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Comment by pakitan | Hacker News Reader

Would a blind person be interested in a painting or car insurance? Another reason I'm sure about it is if there was genuine interest, there would be calls from blind people - "Hey, I'm interested in your products but I'm blind, can you help me with figuring out some things on your site?" or "Hey I'm blind and I have problem accessing certain features on your site, can you please fix those issues?". We haven't got one single call like that. Ever. The people who sued us were never customers, neither before nor after the adjustments we made to the site. The fact they went straight to threats and offers of settlement clearly indicates that it's a racket, not someone genuinely interested in the products offered.

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I'm really curious why you think a blind person wouldn't be "interested" in car insurance. They may not be able to drive themselves, but that doesn't mean they can't be the person paying the bills in a family that owns cars and thus has to have car insurance.

As for paintings... there was really zero information on the site other than pictures of paintings? Nothing about the artist, the size, or the price? You apparently don't realize that a lot of people who rely on screen readers are able to see to some extent. They may use the screen reader to navigate your site or make purchases, but they may still be able to see the paintings (sometimes by magnifying the screen greatly and looking closely at the details) if not in exactly the same way that you do.

I don't disbelieve that shakedowns like you describe happen. But there is a reason for the rules that you are apparently breaking. It also sounds like you don't really believe that disabled folks deserve any consideration.

You say you don't hear from them, asking questions or complaining, probably because the vast majority just give up when they encounter websites like the ones you create. They are likely very tired of contacting website owners (assuming they can figure out how to do so--not easy if the site isn't accessible!) who send back insults about how they can't possibly be interested in the contents of the site or accusing them of trying to shake the website owner down.

The sort of thinking you are putting on display here is exactly why the ADA is so important.

> It also sounds like you don't really believe that disabled folks deserve any consideration.

No, that's not at all what I believe so let me clarify what my objections are. First, by its very nature "accessibility" is open to interpretation and allowing people to sue companies for non-accessible sites gives way to frivolous lawsuits. As far as I remember, there isn't even an attempt to define "accessibility" in US law. Currently it's something like "Go look at WCAG and see what you can do". This is further exacerbated by the way these lawsuits work - it makes sense to settle even if you think everything is OK with your site. The plaintiff doesn't pay anything, his lawyers work on contingency so even if you "win", you'd spend a fortune on defense and you're not allowed to recoup those expenses from the plaintiff.

Second, these are private businesses we're talking about. They should be allowed to weigh in the ROI of investing in accessibility vs the potential income from disabled customers. I'm a reasonable guy and I was happy to fix some legit issues that the lawyers pointed out. They were relatively easy to fix and I would have done it even without any threats. Not in the least because they could have affected sighted customers as well. Other issues are completely out of whack and could take man-years to sort out fully. I don't have that kind of time. So, let me reverse the question. Do you believe everyone with disability must be able to use any service, no matter the expense to the business? Do you draw the line somewhere? What about people with nut allergies? Should we force restaurants to offer guaranteed nut-free food along with their other products? Why should a blind person be able to enjoy a pizza from Domino's but a person with nut allergy shouldn't?

> I don't disbelieve that shakedowns like you describe happen.

You seem to think that the shakedowns are the minority and most cases are legit. It's the other way around if you do a quick "ADA lawsuits" search. Here is good article about the practice: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...

I have met a restaurant owner who had exactly the same issue. A lawyer came into his restaurant alongside someone in a wheelchair. They noticed paper rolls were not at a correct height, threatened to sue, and let them settle for less. For the restaurant owner, it didn't seem that they genuinely cared about the accessibility problem, but rather making money off using ADA.

Could the restaurant owner have been biased against the person who is compelling them to take action that they don't want to take? I would probably take the owner's psychoanalysis of them with a grain of salt.

According the restaurant owner the lawyer was suing hundreds of small restaurants in the Bay Area. Also they didn't seem to care about the restaurant at all, and were only interested in finding out all violations.

