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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Yes; for now.

If you're in the public sector, or have customers in the EU or Australia, you might get sued or fined if your app isn't accessible.

Weirdly even in the US you might not be in the clear for internal tooling. My understanding is its illegal to refuse to hire a blind person because they're blind. If you hire someone who's blind and they can't do their job because your internal tools are written in Godot, you might be leaving yourself open to discrimination suits. Not a big deal when you're a startup, but it will matter at google / fb / etc. I'm sure google has blind employees today who care a great deal about being able to do their jobs.

That sounds like a legal minefield, with more mines added over time.

In short, if you aren't making a video game or a toy, it seems like good advice to use tools that work with accessibility.

(I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.)

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So you agree you are spreading FUD then.

1. There is no law on the horizon that will require any accessibility for general purpose commercial apps.

2. Further, one can add accessibility features on Godot or other engines if needed. No technical limitation whatsoever.

3. If such laws came to be in a decade or two, engines and frameworks of all kinds will most likely support those features on their own.

4. The only case you can make against Godot is that someone has a company which hires people; and finds a blind person that is as productive as a non-blind to the point they are the best candidate for the job; and the company is in a country with such laws; and someone is an asshole that does not want to hire such person even if they are the best; and the position requires to use Godot tools; and the tools are non-accessible to begin with; and that someone does not want to spend the money to make them accesible; and the rejected candidate sues you and wins the case.

No business will even think about such an scenario. In an ideal world, they would. In the real world, they don't. And I am siding with the blind person in such a case and hoping such a company is busted in that case. But the case is extremely rare.

So, as a busines risk, for a commercial startup, this is pretty negligable, right?

Even if they widen the scope, EU commercial laws on this kind of thing (e.g. content filters) tend to be only applied to companies over a certain revenue level (10m euros for the content filters).

Also, EU regulation is enforced differently to US regulation. EU regulators tend to ask nicely the first time, and only impose fines if it's a repeat offence, or the company has flat-out refused to do anything about the problem.

In other words, even if the regulation scope is widened, anyone building their GUI with Godot will probably have enough revenue and be given enough time to rebuild it completely before they'll reach the point of "business-killing" fines.

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