You're ignoring most of what OP is saying, he's completely right in saying he should have no obligation to dedicate huge resources to a potential 0.00001% of his customers which may or may not even exist, when the only benefit will be not getting hit by frivolous lawsuits.
> "he's completely right in saying he should have no obligation"
Is he right because you agree with him? I don't think he's right. The law also doesn't think he's right.
There's also quite a few assumptions that you seem to have made in not very good faith, because how could you know how much effort it would take to fix accessibility for a website that you don't even know what sells? You've also assumed some exaggerated fraction of a percent, and assumed that a lawsuit that you don't know anything about was frivolous.
Based on what information did you assume all those things?
Is that frivolous enough for you? That's the same law you're defending here and when that article came out, it was universally decried here on HN. Funny how things change, huh? But I guess it's not ok for someone to sue UC-Berkley for providing free non-accessible lectures, while it's totally ok for a private business to be sued for having a non-accessible website.
You are moving goalposts here, are we now debating whether any ADA-related lawsuit ever has been frivolous?
I also have a hard time answering for an anonymous group of people, as I am not HN.
You seem very eager to assign very clear and simple intentions to large and complex groups of human beings. Blind people don't like this kind of stuff, these lawsuits are frivolous, HN had this collective opinion on X but has now changed its mind.
For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law. Do you have a labeled box for me?
No goalposts were moved by me. In this thread, the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns and the UC-Berkely case is just one more datapoint. I provided an article with detailed analysis of the practice as well.
At the same time, all you've been doing is disingenuous interpretations of my posts and dismissing other reports as "biased", while not providing a single datapoint yourself.
"GASP! How dare you say blind people are not interested in paintings! The horror and the arrogance!"
Sure, there are blind people buying paintings and interested in art. How does that invalidate anything of what I said? The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people. People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?
> For the record, I think it's fine for someone to sue UC-Berkeley and other private businesses for not following the law.
Are you fine with a frivolous suit against UC-Berkeley too? Because it is possible that lawsuit is frivolous and UC-Berkeley is breaking the law. In fact that's exactly what's happened - UC-Berkeley is in technical violation of a botched law, they got threatened with a frivolous lawsuit and decided to just remove the free content. As a result everyone loses but I hope the ADA defenders are happy.
> "the only thing I've been saying from the very start is that the majority of these ADA lawsuits are shakedowns"
Can you source this claim? You didn't provide any data point for that. You've claimed a lot of things that you just know and seem to take offense to that being challenged.
In fact, UC Berkeley case is the only data point I've seen from you here; which feels sparse given the blanket statements you've made about the intentions of various groups of people. You won't even say what product you are selling that you know for a fact that blind people are not interested in at all.
Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?
> "The point is not that there are literally zero blind people buying paintings, the point is that they are very very far from the target audience and hence it's not worth investing a significant effort to cater to those people."
That depends on how much value you place on following the law.
> "People from Africa are not my target market either and I make zero effort to make sure the site is accessible there. Am I now a racist too?"
Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.
> In fact, UC Berkeley case is the only data point I've seen from you here; which feels sparse given the blanket statements you've made about the intentions of various groups of people.
> Can you also provide a data point on the UC Berkeley lawsuit being frivolous? What are you basing that on?
Are you now trolling me? I can't believe I need to explain this but I'll make one last attempt:
UCB posts free video lectures online. UCB is technically violating ADA by not having captions.
Someone says "You're breaking the law, your free content must be available to everyone with disabilities or I'll sue you". UCB complies with the law the easiest way possible by shutting down the free lectures. You say you value the ADA law so you should be happy - UCB is in compliance now. Everyone else lost, including actual people with disabilities who might have had partial access to the videos one way or another. I'll leave it to you to decide how desirable this outcome was, nitpicking "frivolous" definition notwithstanding.
> Could you please stop inventing arguments to rebut, because it's not really helpful. We're talking about ADA here, not whatever you're making up here.