There was a bipartisan bill that passed the House 2 years ago (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620/...) that aimed at closing drive-by ADA shakedowns. The bill required claimants to give 120 days to business to fix issue. It seems the bill hasn't been signed by the Senate (not sure why, if anyone knows more let me know). This is a good bill, hopefully it will pass.

edit: Found why it didn't pass the Senate. Democrats in Senate promised to filibuster any attempt to bring the bill to the floor. https://rewire.news/article/2018/04/03/sen-tammy-duckworth-s....

That sounds like a great bill. Anything that lets people hold businesses accountable re:accessibility without opening gaping loopholes for legal shenanigans like that seems like the right balance here.

Sounds like it wouldn't have helped at all. From the article: "Proponents of HR 620 say that changes to the ADA are needed to prevent so-called drive-by lawsuits, where attorneys and people with disabilities use the ADA for their own monetary gain by filing frivolous claims. Yet, as the Democrats noted in their letter, HR 620 will do nothing to stop such cases because 'these private actions seeking damages are filed pursuant to specific State laws that unlike title III of the ADA, authorize monetary damages. HR 620 would make no change to those state laws and therefore fails to address lawsuits seeking damages.'"

I suspect the main reason for the bill was the "substantial progress" wording, which would let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Their first argument is that because state laws exist, there should not be a federal reform. I thought federal laws were there to set a default law for states. If they don't agree with the abuse they should work and reforming the federal law first.

Their second argument is that it 'let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant'. I don't understand. A 120-day heads-up isn't a way to get away with penalties.

And what is missing (and maybe they did say it but it is not mentioned in the article) is what they suggest as an alternative. Surely if you vow to block a reform but agree on the problem they should come up with solutions. There should be a way to both make more businesses compliant and prevent ADA shakedowns.

I am discovering how hard it is to make our laws evolve :)

>Other issues are completely out of whack and could take man-years to sort out fully.

What were these?

>Would a blind person be interested in a painting or car insurance?

Sure, why not?

But I'm confused here. Does your website somehow feature both paintings and car insurance?

No, these were obviously examples. Our site sells expensive products that require a certain level of "visual appreciation", just like paintings. No one would buy something like that, without being able to see it.

I mean, you're not making a very good case for yourself here. You won't say what your product is, and the examples you give are things that blind people would in fact be interested in.

You're really intent to get me on a technicality. Fine, I'll concede - somewhere out there, there is a blind person whose pride in life is finding the best auto insurance deals for his relatives. And somewhere out there, there is a blind person who buys random paintings online and hangs them on his walls just so he can have fun conversations about them over dinner with friends.

But by and large, blind people don't buy auto insurance because they don't drive and they don't buy paintings because they can't see them. Forcing these businesses to invest excessive efforts to serve 0.0001% of their potential target audience is idiotic.

And no, I'm not going to say what we sell because it's not important and this was clearly an extortion case.

> I'm not going to say what we sell because it's not important

It seems to me that what you sell is the central issue here, as you're claiming that blind people wouldn't be interested in it. I'm not really willing to take your word for it, given the other examples you've used.

In the case of car insurance, it's obvious that people don't only buy insurance for cars that they drive. Consider e.g. an employee of a company looking to buy insurance for company cars.

There are also lots of blind artists and blind people interested in visual arts, as you can discover from a simple google search.

It's worth remembering also that many "blind" people are partially sighted, so that they may be unable to read text but still appreciate visual arts in a direct perceptual way. On top of that, there are people who have lost their sight, and who may still have a keen interest in the visual arts formed when they were still able to see.

You're ignoring most of what OP is saying, he's completely right in saying he should have no obligation to dedicate huge resources to a potential 0.00001% of his customers which may or may not even exist, when the only benefit will be not getting hit by frivolous lawsuits.

> "he's completely right in saying he should have no obligation"

Is he right because you agree with him? I don't think he's right. The law also doesn't think he's right.

There's also quite a few assumptions that you seem to have made in not very good faith, because how could you know how much effort it would take to fix accessibility for a website that you don't even know what sells? You've also assumed some exaggerated fraction of a percent, and assumed that a lawsuit that you don't know anything about was frivolous.

Based on what information did you assume all those things?

