Hacker News Reader

Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

The headline is bursting at the seams with the promise of low effort jokes. Let us throw those tiny fish back into the pond.

A human being should be entitled to accessibility, especially by this point in time where much of it can be machine generated.

View on HN

But entitled to damages? We are opening the doors to some very shady law firms to shake down tech companies based on laws that were written before the internet.

Accessibility is not an entitlement, it's a right.

What types of sites can be shut down for not having braille and subtitle support? Can I lose my hobby/blog domains?

I believe that's an open question currently and badly needs legal clarification.

One standard proposed at HN from time to time is that maybe websites with high revenue should be required to conform with a specific standard such as W3C's WCAG 2.1 AA.

But it's an open question and I don't know if lawmakers are even aware of WCAG, that would be nice.

I believe you're mostly correct in terms of current legal situation in the USA.

Downvotes are primarily going to be from people who would prefer that wasn't the case.

However, I believe most accessibility improvements must be "reasonable" accomodations and generally I think aren't intended to be onerous costs (unreasonable).

So there's room for debate on whether accessibility should NO LONGER be a right in the USA. And also room for debate on what's reasonable.

But I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law, due to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

> I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law

This is a global community, though. Many probably interpret the statement from a moral/idealistic standpoint rather than whether or not it's a legal right in any particular jurisdiction.

The situation's essentially the same in the UK (EU?) due to it being a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

You can't say 'well disabled people aren't the target demographic, so no I don't have a ramp' any more than you can say 'whites only'.

The other commenter didn't claim it was a moral (as opposed to statutory) right, but even if that was the intention, I think that's a reasonable position to take and argue for, even if others disagree.

It should be a class action suit if anything, but I can see there being an argument for it on platforms that meet a certain threshold of popularity.

What does the Internet not existing before the ADA have to do with it? Also, movies existed before the law did, and so did online services (for example, AOL, CompuServe).

By the way, the Internet existed, but it wasn't available to the general public.

Just gotta say. I really appreciate this comment.

But why should this right be absolute? Surely if there ever was a case for subtitles not being essential this is it. So if we accept it we have de facto risk for damages for all non-accessible commercial videos everywhere. This should have a considerable chilling effect.

I happen to feel this keenly since I'm in the process of dropping a client who insists of putting damage transfer in our consulting colaboration, in an industry vulnerable to GDPR fines. There is no hourly rate that can make me risk bankrupcy for a bug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com