This has the possibility to be a giant step backward, as the following example shows.
Back in 2019, California tax agency FTB made the following announcement[0]:
State agencies’ websites are often the primary way of communicating information to the public and it is important that these sites and the information they provide are available to everyone. AB 434 (2017) required state entities to improve the accessibility of websites and certify that their site meets Web Accessibility Initiative standards by July 1, 2019.
So what happened? Many tax documents, which taxpayers rely on to understand the tax law as it applies to them, stopped being available as downloadable PDF files, or else to obtain the PDF file, you have to provide an email address to FTB and then wait until they get around to sending you a copy. Previously, you could immediately download all the PDFs using self-service.
While some of the docs are also available in HTML format, that is not as handy as PDF in many cases. Also, many documents are only available as PDF.
I don't understand how this helped visually impaired users, but it certainly harmed everyone else.
[0]State of California - Franchise Tax Board - Tax News May 2019
It seems silly, but it does create a very strong motivation to make these documents accessible. And I can already tell that previously removed PDFs are now available again, presumably with their accessibility issues fixed.
The problem here is people choosing to give up instead of comply with policy. How do you propose addressing that? What kind of policy would prevent this outcome? They clearly didn't want to do the work to make their content accessible, and up until that point they were allowed to get away with not doing the work.
> They clearly didn't want to do the work to make their content accessible
I would rewrite that to: "Nobody who wrote the law allocated any money to DO the work."
I'm sympathetic to your cause for "official" documents. Government needs to be accessible to everybody. Consequently, those kinds of websites need to be held to strong standards.
I'm somewhat sympathetic for holding big businesses to account. Your utility website needs to be accessible. Registering for your college classes needs to be accessible (mentioned because class registration web stuff is normally barely functional for anybody). As does your ISP billing website. etc.
I'm less sympathetic when small businesses are involved. We have already seen the ADA being used to shake down small businesses in meatspace. Moving this to webspace is a bad idea. There need to be both size and grandfathering limits.
I'm not sympathetic at all after that. We've have been down this road. UC Berkeley pulled a ton of teaching videos from the web after being forced to comply with web ADA. Those videos are offline and aren't coming back. Technology changed and now automated captioning could probably work for most of those videos--except that they are gone by legal order and nobody is going to put themselves out to reverse that.
This was a terrible result--for everybody including those needing accessibility.
The people preaching web ADA need to remember that this isn't meatspace ADA--"Pull content off the web completely" is always an option.
Berkeley is a terrible example, if you have ever read DoJ’s findings.
Berkeley had university resources available for teachers to assist with making accessible content, as well as policies in place requiring accessibility. Professors chose not to follow those policies or make use of those resources.
Never mind the fact that regardless of where Berkeley hosts/distributes the content, they are a publicly funded institution and still need to make the content accessible even if not distributed to the public.
In other words, they pulled the content down out of spite, not necessity. That is not the fault of laws requiring disabilities, that’s a toddler having a temper tantrum.
I disagree. They were a byproduct of the regular teaching which followed accessibility standards. If a student in a class needed accommodations, they were provided, however the videos were similar to someone posting a video of their security camera rather than Berkeley orchestrating a recorded class session.
The point of the ADA is social good and not one single person benefitted, directly or indirectly, from the Berkeley videos being taken down.
ADA policy generally isn't being set by the people who allocate funds. Someone deciding what policies will enable accessibility for the blind almost certainly has no control over whether a conservative lawmaker will decide to actually fund the local agencies responsible for accessibility. So again, what policy do you suggest to address this? This is not a problem with the accessibility policy, it's a problem with the way the agencies responsible for compliance are run and funded. The ADA could close up shop and the underlying funding and compliance problems would not go away, they would just cause other problems.
How would the lawmakers responsible for the ADA have magically conjured the money necessary for every agency to comply?
> How would the lawmakers responsible for the ADA have magically conjured the money necessary for every agency to comply?
How would you feel if the government passed a law that every restaurant must set aside 2 tables with a special HEPA circulation and sterilization system just in case someone immune compromised wishes to eat there? Or perhaps you need that HEPA system so that unvaccinated individuals can be isolated. (just to make sure I offend both sides of the political spectrum)
This is equivalent to what ADA laws do.
Don't get me wrong. I really like ADA laws (having a broken ankle drives this home quite painfully). However, I like ADA laws that apply strongly to entities with lots of money and much more weakly to the small players.
I want WalMart, Starbucks, the state government and the megaconglomerate behind an apartment complex to have to adhere to the full battery of ADA laws. I'd like my local mom-and-pop coffeeshop, by contrast, to have a lot of latitude. The big boys have enough power--we don't need to give them yet another way to cudgel those who might compete with them.
That’s untrue; you literally just set up a straw man and then argued against it. Point to sources instead. Point to the ADA wording directly. Point to case law. But making up random hypotheticals completely devoid of evidence they connect with reality in any way is exhaustingly bad faith.
It's usually marginally funded and/or essentially private ventures that back out or go bankrupt. There's cases of restaurants having to close down because they simply don't have renovation funds. If it's truly a public good it should be publicly funded. The public likely won't want to fund it, so you're gonna have to go with something more lax like exempting old construction entirely or publishing piecemeal best practices.
Like in this case, readers are to the point where a plain HTML offering should suffice. This is thankfully something that is not a ton of extra work. But for physical ADA compliance it is unfortunately expensive.
Back in 2019, California tax agency FTB made the following announcement[0]:
State agencies’ websites are often the primary way of communicating information to the public and it is important that these sites and the information they provide are available to everyone. AB 434 (2017) required state entities to improve the accessibility of websites and certify that their site meets Web Accessibility Initiative standards by July 1, 2019.
So what happened? Many tax documents, which taxpayers rely on to understand the tax law as it applies to them, stopped being available as downloadable PDF files, or else to obtain the PDF file, you have to provide an email address to FTB and then wait until they get around to sending you a copy. Previously, you could immediately download all the PDFs using self-service.
While some of the docs are also available in HTML format, that is not as handy as PDF in many cases. Also, many documents are only available as PDF.
I don't understand how this helped visually impaired users, but it certainly harmed everyone else.
[0]State of California - Franchise Tax Board - Tax News May 2019