OK, here is a case that we do know something about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-uc-berkel...

Is that frivolous enough for you? That's the same law you're defending here and when that article came out, it was universally decried here on HN. Funny how things change, huh? But I guess it's not ok for someone to sue UC-Berkley for providing free non-accessible lectures, while it's totally ok for a private business to be sued for having a non-accessible website.

You are moving goalposts here, are we now debating whether any ADA-related lawsuit ever has been frivolous?

I also have a hard time answering for an anonymous group of people, as I am not HN.

You seem very eager to assign very clear and simple intentions to large and complex groups of human beings. Blind people don't like this kind of stuff, these lawsuits are frivolous, HN had this collective opinion on X but has now changed its mind.

For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law. Do you have a labeled box for me?

No goalposts were moved by me. In this thread, the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns and the UC-Berkely case is just one more datapoint. I provided an article with detailed analysis of the practice as well.

At the same time, all you've been doing is disingenuous interpretations of my posts and dismissing other reports as "biased", while not providing a single datapoint yourself. "GASP! How dare you say blind people are not interested in paintings! The horror and the arrogance!" Sure, there are blind people buying paintings and interested in art. How does that invalidate anything of what I said? The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people. People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?

> For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law.

Are you fine with a frivolous suit against UC-Berkeley too? Because it is possible that lawsuit is frivolous and UC-Berkeley is breaking the law. In fact that's exactly what's happened - UC-Berkeley is in technical violation of a botched law, they got threatened with a frivolous lawsuit and decided to just remove the free content. As a result everyone loses but I hope the ADA defenders are happy.

> "the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns"

Can you source this claim? You didn't provide any data point for that. You've claimed a lot of things that you just know and seem to take offense to that being challenged.

In fact, UC Berkeley case is the only data point I've seen from you here; which feels sparse given the blanket statements you've made about the intentions of various groups of people. You won't even say what product you are selling that you know for a fact that blind people are not interested in at all.

Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?

> "The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people."

That depends on how much value you place on following the law.

> "People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?"

Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.

> In fact, UC Berkeley case is the only data point I've seen from you here; which feels sparse given the blanket statements you've made about the intentions of various groups of people.

You've been too busy twisting my arguments and you might have missed the link I posted earlier: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...

> Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?

Are you now trolling me? I can't believe I need to explain this but I'll make one last attempt:

UCB posts free video lectures online. UCB is technically violating ADA by not having captions. Someone says "You're breaking the law, your free content must be available to everyone with disabilities or I'll sue you". UCB complies with the law the easiest way possible by shutting down the free lectures. You say you value the ADA law so you should be happy - UCB is in compliance now. Everyone else lost, including actual people with disabilities who might have had partial access to the videos one way or another. I'll leave it to you to decide how desirable this outcome was, nitpicking "frivolous" definition notwithstanding.

> Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.

My argument is perfectly valid. I was talking about ADA until you implied that I'm bigoted and trying to tell blind people what they should be interested in. That has nothing to do with ADA. If want to go in that direction, go all the way and tell me that I'm racist because I'm not ensuring my site is accessible in Africa.

I'm not ignoring it. I simply don't believe that he/she is selling a product which would be unusually uninteresting to blind people. People with visual disabilities are a few percent of the population.

Who has got more information here, you, who has no idea what the OP is selling, or OP who is actually selling the thing?

"I simply don't believe" is not a great argument, when the previous car insurance and painting analogies proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.

> previous car insurance and painting anecdotes proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.

These aren’t hypothetical! Blind people really are interested in both these things, as you can easily find out by googling — or just using your common sense.

Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA. People often have wildly inaccurate perceptions about what people with visual disabilities can or can’t do and about what they may or may not be interested in. If “I don’t think blind people would be into this” were a valid excuse, then virtually nothing would be accessible in practice.

As the OP has already demonstrated that they have mistaken ideas about blind people, I’m not willing to take their word for it that they have some kind of special product which couldn’t possibly be of interest to the visually impaired. They are free to reveal what they actually sell, if they think they have a slam dunk case.

