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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

The standard for physical buildings falling under ADA Title III is 20%. In addition, ADA title III requires owners and tenants to remove existing barriers on an ongoing basis as resources are available even absent other construction.

In the case of Title III, architects and other people involved in the design are individually liable should they fail to design in accordance with the technical standards.

ADA is civil rights law, and ROI doesn't enter into Title III, only "technical infeasibility." To put it another way, "I make more money by discriminating against the disabled" isn't any more a valid argument than if one substituted "women," "Latinos" or "Coloreds."

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> "I make more money by discriminating against the disabled"

If I throw up a proof of concept website in a weekend as a test, it takes off, and I work on it full-time just to make sure it's not exploding/falling over as it scales, and I don't go back and make everything 100% accessible to 100% of my users, am I really discriminating against the disabled?

Am I obligated to cut into my revenue (if _any_) to make the site accessible to users who will not be or are not a valuable asset to me? What if it's a video site and I don't provide closed captioning? Do I have to caption all my videos do the deaf can watch them? Do I have to provide complete transcripts for every blind person?

I'm not intentionally discriminating, I'm just unable to justify allocation of my development time/resources to that particularly area.

I don't think it's a moral problem since I'm not going into it with a "fuck the handicapped" mentality. It's a result of allocation of extremely constrained resources.

(Note: I agree with you. I'm just arguing here for fun. This is unenforceable, anyways, and, if it did become enforced, companies would just move their sites/online companies offshore.)

> If I throw up a proof of concept website in a weekend as a test, it takes off, and I work on it full-time just to make sure it's not exploding/falling over as it scales, and I don't go back and make everything 100% accessible to 100% of my users, am I really discriminating against the disabled?

Yes. At the point where your site stopped being a proof-of-concept and became a public offering, that's when an inaccessible website starts discriminating against disabled people.

Simply put, a service offered publicly needs to be accessible to the public. That public includes people with disabilities.

> a service offered publicly

But there is no legislation that says my website must be publicly accessible. I could randomly return 403 errors, or only block people using Firefox, or only block people from the state of California.

When there's legislation saying that my website must not exclude people, then I'll consider accessibility.

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