This feels very much like a "tyranny of the minority" type situation though, where you have to bend backwards to aid a small subset of the population at the cost of a larger chunk of the same. There's probably a balance somewhere to be found. Not everything should have to be ported across.
In 2010 Google determined that there were more people using the internet with accessibility features than Canadians. I can't find any new data, but I find it hard to assume that has gone down since. On top of that, making your website friendly to navigate with a keyboard doesn't just help people using accessibility features, lots of people use the keyboard to quickly navigate.
We have ~4.77 billion people on the internet. Assuming all of Canada was blind, that's 0.77% of total users. Under most circumstances, < 1% is a small minority.
I get that some level of accessibility is reasonable, but if you're expecting the same level of UI investment there for <1% of the population, I'd call that insane. Here, he can still call in and order the pizza.
TBH personally I find this comment exceptionally strange given the rigors of acceptable limits among software uptimes and reliability outside of accessibility concerns. Netflix would probably not tolerate an entire country's access being revoked from their service for a technical reason they could fix. If AWS had a 0.77% downtime rate for all of their services, it would be a lot of services and a ton of bad press from businesspeople that are losing money due to AWS being down. If the Bloomberg terminal went down 0.77% of the time, it'd probably be considered completely unacceptable as a service to its userbase.
0.77% is something that would be protested ordinarily, except when it comes to accessibility concerns. Why?
That's an apples to oranges argument here. So first a market argument:
AWS downtime results (or the lack thereof) are what's desired by the market. Blind people are a small market, and prioritizing them equally or disproportionately is an inefficient use of resources.
This can be countered by "we can't just abandon the disabled". And we haven't; In this case, the disabled guy can call in and order a pizza. The core service is still available to him.
However, I don't see why forcing all features for every disability should be mandated. It's a small proportion of the populace, and while steps should be taken to enable usability, I don't believe that their desires warrant as much resources as the mainline, nor do I think we should force design to cater to them.
This is particularly so as, from what I get from the ADA, there is no size requirement for such. If you classify websites as "public accommodations", then all websites big or small now have yet another thing that they can be sued for.
I think this is kind of an odd proposition to have though, because market sizes aren't always reasonably correct to judge. For example, beauty products previously thought that black women are a small market. In reality, black skintones have unique qualities in shade that aren't appropriately captured. The day a line of PoC oriented foundations were widely available they were so heavily demanded that stores nationwide were constantly sold out for months.
We've already learned this via curb cutouts. An argument like yours was proposed (eg. we don't need cutouts in curbs for wheelchairs, so few people have wheelchairs) but it turns out that everyone benefits from the thing installed (child strollers, luggage pulling, movers, anything on wheels suddenly benefited). The position here is that this is similar.
Having something that is readable to the blind could suddenly benefit a wide, diverse range of people- colorblind folk, people who just underwent eye surgery, cataract sufferers, even photosensitive or light-induced migraine sufferers suddenly benefit! You could even argue that it would help reduce blue light exposure at night if you could browse without turning on your screen and suddenly theres an opportunity for literally everyone using a screen to benefit from ADA compliant websites for the blind.
Sure, but then that's an opportunity waiting to be taken, especially in your beauty product case. Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that.
For the latter, how sure are you that the benefit outweighs the cost here. Given the current state of the law as I understand it, if websites would be classified as "public accomodations", they'd all have to provide accessibility options regardless of size. Moreover, I've taken a look at the WCAG guidelines to educate myself on what providing accessibility would be like. It's not exactly small, and while experienced, large organizations might be able to comply, smaller restaurants might have issues there, especially if they're skimping on the webdev side of things.
If I wanted to abuse this, I could crawl restaurant listings, hit them with a scary templated legal document threatening a lawsuit for compliance to some law they've probably never heard of.
From an outsider viewpoint, I don't really trust American regulation that much to improve the situation, especially looking at the bay area housing situation and the state of your public transport. The former is a precise case of regulation causing issues, and attempts to remove that highlight how hard it is to remove poor regulation.
" Someone found that niche, took it and now that problem is solved, don't need regulation for that."
Except for ADA related things, we really did need regulation to install cutouts in curbs, and now it's a major wonderful thing everyone is advantaged by.
Making a website accessable isn't hard. there's a plethora of tooling available to help and most of it comes down to aria roles and color selection. It really is a bare minimum sort of task imo.
And then you get sued for $100k over your "bare minimum". This just makes front end dev seem dangerous, because you can never be sure that you meet absolutely all the guidelines without being a lawyer.
You don't have to meet absolutely all of the guidelines. Did you make an effort to have an accessible website? Did you accessibility bugs when they are reported as causing problems for users? If so, you will be fine. Domino's didn't. They basically just told blind users to fuck off and call them instead.
Are you actually making an "tyranny of the minority" argument against disabled people? :O
This is one of those basic human rights things. Especially if the service your site is offering is important or one of a kind. And especially as more and more things become accessible only through the internet.
Sure. They can order a pizza. Notice that I mentioned that reasonable allowances for disabled people can make sense, but I see no reason that a tiny minority should dictate the design viewed by a vast majority.
I think this is a symptom of providing a legal remedy of 'you can sue'. There are dishonest lawyers with no interest in helping people with disabilities and they will sue you if they think you have enough money to make it worthwhile.
This is also the reason many of us have to step over used needles on the way to work every day, there are people who are going to die very soon from using heroin on the sidewalk, and there are lawyers lining up to sue if anything at all is done to discourage them from shooting up and passing out on the sidewalk.