My problem is that everyone in these threads acts like this all takes zero effort. There's no "turn on a11y" switch, you have to dedicate resources, money and time.

It's a perfectly valid complaint from someone that sells a product which is generally not interesting to blind people (you seem to think this is an impossibility, or that one edge case outlier invalidates this reality), to not want to do this if it will bring no new business and make no-one's life easier.

Not having security vulns in your software costs money. A large number of users aren't actually harmed by vulns or don't care about them.

But if you went around saying that really it isn't important to fix vulns since they don't affect that many people you'd be rightly raked over the coals.

"It is expensive" isn't an excuse.

Selling stuff requires complying with lots of laws that take time, money and effort to comply with.

I don't know why you keep referring to "edge cases" and "outliers". The two actual examples that the OP has given do not meet this description.

Sure, you can find blind people with intense interest in visual media. There have to be a few out there. However, a quick google (as you requested) on the art topic seems to indicate that art targeted at the blind is rarely of the painting variety, but of a more tactile sort. This... would not be appreciated in many museums, where touching the exhibits is typically discouraged (Admittedly, audio enjoyment of visual art does exist).

I'm really sick of the argument by outlier where a generally true statement is countered by an outlier case as though that invalidates the whole statement.

I think you are forgetting the existence of partially sighted people. Most people who use screen readers can see. There wouldn't be anything odd or unexpected about such people being interested in paintings or other visual art forms. On top of that, many people who are fully blind were not blind from birth, and so are about as likely to be interested in visual arts as anyone else.

I considered them, but blind enough to appreciate visual art but too blind to use a webpage seems like a rather narrow group to me. It's one of those things where I would very much need evidence accept.

>I considered them,

By which you mean, you decided without actually asking any of them or doing any investigation that a certain group of people don’t appreciate visual art.

The vast majority of people using screen readers have some degree of vision. I would not assume that they have no appreciation of visual art.

The ADA is needed because people have so many assumptions about people with disabilities that they don’t bother to verify.

And I ask of you. How many are there. How large is this population. If you support regulation, give numbers to back it up. The absence of regulation is the default state, and to introduce some should require not a feel good statement, but a concrete estimate of how much impact it will have vs the potential cost.

You don't need to convince me that it would make some people's life better. That could be said of any expense made on somebody's behalf. You have to show that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense.

It's not the government's job to figure out what blind and partially sighted people are and aren't interested in buying. Would you really support regulation that attempted to distinguish between "products blind people are interested in" and "products blind people aren't interested in"? That seems entirely unworkable.

If you wish to continue making unwarranted assumptions about what blind people are interested in buying, that's your call. But the law doesn't (and shouldn't) back you up.

> You have to show that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense.

Why? No one is saying that it's always a sound business idea to accommodate people with disabilities. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But not everything is about the business owner's bottom line.

> Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA.

Firmly agree. It's amazing to see how many cling to the view that people with disabilities are this alien group of "others" that think differently and are probably only interested in things for disabled people.

It's not only the information about the thing OP is selling, it's also the information about blind people OP seems to be lacking.

Like, how can anyone state that "blind people aren't interested in this" seriously? Like there exists a bullet list of things that blind people like.

Your language here is really insulting. Take a step back and consider maybe you don't know everything there is to know about how visually impaired individuals live their lives. They aren't all (or even mostly) fully blind! They have families which usually include fully sighted individuals! Meanwhile they are also capable human beings who have all the same needs and concerns about day-to-day life as anyone else.

Are you surprised? He's got a product which he believes has no value to blind people and a record of exactly zero people calling to complain, but he's getting shit on by the a11y brigade anyway.

I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base.

It's very easy to tell others to do something a certain way with a condescending tone from behind your screen if you've got no stakes and don't have to do any of the work involved.

> I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base.

Fortunately, in America we don't believe discrimination is acceptable, and we've codified that principle in the law.

Ha. The ADA has been put into law, yes. The result was reduced employment opportunities for disabled people. Because the cost of conforming to the law is prohibitive.

Apparently, in America, its more important to appear to be virtuous than to actually do good.

