Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

First you will need to convince people that WCAG is relevant. I have worked at over a dozen employers at this point and none of them have thought it worth mention. The anecdotes on Hacker News about it are that the individual devs had to do the legwork to get it considered.

View on HN

I don't convince employers or clients to follow WCAG, I just do it. If they say the link needs to be yellower, I figure out how to make the link look yellower and make it within WCAG.

If they ask for something outside WCAG, I say no, that doesn't meet the standards required and do not ask if they want to respect the standard.

I learned to stop asking permission to use my professional judgement when I went to a boss with an active password/login leak that was risking an important dataset and his response was "if it hasn't leaked, let's just not worry about it and leave it"

What do you know, the next morning he was informed of a leak and I was approved to fix the issue. The leak was not real, of course.

It is quite relevant if you work with public entities - schools, cities, etc. There are people out there who test government sites to be sure they are compliant and report it to the DOJ when they find failures. And the folks at the DOJ will call you to discuss it. Those calls were surprisingly pleasant and helpful, at least in those days (I haven't done that work in 5 years), but if you think you won't get called out on it in public industries, you'd be mistaken.

It is not necessarily relevant if you only work with private individuals and entities.

But it also isn't that much of a burden. So my take on it is just do it and then it never is a problem.

> But it also isn't that much of a burden. So my take on it is just do it and then it never is a problem.

What are you meant to do when you have an existing site with a brand that has inaccessible colors for the headings, buttons, links, backgrounds, text etc.? Sometimes it's not as easy as making a few colors darker/lighter, and it's a huge ask to get the client to modify their brand for this, as well as updating the styling code everywhere.

Regardless of how one personally feels about it, you can get sued into oblivion in certain countries for not complying with WCAG, so that's something.

Give me one example.

$JOB-2 got sued over website accessibility. The way these cases go is someone uses the WAVE browser extension to identify accessibility issues, and anything yellow or red becomes part of the cause of action. IIRC we settled out of court.

We were pretty large, big-name online merchandise retailer. Definitely put our heels to the fire on giving the frontend a design refresh.

Sounds like they were taken to the cleaners by grifters.

You're implying the the only benefactors of that actions were the people suing. That's not the case. They're accessibility standards for a reason. They're the minimum required to not make an impaired person's life hell. And we should all care about that.

In this case yes, because clearly if the goal is accessibility, then a company shouldn't face legal action unless they refuse when asked. Like in the DOJ examples in this comment section.

Any and every good cause will attract a bunch of vultures, scammers and scavengers, including accessibility issues. But I'm not going to believe those who say that any company which isn't up to date on this will "get sued to oblivion". Not without examples that prove it.

With that said, I'm a strong supporter of Internet accessibility because there are no down-sides to it. It is essential to the people who need it, and at the same time it improves the experience of those who don't.

Here let me google that for you ....

https://news.mobar.org/confronting-the-rise-in-ada-website-a...

Looks like some fear mongering from lawyers who have a financial interest in the mentioned mongering, and certainly in other types of mongering.

Is there an of any company which was "sued into oblivion" there? The examples in your link of Netflix, Domino's and MIT are still alive and well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com