>This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.
Do you feel the same way about wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking?
Do you feel the same way about wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking?
I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites. Leaving out the fact that this is almost certainly a bad thing for society (remember how Berkely had to take down their free online classes because some deaf people sued them for not being deaf-friendly enough?), it's also completely indefensible for the government to stick their nose into how people choose to communicate online. "Oh, hey there art website; we're going to have to shut you down because your music and films don't support subtitles and screen readers."
I think we might need more elaboration on why that's the case.
In both situations, you have a company offering services to the public. In one case, legislation says that the services should be accessible to members of the public with certain disabilities. Why should that same legislation not apply because the services are being offered online, rather than in a physical location?
In fact, Winn-Dixie seems particularly incompetent; according to a different article
The software has allowed Gil to use 500 to 600 websites, including Publix,
Walgreens and government sites, but his vocalizing software could not read
information on www.winndixie.com when he tried to order a prescription and
look up store hours. [1]
[1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article155927249.ht...
I'm confused; do you not see the very obvious contradiction here? Perhaps my use of the word "people" is confusing. The proprietors of a store or an art gallery or other business would also qualify as "people".
> Winn-Dixie on the internet is being treated the same as Winn-Dixie's physical locations.
The internet isn't a physical location. There's no good reason we should pretend it is.
Even if you completely buy the idea that physical storefronts should be forced to adopt certain (possibly socially sub-optimal) standards for the sake of some customer base, this reasoning absolutely does not carry over to private digital communication. You can't just say "a website is like a building" and call it a day. That's simply untrue.
That's a much less ridiculous way of framing the argument.
I absolutely think that if you operate a business online there should be some minimum of accessibility you need to achieve, in exactly the same way we force physical locations to install wheelchair ramps.
America has wholesale adopted in law the idea that we require so-called "sub-optimal standards".
If you want to do business in the US, you need to follow certain regulations. This includes accessibility for online stores. A personal blog or forum, for example, wouldn't need this legally.
Clearly? The huge in that sentence is an opinion. Both wheelchair ramps and web site accessibility guidelines add requirements that cost the owner money, but help give the handicapped access.
Adding a wheelchair ramp is a small fraction of the total costs of making a building, just as making a website properly is a small fraction of making a website. So it's somewhat reasonable to require the (relatively small) change to make the thing more accessible.
On the other hand, in the Berkeley online classes situation, making the lectures deaf-friendly (i.e. doing transcripts or subtitles) was much, much more expensive than making the lectures available in the first place, which amounted pretty much to setting up some simple gear to record something that was already happening. In this case, the required costs were totally out of proportion, and meant that the content became less accessible, i.e. was taken down for everyone.
So the regulations must be taken with a grain of salt - it's easy to write (or interpret) a single sentence that makes a requirement totally disproportionate and not comparable to a wheelchair ramp.
I can't see a way to define the limits of such an exemption without getting collateral damage, so maybe, this amount of collateral damage is about the best we can get?
Also, in the Berkeley case, part of the reason Berkeley deemed the costs too high was that Berkeley had a large backlog of such videos. They have been making new content accessible since spring 2015 (that content also is behind their firewall to prevent 'pirating' (http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...: "Pirates is a term used to describe websites that embed YouTube content without the permission of the original copyright holder for profit. UC Berkeley legacy Course Capture content has been discovered on for-profit websites, which use either a subscription fee or on-page advertising"; "UC Berkeley stopped posting course lecture videos publicly through webcast.berkeley.edu in 2015 as a way to reduce costs and increase adoption.")
First of all, Berkeley didn't have to take down their courses. They elected to, then threw a tantrum about it. And yes, they could have spent money making their videos accessible, but let's not forget that they spent money to get those videos made in the first place, and it isn't as if the requirements that this content be accessible are a huge shocker to a public university that should be no stranger to accommodating disabled students. This is why those of us in the accessibility profession tell clients to build in accessibility right from day one, and this continuing trope of "OMG I didn't realize we needed to make our content accessible! Woe, woe are we!" passed through the realm of disingenuous and into that of pure bullshit a long, long time ago.
"There's clearly a huge difference between having a building code and requiring people to design websites in a certain way. It doesn't matter what your opinion of wheelchair ramps is; the two situations aren't comparable." OK, so as a blind person, I'm supposed to do what? Drive my car to the store when a website won't let me access that store's services? Pay more than someone with their own car to take a Lyft or Uber, assuming either exists in my location? Arrive at said store and hope whatever I want is in stock, take extra time to find an employee to help me shop (which isn't always available...) Where is all this time supposed to come from, and who are you to deprioritize it against that of the large corporation building those accommodations? And BTW, my girlfriend is a wheelchair user, and it does feel to me that the situations are often comparable. She routinely takes extra time accessing a building or its facilities, sometimes can't at all, and let's not even discuss inaccessible bathrooms and the literal blood and tears spent trying to use them. So take it from someone who has experienced both, they are very comparable.
And let's not forget the websites that don't have a physical location associated with them. Just last week I saw a few startups advertising their services here, thought I might use them, went to apply/sign up, then found their sites were completely inaccessible. Their huge, obscure crime? Using div elements without ARIA attributes instead of the HTML markup that would have achieved the same thing. So in the past few weeks I've been denied the ability to apply for jobs, purchase products, or even launch interesting side projects that might build my skills or improve my resume, all because web developers can't be bothered, and let's not forget that when I am hired by someone, I either can't use tools like Basecamp and Slack effectively, or they're such pains that it's easier to self-host open source tools llike Rocket.chat and Wekan, both of which I've submitted accessibility patches to. And people wonder why I don't bother looking for work anymore.
"I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites." Then on behalf of disabled folks everywhere, stay the hell away from building websites. I for one am sick and tired of fighting with people like you whose anti-regulation stance happily throws me under the bus, and I haven't even scratched the surface regarding the ways that an inaccessible web has and continues to hinder me.
If I seem furious, well, here's a challenge. Fire up Orca, NVDA or VoiceOver, all free screen readers, and try to use api.ai with your eyes closed. Fail, then imagine you spent the last few hours reading up about how you might build a Google Assistant bot to provide real-time transit information, and that you now need to find an api.ai alternative that is accessible, assuming such a thing exists (wit.ai is also inaccessible, my accessibility issues apparently made the support staff's day to read about, but they're probably not resolved and probably never will be.) Multiply that by, say, 10 for a handful of other projects I named. I could call out more recent startups, but I'd probably start stepping on the toes of some folks reading this, and if you aren't building in accessibility from day one or paying me to advise you on fixing it, then I'd basically be volunteering for a full-time job's worth of work pointing out the ways in which a given complex service isn't accessible.
So you can stop worrying that society will crumble
Captions are for the hearing impaired. There are also requirements for audio description for the vision impaired (additional audio describing important aspects of a video not conveyed through the original audio track). There's very little enforcement of this as it's often challenging to produce and non-synced text is often good enough.