Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half of them you won't be able to use. Imagine that you cannot order from some online stores. You cannot fly certain airlines. And apparently you cannot order some pizza online. Worst of all you don't magically know whether a web site is accessible or not. You just go to web site and try it, spend some time to learn the layout - it typically takes blind peple longer to familiarize with new web sites, spend thirty minutes to fill out the details of your order and then when you try to click the submit button, you figure out that it wouldn't click for some reason. Being a developer you open HTML code just to realize that this is some weird kind of button that can only be clicked with the mouse, but not a screenreader. But hey, your screenreader can route the mouse cursor to this button and simulate a click. So you try a real mouse click and it still doesn't work for some reason, and I have no idea why. Finally, you give up. I hope I managed to convey a typical sense of frustration with a web-site that is not that accessible. I do get arguments of other people that it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible. and I don't know where to draw a line, but I need to say that Domino's is a large enough company and even though I hate counting other companies' money, I must say they're big enough to be able to afford to make their web-site accessible.

Small personal story:<p>My father is an amazing salesman. He used to sell for Schwan&#x27;s food in the 90&#x27;s (those big yellow trucks that delivered frozen food to your door every 2 weeks).<p>He had a blind couple (husband and wife) that were on one of his routes, and they bought a little bit of food every time he came by. But they could never read the menu, because Schwan&#x27;s only had printed brochures. One day, he had me and my siblings record on audio cassette the entire menu and their prices.<p>His sales from that couple shot through the roof! All of the sudden, there were all of these options for sale that they didn&#x27;t even know about before, and now they wanted to try them. From that time forward, they were very faithful and consistent customers. And, of course, they were very appreciative of the gesture!<p>Every 6 months or so, when Schwan&#x27;s updated their menu and&#x2F;or pricing, we would re-record the menu, until Schwan&#x27;s finally figured out an audio offering of their own.<p>A few years ago, my father ran into the couple when he happened to pass through their town (my father no longer sells for Schwan&#x27;s, but now sells insurance and investments). The couple remembered and asked about each of us children by name, these decades later.<p>It&#x27;s neat to see how just a little consideration (and a bit of extra work) can make a huge impact on someone else&#x27;s life!

Despite the somewhat misleading headline, the Supreme Court didn&#x27;t really say anything new here. They declined to hear Domino&#x27;s appeal of the Ninth Circuit&#x27;s (unanimous and clearly correctly decided) reversal of the District Court&#x27;s absurd dismissal.<p>Domino&#x27;s tried to claim that their due process rights were being violated since there is no federally-mandated standard for accessibility. But the ADA is clear: businesses have a legal requirement to ensure that disabled customers have &quot;full and equal enjoyment&quot; of their goods and services. Domino&#x27;s made the tenuous argument that the lack of a specific standard meant that they didn&#x27;t receive fair notice.<p>Robles, the plaintiff, argued that the appropriate standard to apply was WCAG 2.0. Instead of offering a different possible standard (which would have been a defensible legal rationale), Domino&#x27;s position was basically, &quot;fuck off&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s really not hard to make your websites accessible at a basic level. Follow the standards. Make sure your content and markup are reasonably semantic. Use standard form components for data entry. Where more complex, visual-first designs are employed, make sure there are text-based fallbacks.<p>If you are a professional software developer, doing this is not just your legal responsibility, it&#x27;s your moral responsibility.

So somehow along my career I fell into accessibility dev for a while. Funny enough it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did and there was always plenty of work. It is easily outsourced to a remote developer because all you really need is a browser and a screen reader. In my opinion there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility, it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page. No I am not saying that this provides a great experience for the blind but it at least helps them to be able to get around the site.<p>I personally an color blind, which is not a disability but it is a pain in the ass at times, especially give that color has the ability to convey data visualization in a rapid manner that is subconsciously parsed by the user. It&#x27;s extremity effective if one can see color. It is kind of how I got into accessibility for a time. By simple adding a secondary reference of iconography for the color blind a site can convey the same info. (e.g if you show red put a small stop sign on it, yellow use a triangle etc.)<p>I see no reason why even the smallest sites should not be able to provide access to the blind, whereas larger sites should be striving to go the extra mile to make it accessible and easy to parse for everyone.

