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0 pointsshripadk5y ago0 comments

You don't need to hire a blind person to be compliant with regulations. What if you are building consumer facing products? Can you pick who your consumer will be? What stops a blind person from using your product? And what if the user is suffering from another physical disability which doesn't let the user operate a keyboard/mouse? What if the employee were a medically fit person but met with an unfortunate accident and lost his/her eyesight/limb and have to now continue job after recovery? How can s/he continue their job? Will you fire the person? You never hired a physically challenged person but s/he can always become physically challenged due to some accident later.

> Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard?

"Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites.

The 50 lawsuits, filed in November, say the colleges are in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as their websites are not accessible to people with disabilities. Camacho uses a screen reader and said he experienced barriers when trying to access the colleges' websites."

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-college...

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gridlockd5y ago· 2 in thread

> What if...

What if tomorrow some change of parameters makes my business impossible? I'll go out of business. That's always an option.

Dealing with every possible risk ahead of time generally isn't an option.

> "Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites.

This is referring to public websites, which arguably are covered by the ADA.

I'm looking more of a story like "We wrote all our software without regards to accessibility. Then we got sued. It bankrupted us."

If this was a real problem for software in general, why is there no cottage industry of shady lawyers using people with disabilities to sue software vendors in particular? There's obviously lots of software that is not accessible, or not accessible enough.

shripadkOP5y ago

> What if tomorrow some change of parameters makes my business impossible? I'll go out of business. That's always an option.

Yes and no one can sue you for going out of business. But you can be sued for violating a law while your business is in operation.

> Dealing with every possible risk ahead of time generally isn't an option.

No you need not if you use standard software development tools that do it for you. You would need to worry about it if you plan to implement everything on your own.

> If this was a real problem for software in general, why is there no cottage industry of shady lawyers using people with disabilities to sue software vendors in particular? There's obviously lots of software that is not accessible, or not accessible enough.

When there is a clear law that states that you have to make your software accessible you have no choice but to implement accessibility. For personal use you need not. For open source projects, the implementation rests on the shoulders of those using the project for end-user facing software. You can get away with it for a while, just like you can get away with using pirated software. But then law will catch up anyways. Just because there is no precedent set doesn't mean that it is legally allowed. Would you want to be the first test case? A scapegoat? I bet not!

As far as why there are no cottage industry of shady lawyers: Maybe those shady lawyers have bigger fish to catch. Maybe there isn't much awareness about it in the legal circles. Could be variety of reasons why.

gridlockd5y ago

> No you need not if you use standard software development tools that do it for you.

The belief that you just need to use "standard toolkits" and accessibility "just works" is wrong.

> When there is a clear law that states that you have to make your software accessible you have no choice but to implement accessibility.

There is no law that mandates implementing accessibility for all commercial software.

> As far as why there are no cottage industry of shady lawyers: Maybe those shady lawyers have bigger fish to catch. Maybe there isn't much awareness about it in the legal circles. Could be variety of reasons why.

...or maybe the law doesn't actually say what you think it says.

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