My argument is perfectly valid. I was talking about ADA until you implied that I'm bigoted and trying to tell blind people what they should be interested in. That has nothing to do with ADA. If want to go in that direction, go all the way and tell me that I'm racist because I'm not ensuring my site is accessible in Africa.
I'm not ignoring it. I simply don't believe that he/she is selling a product which would be unusually uninteresting to blind people. People with visual disabilities are a few percent of the population.
Who has got more information here, you, who has no idea what the OP is selling, or OP who is actually selling the thing?
"I simply don't believe" is not a great argument, when the previous car insurance and painting analogies proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.
> previous car insurance and painting anecdotes proved to me that you can conjure up a hypothetical interest of a blind person about anything.
These aren’t hypothetical! Blind people really are interested in both these things, as you can easily find out by googling — or just using your common sense.
Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA. People often have wildly inaccurate perceptions about what people with visual disabilities can or can’t do and about what they may or may not be interested in. If “I don’t think blind people would be into this” were a valid excuse, then virtually nothing would be accessible in practice.
As the OP has already demonstrated that they have mistaken ideas about blind people, I’m not willing to take their word for it that they have some kind of special product which couldn’t possibly be of interest to the visually impaired. They are free to reveal what they actually sell, if they think they have a slam dunk case.
My problem is that everyone in these threads acts like this all takes zero effort. There's no "turn on a11y" switch, you have to dedicate resources, money and time.
It's a perfectly valid complaint from someone that sells a product which is generally not interesting to blind people (you seem to think this is an impossibility, or that one edge case outlier invalidates this reality), to not want to do this if it will bring no new business and make no-one's life easier.
Not having security vulns in your software costs money. A large number of users aren't actually harmed by vulns or don't care about them.
But if you went around saying that really it isn't important to fix vulns since they don't affect that many people you'd be rightly raked over the coals.
Sure, you can find blind people with intense interest in visual media. There have to be a few out there. However, a quick google (as you requested) on the art topic seems to indicate that art targeted at the blind is rarely of the painting variety, but of a more tactile sort. This... would not be appreciated in many museums, where touching the exhibits is typically discouraged (Admittedly, audio enjoyment of visual art does exist).
I'm really sick of the argument by outlier where a generally true statement is countered by an outlier case as though that invalidates the whole statement.
I think you are forgetting the existence of partially sighted people. Most people who use screen readers can see. There wouldn't be anything odd or unexpected about such people being interested in paintings or other visual art forms. On top of that, many people who are fully blind were not blind from birth, and so are about as likely to be interested in visual arts as anyone else.
I considered them, but blind enough to appreciate visual art but too blind to use a webpage seems like a rather narrow group to me. It's one of those things where I would very much need evidence accept.
By which you mean, you decided without actually asking any of them or doing any investigation that a certain group of people don’t appreciate visual art.
The vast majority of people using screen readers have some degree of vision. I would not assume that they have no appreciation of visual art.
The ADA is needed because people have so many assumptions about people with disabilities that they don’t bother to verify.
And I ask of you. How many are there. How large is this population. If you support regulation, give numbers to back it up. The absence of regulation is the default state, and to introduce some should require not a feel good statement, but a concrete estimate of how much impact it will have vs the potential cost.
You don't need to convince me that it would make some people's life better. That could be said of any expense made on somebody's behalf. You have to show that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense.
It's not the government's job to figure out what blind and partially sighted people are and aren't interested in buying. Would you really support regulation that attempted to distinguish between "products blind people are interested in" and "products blind people aren't interested in"? That seems entirely unworkable.
If you wish to continue making unwarranted assumptions about what blind people are interested in buying, that's your call. But the law doesn't (and shouldn't) back you up.
> You have to show that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense.
Why? No one is saying that it's always a sound business idea to accommodate people with disabilities. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But not everything is about the business owner's bottom line.
> Like OP, you’re illustrating exactly why we need the ADA.
Firmly agree. It's amazing to see how many cling to the view that people with disabilities are this alien group of "others" that think differently and are probably only interested in things for disabled people.