I see a lot of negativity in the comments. I imagine much of that is gut reactions of web developers hearing they need to do more work.<p>As a web developer that has had to pass an accessibility review from a person who is actually blind each release for the last two years, I can tell you it’s not that hard. Make sure you have a sensible tab order and labels on forms and you are 80% there. The hard issues are creating hidden buttons for drag and drop interactions and announcing changes in the view.<p>Honestly it’s more keyboard nav than label work anyways. For as many vim lovers as I meet, many developers seem to falsely believe you need a mouse to use the web.

On the surface, this sounds like a fine thing. Who doesn&#x27;t want accessible websites?<p>But it really opens a can of worms. What&#x27;s a place of public accommodation? With brick-and-mortar, it&#x27;s easy; if you have a physical location open to the general public, it probably qualifies. But on the web? Does my personal website count? What if I sell t-shirts on it? What if I don&#x27;t sell anything, but have forums where the public can discuss things? What about a site which is primarily about communications, i.e. speech? Does a requirement that you put ARIA labels on things amount to compelled speech?<p>What if accessibility standards change? Am I compelled to upgrade my site?<p>This issue is a lot hairier than the court imagines. Does the court really want to get into the issue of which websites need to comply and which don&#x27;t?

Some clarity on the matter:<p>The Supreme Court didn&#x27;t say anything. All they did was decline to hear the appeal.<p>From skimming the petition and responses, it looks like the situation is that the 9th Circuit is allowing the case to go ahead to determine whether or not Domino&#x27;s website is violating accessibility requirements, which means that there&#x27;s not a lot of facts and administrative record for SCOTUS to attempt to decide if the reasoning as to how to determine how the ADA applies here. In other words, this does feel like a case that SCOTUS rejected in large part because the petition is way too premature--the respondent&#x27;s brief definitely feels far more persuasive to me than the petitioner&#x27;s (Domino&#x27;s) briefs.

&quot;a11y&quot;: Accessibility<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a11yproject.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a11yproject.com&#x2F;</a> has patterns, a checklist for checking web accessibility, resources, and events.<p>awesome-a11y has a list of a number of great resources for developing accessible applications: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brunopulis&#x2F;awesome-a11y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brunopulis&#x2F;awesome-a11y</a><p>In terms of W3C specifications [1], you&#x27;ve got: WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative: Accessibile Rich Internet Applications) [2], and WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [3]. The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least.<p>There are a number of automated accessibility testing platforms. &quot;[W3C WAI] Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List&quot; [5] lists quite a few. Can someone recommend a good accessibility testing tools? Is Google Lighthouse (now included with Chrome Devtools and as a standalone script) a good tool for accessibility reviews?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brunopulis&#x2F;awesome-a11y&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;topics&#x2F;specification.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brunopulis&#x2F;awesome-a11y&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;topic...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;using-aria&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;using-aria&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;WAI&#x2F;standards-guidelines&#x2F;wcag&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;WAI&#x2F;standards-guidelines&#x2F;wcag&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;payment-request&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;payment-request&#x2F;</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;WAI&#x2F;ER&#x2F;tools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;WAI&#x2F;ER&#x2F;tools&#x2F;</a>

There has been a long standing precedent around the ADA requiring web accessibility: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;National_Federation_of_the_Blind_v._Target_Corp." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;National_Federation_of_the_B...</a>.<p>A number of companies have been (more or less) blatantly violating the law in this area. Framework authors in particular have often ignored the value of accessible, semantic markup. Many devs come to the web knowing only frameworks (and not the underlying web technologies), which is dangerous if those frameworks aren&#x27;t accessibility-focused.<p>Hopefully this decision finally scares companies into action, and inspires a lot of valuable future litigation on behalf of the visually impaired.

I know the owner of a small brick and mortar store in California. She decided to create a web site to sell her products on line. She got a domain name and a hosting account and installed a canned platform (OpenCart) which allowed her to create her own web site and started to try and sell. Total sales on the web site over three years: about $3,500.<p>Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) her web site is not ADA compliant; b) If she doesn&#x27;t fix it, they&#x27;ll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to &quot;cover their time in handling this unfortunate situation&quot;.<p>With her sales, she can&#x27;t justify spending an additional few thousand to pay a programmer to fix or redo her web site to be ADA compliant. Her only option is to just shut down the web site.<p>The only winners here were the lawyers.

Does the ADA really apply and enforced at all publicly available businesses? Does every Chinese restaurant in Chinatown have a Braille menu? If we really start enforcing this, only larger businesses will survive.

