers as well? Would Google pull ads from businesses whose websites were not in compliance?

And in the Netflix case, the judge found that it would be “irrational to conclude [that] places of public accommodation are limited to actual physical structures.”[1] That's quite an interesting interpretation.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/07/closed...

The foundational law has been around for over 25 years. It doesn't require anything of your personal website anymore than it would require your personal home to have wheelchair ramps.

> What if the scope were broadened so that all websites required content compatibility modes for color blindness or spectrum sensitivity?

The law already requires reasonable measures to provide access to people with disabilities. If a business website's colors prevents a customer from using the site, they could already make it a legal matter. But that doesn't happen often, it's much easier for everyone for a customer to contact the business, explain the problem, and for the business to make a change that corrects the problem (more likely, some number of customers explain and eventually something is done).

But standards and expectations do change over time, what's considered reasonable partially depends on technical possibilities, their general availability, and cost. It's reasonable to expect web sites to work with screen readers because they're readily available on almost all the computers people use; if screen readers didn't exist, it would not be reasonable to expect web sites to provide a purely aural interface for the vision impaired.

> the judge found that it would be “irrational to conclude [that] places of public accommodation are limited to actual physical structures.”[1] That's quite an interesting interpretation.

It's an interpretation that makes sense. The purpose of the law is to ensure people with disabilities have access to goods and services, it matters not whether such access involves concrete, paper, or ones and zeros.

> It doesn't require anything of your personal website anymore than it would require your personal home to have wheelchair ramps.

The only slippery slope that wheelchair users approve of :)

What if your personal website hosted some dynamic content where an uncaptioned sound bite appeared, and you ended up being faced with legal action?

Then I'd have to take the content off my website or use a service that automatically captioned it. To suggest anything else is to say that my website is more important than the accessibility of the internet to disabled users, which is nearly nonsense. A personal website is utterly trivial in comparison.

Businesses will very often do the minimum possible work to make money, which leaves anyone who can't access content due to their disability having to pay more than people without disabilities or it leaves them completely shut out of the service just because the business doesn't want to pay to make their service accessible. That's clearly and obviously not fair, and not something I want to happen in the society I live in, if only because I realise that I might have an accident one day that leaves me disabled and be in the position that disabled people are in now.

> a de-facto industry standard that non-experts use to judge things against

What purpose does a standards body have if not to set industry standards? Even if it's a government standard, would it not better than 99% of specifications a one-off contract would include? I mean – if it becomes outdated, the contractors can always make their case, and they'll probably have Google etc. not following the standard either to point at.

Also: slippery slope fallacy.

That's because the UK government wants to replace as many manual process by the web and make a load of people redundant

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