Deaf, Blind Sue Over Web Shopping

The "innovation" has been on the shipping/distribution side.

I do still see the possibility of predatory litigation. To protect small businesses, maybe the burden should shift to the web developers that they hire. Much like we expect contractors to know the ins-and-outs of building codes, we should come to expect web development agencies to understand their clients' legal obligations.

I personally ignore most on-page SEO trick things, and just focus on accessibility when I can. If a screen reader can handle it, Google can handle it and understand it. I'd rather focus on people than machines. If companies can take time to SEO-trick out their page, they can focus on accessibility.

Now the associations are suing companies for not being accessible. This is ridiculous. How much of that money will go to benefit of people in need and how much will go to such people?

- Any valid HTML site has an `alt` attribute in all of its image tags. This helps screenreaders read the image, and could probably satisfy the "spoken captions of images" requirement.

- Sites that cleanly separate layout from presentation are already quite easy for screenreaders to parse. Go ahead and run `links -dump http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness` for example; it just has a bit of boilerplate and then the content begins. There's even "Jump to: [navigation], [search]" links that are hidden with CSS for those who don't use it.

I think this will primarily affect sites that rely heavily on javascript to try and create the sense of a large application. This is another good argument to separate the presentation and logic from the content of the site.

The Equality Act in the UK has much tougher provisions, and has for a long time under the Disability Discrimination Act before it. British business has not collapsed under the weight of supporting it yet.

If you're really struggling to make your website compliant then you can go on the government website and it even tells you the appropriate guidelines. In addition, the W3C publish their own sets of guidelines for you to follow.

For Add-Ons, you have Fangs to show you how a screen reader sees your page. There are simple tools that will tell you if there is sufficient colour contrast between your text and background.

Using terminal (text only) browser such as Links is great way to test accessibility.

Sounds intresting, but the link is broken...

However, in my interactions with people with visual disabilities, I've come to understand that for many of them, the ability to use the same technology as everyone else is actually quite important. Everybody else uses Windows, why shouldn't they be able to? Everybody else shops on the Amazon website, why not them? To say they should use a separate interface is tantamount to telling them to go to the special grocery store for the blind people.

I don't really know that this is a constructive way of thinking, but it's important to consider.

  | "marketplace of user interfaces"

"No" is not acceptable, at least not to me. I have no disabilites, but I think that there should be accommodation for disabilities in society. Perhaps below a certain business income or traffic the requirements are reduced or go away, and that's where we're not very good at balance.

As commerce, government and social interaction move online, it becomes imperative (yes) that we make accommodations for disabilities. The more we are, the better we are, so it's good for "the rest of us" as much as for "them."

In the end, it's likely an "eat your spinach" issue as said in the article: you bring more people and benefit in by your accommodation than the accommodations cost. Where that falls down is the micro-operations, and that's where I think we need some balance. Big ops can afford all this and more, but you won't get more big ops unless you let the small ops grow through that stage.

What he means is that you must actually use HTML's alt and title attributes properly so that screen-readers can produce these spoken descriptions.

That strikes me as a fairly reasonable burden.

I memorise all the keyboard shortcuts and keyboard navigate as much as I possibly can. My biggest peeve with webapps is that they usually slow me down to hunt-and-peck speed.

And if this stifles "innovation" in web site design, well that would be fucking fantastic. We really don't need more "innovation" by web site designers--they've already done enough damage to the internet.

The disabled being denied access to critical infrastructure is a market failure†. That’s why there is a discussion about regulation.

It would be super great if everything could be solved by the market (politicians tend to be clumsy, not the brightest and not super efficient), sadly I cannot see that being possible. A world in which the market solves everything neatly along our moral views would be pretty awesome, I just don’t think that’s the world we live in.

I want market solutions to as many problems as possible and will happily accept them whenever they exist. If they don’t, however, I’m more than happy to begrudgingly accept a regulatory approach.

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† Underlying this is the assumption that the disabled should not be violated in their human dignity. If you do not share this view then you might arrive at different conclusions and I don’t think I want to talk to you any further.

This is why the government does these things: To break Nash equilibria that have harmful externalities. In this case, the harmful externality is handicapped people having shittier lives. Much the same logic applies to what the EPA does.