I wonder if there is a good rule of thumb for what software and features are acceptable to <i>not</i> be accessible? What does it mean for a drawing program to be accessible by the legally blind? You can follow accessibility guidelines (for UI navigation and so on) but does that mean you made the program accessible if the bulk of the operations you can actually do in the software - draw - still requires seeing what you are doing? Are you expected to invent workarounds that allows people to use your software, or can you assume that &quot;nah, no blind person is likely to be drawing anyway&quot;? It seems there is a gray area where it&#x27;s just not economically feasible to add some extreme bespooke types of accessibility, but at the same time not doing it will make it self fulfilling - of course no blind people will draw in drawing programs so long as they don&#x27;t get the tools.

If you&#x27;re blind, can&#x27;t you just call up a Dominos to order your pizza? &quot;Talk to a human and order your pizza&quot; sounds like a friendlier approach than the automated screen reader or whatever they&#x27;ll come up with to resolve this litigation.

Here&#x27;s the ruling from the 9th circuit:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov&#x2F;datastore&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;15&#x2F;17-55504.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov&#x2F;datastore&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;15&#x2F;17...</a><p>A denial of cert doesn&#x27;t mean the supreme court necessarily has an opinion on the merits of the case. Courts in other circuits can still rule otherwise, and SCOTUS might eventually decide to hear such a case at a later time.

I tested the Domino&#x27;s home page with WAVE (I had to install the browser extension for some reason) and it found no errors and what looks like healthy use of landmarks and ARIA, though I didn&#x27;t dig too deep. Would any blind HN readers care to comment on to the degree to which <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dominos.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dominos.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a> is accessible to them, personally?<p>The stress around website accessibility comes from the lack of any authority who can tell you you&#x27;ve done enough and you can&#x27;t be sued, perhaps by someone using an outdated screen reader&#x2F;browser combination you&#x27;d never think to test with. It brings back bad memories of things like trying to support IE5&#x2F;Mac at the same time as IE6&#x2F;Windows. (Protip: embrace quirks mode.)

I would consider this a good thing. It really doesn’t require very much effort to be compliant and it ultimately results in UI that are more easily accessible by not only bling people, among other disabilities but also encourages better extensibility for creative purposes <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;WAI&#x2F;standards-guidelines&#x2F;wcag&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;WAI&#x2F;standards-guidelines&#x2F;wcag&#x2F;</a>

Accessibility seems to be thrown under the bus under MVP style thinking. You are trained not to focus on issues that only affect a small number of users. I know I do this all the time. The reason is money.<p>At what point do we just accept that security, accessibility, and similar properties are actually important, and that we shouldn&#x27;t accept half baked products anymore?<p>I don&#x27;t have a clear answer. But regulating the software industry is just going to make running a startup almost impossible. No more jobs for self taught hackers. All platforms will be a walled garden, including the web.<p>I&#x27;m leaning towards the viewpoint that companies (or anyone) should not be responsible for accessibility problems.

Target.com is accessible because of a similar case from 2006. This appears to be a decent summary: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jimthatcher.com&#x2F;law-target.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jimthatcher.com&#x2F;law-target.htm</a>

FYI for those interested, there is a Google Group called <i>blind dev works</i>:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;?nomobile=true#!forum&#x2F;blind-dev-works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;?nomobile=true#!forum&#x2F;blind-...</a><p>It&#x27;s a small, low traffic group. I&#x27;m one of the admins.

&gt; The ADA mandates that places of public accommodation, like Domino’s, provide auxiliary aids and services to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind<p>I haven’t read the actual ruling, but Domino’s provides a phone number that you can call, and a person will tell you any of the information on the website and can perform all of the services the website can perform. How is this not a sufficient “auxiliary service to make visual materials available to individuals who are blind”?

On another note, there are services that are already scraping thousands of websites and testing them for ADA compliance. If the website fails the test, the website or lead is sold off to an attorney. The attorney will then find or hire a straw client to sue the website and the company. Its very prevalent and lucrative because a lot of the law has yet to be written and the companies being sued are settling very quickly.

Sounds like a great start-up opportunity. Turnkey and ongoing accessibility compliance.