The law of unintended consequences.

Can you source your claim? I am genuinely interested in reading it.

As with most research, take multiple sources. A quick survey showed this (admittedly rather old paper), but it does show the immediate effect:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/146368.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_...

>On average over the post-ADA period, employment of men with disabilities was 7.2 percentage points lower than before the act was passed. In addition, wages of disabled men did not change with the passage of the ADA.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/J...

This one is long, and they do mention some positive impact on education later. Didn't read that far though.

>while relative disabled employment declined significantly just after the ADA’s enactment in states in which these provisions were a substantial innovation relative to the pre-ADA state-level employment discrimination regime, relative disabled employment was stable in states with ADA-like employment discrimination regimes in place prior to the ADA’s enactment

Non-exhaustive search, but the data seems to indicate that ADA reduced employment for the disabled shortly after inception. I'm not certain on the longer term effects (those are also much more annoying to model here).

The negative effects on employment were a blip:

https://www.nber.org/digest/nov04/w10528.html

It's great to think that the ADA damage was short-lived. But rather than a 'blip', it lasted 'through the 1990s' by that reference (thanks!) which cut out the prime earning years of a whole generation of disabled people.

Again, Law of Unintended Consequences.

Of course we do, we allow and encourage discrimination on a number of fronts. The most obvious is discrimination based on socioeconomic status; we have a whole host of "luxury" products that are kept inaccessible to lower income people so they can serve as a status symbol. Education is another lateral that is generally viewed as acceptable for discrimination (i.e. jobs that require a particular degree). Financial, employment and criminal histories are all also acceptable to discriminate based on.

It's perfectly acceptable to not allow someone to rent an apartment because they have a criminal history, or a poor financial or employment history. It's also acceptable for American Express to not issue black cards to people who don't make a million dollars a year.

We have codified some traits that we do not allow discrimination based on, but generally speaking, discrimination is acceptable. Unless you change the general definition of "discrimination" to the legal one, which would seem to make the argument circular (i.e. we have banned discrimination where discrimination is the things we have banned).

> I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base.

You might believe it, but the law apparently says otherwise. It’s ok to disagree with laws while still complying with them, and if you’re so passionate about it... it’s ok to work to change them.

I might believe that my healthcare business shouldn’t have to comply with HIPPA but if I don’t comply I should expect to be sued.

I might believe my online store shouldn’t need to be PCI compliant and that it’s unfair, but if I don’t imply I should expect to pay for it.

Through (imperfect) representative democracy, the public has decided that being sloppy with health information, improperly protecting credit card information, and providing access to your business to disabled people are important enough to enforce via the law. It doesn’t really matter what the business owner’s beliefs are at that point.

Anyone who really thinks it’s so important to deny blind people equal access to their web site is free to run for Congress or find a politician who agrees with them to vote for.

It is entirely possible a blind person would buy a painting or a piece of artistic jewelry as a gift for a friend or family member; they may even buy one, sight unseen, to decorate their apartment or body for the enjoyment of their sighted friends.

> It's very easy to tell others to do something a certain way with a condescending tone from behind your screen if you've got no stakes and don't have to do any of the work involved.

Isn't this exactly what you're doing here, condescendingly name-calling people and dismissing their opinions?

You seem to be under the impression that all blindness is exactly the same. There are people who have serious difficulties reading at normal screen distances, but still have enough sight to appreciate a painting.

Yes, and that impression is correct because "blind" means someone who can't see. At all. The people you mention are usually referred to as "visually impaired" or "legally blind".

This thread is about people who need visual accommodations to use websites, not completely blind people exclusively. You're the one who's been talking like they're the same thing.

I believe the idea is that you (or I, or the government) doesn't get to decide which topics should or should not be interesting for different groups.

As but one example: there are blind people skiing now, with echolocation and other methods. I bet ski lift operators would have argued that they have nothing to offer to blind people, making that particular expansion of freedom more difficult.

Yeah, I can imagine how many things would be different if businesses had been able to decide what blind people like.

"It's a website, which you look at, so clearly blind people aren't interested."

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