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Comment by throwaway_bad | Hacker News Reader

Rather than crippling the rest of the world for the blind, why not improve the tools for them instead?

Screen readers that are limited to structured inputs can't be the end-all final solution right? It would be shortsighted to set this tech in stone with legal precedents. Do we seriously want to require every blind person to be fluent in reading html/React as the default way to consume sites?

We should be trying to improve the tech so they can consume the world just like sighted people. There are already apps that can use computer vision to caption and describe images. It can even connect you with real people if the AI sucks.

I think pouring investments into those technologies might be cheaper relative to the amount of work added to the industry as a whole.

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React/Vue/etc are all accessible. Almost all web technology that exists is accessible. The trouble is you can’t just do what you want, and you have to test it to ensure it’s accessible. Most companies put it to the bottom of the list or forget about it. It really isn’t that hard, no new tools are required, everything is already there: you just have to do it.

You are thinking of the most trivial of apps. For example I have worked on a web-based image editor that is practically impossible to make accessible to the blind. Not with current screen reader technology.

Another example is Reddit, where a good chunk of their content is just text memes overlaid on images. For compliance, would you force people to describe their images with an alt text before submission?

The better solution would be to do what Facebook does and have builtin tools that will annotate a OCR/description with ML or crowdsourcing. In an ideal world these tools would be available to everyone with no extra work.

Don't settle for making the blind wade through a pile of HTML and call that accessible. It would be a travesty if it became law to use alt tags, because that is so far from the best we can do. Don't lock the world into dead technologies.

The law requires only "readily achievable"changes. So something that is practically impossible isn’t required.

Sure, the companies involved can improve the tools. A bunch of them joined the lawsuit via briefs. If they can cooperate to fight it, they can cooperate to mitigate it by making better tools.

>The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business groups that said they represented 500,000 restaurants and 300,000 businesses joined in an appeal urging the high court to review the 9th Circuit’s decision.

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