Blind person here. While I definitely appreciate any efforts towards accessibility, I believe this is not the way. What people don&#x27;t realize is that, at a certain point, <i>most</i> companies do accessibility anyway. Some of them, like Apple or Microsoft, even turn it into a marketing advantage. There are exceptions, sure, but this doesn&#x27;t justify government regulation. I believe the days of John and Chuck, two dropouts from MIT making a tech startup and becoming billionaires are almost over. There&#x27;s more and more regulation introduced around technology, first the absolutely ridiculous COPPA, then GDPR, then California&#x27;s privacy initiative and now this. I believe that, in five to tech years, our tech landscape will consist of a few big companies who will have the resources to comply, and many walled gardens, as each country will have their own laws, wildly different from any others. The UK is already starting to go this way, i.e. with the proposal to ban Facebook likes for users under 18 and introduce mandatory age verification. I think that a small company making a website in 2030 is as likely as a small company making their own car or drug now. Some groups might benefit from this, but, ultimately, we, as a society, will be worse off. This one particular case seems beneficial when consideret in separation from anything else. The wider trend is not.

What happens to every game on Steam, every app in the two main app stores, websites and software for 3D mechanical CAD (Solidworks, Fusion 360), ECAD, etc?<p>Just trying to understand this. Where are the boundaries, limits and rules? What happens if you use web technologies to control equipment, say, 3D printers, robots, etc.<p>To clarify, this isn’t to say I have a problem with this ruling. Not at all. Just trying to understand if this is a massive world-wide hammer anyone can wield against any website and tangentially related technologies or if the range, domain and impact have certain limits.<p>Put a different way: Should Mom and Pop lose sleep over the possibility of being sued out of business any given Monday or sleep well knowing the process is sensible enough to allow for a reasonable ramp to adoption?<p>There’s even stuff like, for example, if you have 200 domains parked with a registrar who puts-up a non-compliant page on all of them. Are you exposed?

This law is ripe for exploitative lawsuits. Instead of damages going to the plaintiff, of which actual damages are very dubious, it should go to a fund that helps web site developers increase accessibility. Maybe an open source foundation that integrates this into regular HTML.<p>The money should NOT go to lawyers for their fees and plaintiffs. It just creates the wrong incentive system.

Rather than crippling the rest of the world for the blind, why not improve the tools for them instead?<p>Screen readers that are limited to structured inputs can&#x27;t be the end-all final solution right? It would be shortsighted to set this tech in stone with legal precedents. Do we seriously want to require every blind person to be fluent in reading html&#x2F;React as the default way to consume sites?<p>We should be trying to improve the tech so they can consume the world just like sighted people. There are already apps that can use computer vision to caption and describe images. It can even connect you with real people if the AI sucks.<p>I think pouring investments into those technologies might be cheaper relative to the amount of work added to the industry as a whole.

Is there really any requirement to make a website accessible if you could provide &quot;full and equal enjoyment&quot; via old fashioned phone support? I see this being vastly cheaper and less risky to provide for most non-&quot;web app&quot; websites (e.g. retail websites) for the smaller number of users who need it.<p>Edit: Found a source that seems to discuss it but it seems it hasn&#x27;t been tested in court: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adatitleiii.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;telephone-access-might-be-valid-alternative-to-accessible-website-but-court-needs-more&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adatitleiii.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;telephone-access-might-b...</a>

I live to use keyboard shortcuts, mostly TAB. It&#x27;s amazing how many websites don&#x27;t even have that working correctly.<p>Or a page has exactly one text entry box and it doesn&#x27;t have focus when page first renders.<p>That&#x27;s just sloppy.<p>And for those with vision problem a major problem.

As someone now living in Japan, I think I can understand how frustrating the user experience is for disabled people. While not disabled, I often need to use Google translate or lookup for Kanjis&#x2F;Words in a dictionary. There are a crazy amount of websites (and mobile applications) where text selection is disabled or where text is written inside images, which often completely prevents me from using the website...<p>I&#x27;m not even counting the number of websites breaking the system scroll speed of forcing a custom mouse cursor. I may be too sensitive here, but it is very annoying so I now just close the tab whenever it happens.

According to the article, the Supreme Court did not rule on the case, the 9th Circuit did. Sometimes the Supreme Court will turn down a case on a technicality while still leaving open the possibility for future ruling on a matter.

I really don’t see anything wrong with this. I blame the modern web a lot for this As javascript hijacks functionality of the browser, and the browser is typically better accessible

Honest question from a web developer, and I&#x27;m ashamed I don&#x27;t know more, is there a clear concise guide to building accessible websites? I&#x27;ve had to support ARIA for U.S. Government websites, and certain color schemes for color accessibility, but I really don&#x27;t feel like I know how to build a web product with accessibility in mind. I am genuinely sorry that I haven&#x27;t developed the skill more, and would like to take this opportunity to learn more.

