Supreme Court Rejects Domino’s on Blind Man’s Website Lawsuit

It's time some big companies donated tech and resources to screen reader software.

Today's software is terrible, and there are certainly massive improvements that could be made.

For one thing, a screen reader should actually read the screen like a sighted person would. It shouldn't say text outside the viewport, hidden text, or 0 sized text. It should read text in images (central to memes, adverts, photos of roadsigns, maps). It should understand common layouts, styles, and able to summarize verbose text.

A bit of machine learning could easily make a screen reader say "You are on BBC.com, the news headlines are X, Y, and Z, and each has more detail. There is a navigation menu at the top with links to Sport, Weather, and Local News."

My first thought was how such a large chunk of your web development resources now need to satisfy such a small population of pizza eaters. But I quickly realised, beyond the morals and ethics, this is just practically a good idea.

An interface that works for a blind person could be the same interface fundamentals that allow me to order a pizza while driving.

That also got me wondering: what if the Domino's site just led blind people to finding the right phone number to call? (I thought about this because naturally, if I was driving, I'd just say, "Hey Stupid Phone, call Domino's Pizza")

If Apple's VoiceOver can't read your website, then yeah, you have some work to do. Because it isn't just visually disabled people who suffer (though they suffer dis-proportionally), it's the rest of us, too, who might benefit from some automation. An Apple Shortcut on my phone to just slam a $MY_USUAL in the queue with a button press or Siri command, for example. And if JAWS can't read it, VoiceOver can't handle it, then I'll bet Selenium doesn't have much of an easier time with it, so how much did you really test this, and how much ongoing testing is there?

I could go on but at the end of the day, JFC, Domino's would rather let this go to court than add some alt-text? (Which all it would have taken to shut this guy up and made him go away.) I hope they lose just on the principle of their stubbornness.

This is actually a plus. While it might be expensive to make a site accessible now given the fact that it must be done due to the legal action the costs will fall since there will be a push to get it done at the lowest cost possible. The more it is done the cheaper it will get.

JAWS is horrid. There needs to be better open alternatives sponsored by Congress.