In fear of sounding insensitive, what if a business has decided that their website is just one way that customers can engage with them (much like their physical storefront is another), and that there are other ways as well that customers can purchase from them -- such as via phone (, etc). They can handle anyone&#x27;s needs over the phone (, etc) if they can&#x27;t use the website... much like the website enables them to engage with customers who can&#x27;t visit their physical location, which could be in a different state or country. Can&#x27;t visit our location? We still want your business, buy from our website. Having trouble using our website? We still want your business. Here, give us a call (, etc) and we can take your order. Once we have your order ready, we&#x27;ll give you a secure PCI-compliant interface to enter your payment info for the order, that&#x27;s totally accessible in whatever form it is, but is certainly separate from the rest of the not-so-accessible site, since your primary means of interaction with our business for this purchase is via [phone call or some other accessible interface separate from the website].<p>I say this after watching my mother struggle using the IRS&#x27; website this Sunday. Even though she is not blind or otherwise physically disabled (she doesn&#x27;t use a screen reader, for example), she isn&#x27;t the most tech savvy person. While searching for a form she clicked on a link then scrolled down straight to the footer, thinking the footer was the page&#x27;s unique content, and already starting to click on links in the footer, which wouldn&#x27;t have gotten her where she needed to go since what she needed was above the footer but she missed it. If she had someone she could call she would have gotten done what she needed to do faster than using the website. I helped her out, of course, but it was still helpful to watch how she used the site on her own before offering assistance.<p>So what if a company acknowledges that not everyone will be able to use their website and provides alternate ways for customers to engage with them that can still accomplish the same thing? When you define a business as more than just a website, is having multiple different interfaces (physical location for those nearby, website, voice call, etc) for a customer to purchase from a business not one way to provide accessibility?<p>If Domino&#x27;s will take my order over the phone and deliver it and I can pay at the door, is that not accessible for me, even if their website isn&#x27;t?

The sum of all kinds of regulations like this one is great news for mega-corporations. Economies of scale mean that the costs are small for them, and proportonaly much bigger for smaller companies.<p>While I think it is a great goal that services should be accessible by people with special needs or restrictions, would it not be better if this could be achieved by incentives instead of hard regulation?<p>Perhaps as follows. 1) Create a registry for companies to self-declare that they are accessible for a given user segment by some given standard. (For essential utilities and government agencies, compliance can still be made mandatory) For registered entities, make this statement binding, and follow up breaches with fines that are sufficiently stiff that only companies that comply will register. This registry could contain information would contain information about standards that are already regulated, but could also be extended to include other needs (dietary standards, child friendliness, accessible to people with certain mental limitations, etc) 2) Make this information open to the public, and attach a rating service such as TripAdvisor where users can rate the degree of availability. This would make it easy for the beneficiaries to find services suitable for them. The data should also be made accessible through an API, so that special interest groups can mirror it on their own infrastructure. 3) Step 2 will provide an incentive in itself, but where it is not enough, introduce a tax incentive on top. Companies with the necessary accesiblity could be given a tax benefit in the order of 1-5%. This benefit should be on the profit, not the turnover, to avoid putting companies with limited profitablity out of business over this.

Because there are a myriad of perceptual issues and the idea of reporting specific perceptual needs is likely an unnecessarily severe data disclosure, wouldn&#x27;t it be best for non-app websites to have their content mapped out according to some standardized API for consumption by their client?

Would a chat bot interface to order pizza&#x27;s count as blind accessible? Or even a live person on a phone?

This is already EU law. You can get fined if you don&#x27;t follow accessibility guidelines on your home page.<p>Usually that also makes for better home pages for other people as you don&#x27;t get the type of crap &quot;creative&quot; web developers tend to put there to make it flashy but unusable.

Suppose I can&#x27;t use a product because of a disability. Do I sue a company for making the product available to others who can use it? The ADA says I have the legal right to do so, but the mentality that &quot;if I can&#x27;t enjoy something, nobody should&quot; is immoral.

As a fully sighted person (well, I wear glasses to drive), I&#x27;m thrilled about this. Websites that are easier to use for the blind are easier to use for everyone. If your website is a giant picture of text, this is just karma.

Misleading title. SCOTUS refused to hear the case, not ruled in favour of the cause.

This sounds like it&#x27;s great for web developers like myself. We&#x27;ll have jobs for years to come!<p>And it will force companies to really think about their functionality and ensure that it&#x27;s easy for common use.

Is there a EU&#x2F;Australian&#x2F;British equivalent? I&#x27;m an Indian employee developing for EU and want to scare people into cutting back the design madness that makes sites unreadable and slow.

Followup question for those in the know: If domino&#x27;s hadn&#x27;t had online-only deals&#x2F;rewards&#x2F;etc, would the availability of the phone line have counted as accessible?

This is a just outcome. The disabled have a right to access society.

I don&#x27;t get it. Why can&#x27;t he just order from someone else that has an accessible website? I choose not to use lousy webapps for all sorts of reasons.

The issue here appears to be whether or not it&#x27;s Domino&#x27;s legal (and moral) obligation to make their website compatible with some specific piece of screen-reader software. To me, it seems like they probably should; the APIs are relatively clear, standardized, and easy to use, and there are quite a few people who can&#x27;t use the website otherwise.<p>I do wonder how far this argument goes, though. Say someone creates a new device that allows people with some incredibly rare motor impairment to access the Internet. Is it now the responsibility of everyone in the world to add support for that device?

This opens a huge can of worms, given that there is no clear standard for this. W3C has varying degrees of compliance, some of them near impossible to abide by.

This seems like overreach. Clearly the law doesn’t cover websites.<p>Why can’t congress just pass a law to make the ADA apply to websites? It’s not SCOTUS’s job to create law.

I&#x27;m not seeing much mention of Net Neutrality or what this means in the grand scheme of open &amp; free web vs Gov&#x27;t control of it.<p>Any thoughts?

Is there a checker to see if a website is accessible, and how to make it accessible (like the ones for SEO and site-speed optimizations)?

I&#x27;ve read a bunch of comments; surprised not to see mention of DevTools &#x2F; Lighthouse Audits &#x2F; Accessibility.

I’m a bit shocked that the Dominos CLI wasn’t brought up as a defense.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freecode&#x2F;dominos-cli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freecode&#x2F;dominos-cli</a> Or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jkereako&#x2F;dominos-pizza-cli&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;dominospizza&#x2F;urls.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jkereako&#x2F;dominos-pizza-cli&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;do...</a>

Good.<p>Part of my work is to make the service I work on accessible so I follow this topic.<p>I find it absolutely disgusting that Domino would rather drag their case to the supreme court than make their site accessible.<p>Anecdotally, while making an app or website accessible is not particularly easy, I have found that there are some good benefits.<p>At least on mobile, it pushes you to avoid relying on hacky solutions and to make clear layouts instead. This also makes your code more maintainable.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;RGxKw" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;RGxKw</a>

What’s wrong with using a phone to order pizza? Seems like a reasonable alternative.

Great, now make it possible to sue owners of sites unusable without JS.

How could this lawsuit cost less then just fixing the website?

what is a retailer? does this mean that if i make a website to sell my small indie game, i have to follow all the ephemeral accessibility rules or else be sued?

I wonder why having having a voice ordering system by phone wouldn&#x27;t be a valid defense for Dominos. Should the ADA apply to every channel of sales if there are supported alternatives by the same company.

This is the most PC shit ive read about this year.

web dev should start using vanilla html + css, following w3c guidelines for accessibility and stop all the fancy js shit.

This is such a good plan. So many developers don&#x27;t care about a11y. This just adds a cost to actually start caring and planning your code around it.

I just became an a11y programmer :)

hiQ vs Linkedin was a Heller vs DC. This feels congruent.

This would be wonderful news. I am blind, and can report that accessibility on websites is getting worse and worse with every new web framework invented. Accessibility is usually bolted on as an afterthought, with all the quality issues implied. However, I only believe this headline when I see the first lawsuits being won. Lets hope this is no clickbait.

The ADA law actually doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. I get they are trying to stop discrimination, but the means they take is misguided and an encroachment on peoples rights.<p>If you have a business and are offering a service, you are doing so at-will. Your not obligated to provide anyone with any product or service, if you were, how is that not slavery? The law forces you to provide a product or service without allowing you use your own judgement.<p>The law itself is unconstitutional. How did it even pass?

I&#x27;m in favor of requiring that all deals and coupons be available via all methods of ordering, with things such as app-required deals only being legal if the app is accessible to the blind. Other than that, I fail to see how having phone ordering doesn&#x27;t completely cover the accessibility requirement. It&#x27;s very easy to get silly with these requirements. Should comedians be required to provide transcripts for deaf people? Should paintings come with exhaustive descriptions attached to their frames?

Then the Supreme Court is wrong (which isn&#x27;t impossible, by the way). If I draw on my street with chalk, should I also be compelled to play a cassette on repeat outside my driveway describing what the picture is? This is absurd.