In the US, the choice was made instead to create a private right of action and to allow legal fees to be recovered. That means that lawyers who make this their business have to aim high to cover their costs (including from cases they lose) and are no incentivised to let a company off with a compliance notice and a deadline to improve.

As a result, there are a certain percentage of ADA cases which are not brought in good faith but that is the system the people have decided they want.

The people haven't decided anything. As usual, someone comes up with an absurd law, or an absurd interpretation of the law and there are not enough people affected to bother challenging it. But that doesn't mean "the people have decided".

Fighting the status quo is immensely more difficult than keeping it, even if the effect of that status quo is provably harmful.

The majority is not neutral but assumed to be in favor of their representative's (!) proposals.

Of course, politicians can and do deviate from this, in particular where legal bribery (lobbying) is involved, but that is the base assumption of representative democracy.

On the other hand, regulators pouring bleach on food for the homeless and secret homeless rescue operations to avoid regulators are a real thing. As are hairdressers being shut down, fined and even jailed for things like not having a license to braid hair, or giving free haircuts to the homeless. Excessive regulations also kill jobs and productivity from overzealous and power-tripping regulators. There are horrors on both sides.

Honestly, I'd bet that after you calculate the fixed costs + variable costs + opportunity costs + economic deadweight loss of all of these solutions, it'd be better to just take the total costs--what is likely 10s to 100s of thousands per person per year--and actually just give it directly to the disabled in the form of a check, and be done with this circus.

How do you know? It's not like blind people are all the same. They're just people with the same wide range of interests as everyone else.

As for paintings... there was really zero information on the site other than pictures of paintings? Nothing about the artist, the size, or the price? You apparently don't realize that a lot of people who rely on screen readers are able to see to some extent. They may use the screen reader to navigate your site or make purchases, but they may still be able to see the paintings (sometimes by magnifying the screen greatly and looking closely at the details) if not in exactly the same way that you do.

I don't disbelieve that shakedowns like you describe happen. But there is a reason for the rules that you are apparently breaking. It also sounds like you don't really believe that disabled folks deserve any consideration.

You say you don't hear from them, asking questions or complaining, probably because the vast majority just give up when they encounter websites like the ones you create. They are likely very tired of contacting website owners (assuming they can figure out how to do so--not easy if the site isn't accessible!) who send back insults about how they can't possibly be interested in the contents of the site or accusing them of trying to shake the website owner down.

The sort of thinking you are putting on display here is exactly why the ADA is so important.

No, that's not at all what I believe so let me clarify what my objections are. First, by its very nature "accessibility" is open to interpretation and allowing people to sue companies for non-accessible sites gives way to frivolous lawsuits. As far as I remember, there isn't even an attempt to define "accessibility" in US law. Currently it's something like "Go look at WCAG and see what you can do". This is further exacerbated by the way these lawsuits work - it makes sense to settle even if you think everything is OK with your site. The plaintiff doesn't pay anything, his lawyers work on contingency so even if you "win", you'd spend a fortune on defense and you're not allowed to recoup those expenses from the plaintiff.

Second, these are private businesses we're talking about. They should be allowed to weigh in the ROI of investing in accessibility vs the potential income from disabled customers. I'm a reasonable guy and I was happy to fix some legit issues that the lawyers pointed out. They were relatively easy to fix and I would have done it even without any threats. Not in the least because they could have affected sighted customers as well. Other issues are completely out of whack and could take man-years to sort out fully. I don't have that kind of time. So, let me reverse the question. Do you believe everyone with disability must be able to use any service, no matter the expense to the business? Do you draw the line somewhere? What about people with nut allergies? Should we force restaurants to offer guaranteed nut-free food along with their other products? Why should a blind person be able to enjoy a pizza from Domino's but a person with nut allergy shouldn't?

> I don't disbelieve that shakedowns like you describe happen.

You seem to think that the shakedowns are the minority and most cases are legit. It's the other way around if you do a quick "ADA lawsuits" search. Here is good article about the practice: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...

There was a bipartisan bill that passed the House 2 years ago (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620/...) that aimed at closing drive-by ADA shakedowns. The bill required claimants to give 120 days to business to fix issue. It seems the bill hasn't been signed by the Senate (not sure why, if anyone knows more let me know). This is a good bill, hopefully it will pass.

edit: Found why it didn't pass the Senate. Democrats in Senate promised to filibuster any attempt to bring the bill to the floor. https://rewire.news/article/2018/04/03/sen-tammy-duckworth-s....

I suspect the main reason for the bill was the "substantial progress" wording, which would let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant.

Their first argument is that because state laws exist, there should not be a federal reform. I thought federal laws were there to set a default law for states. If they don't agree with the abuse they should work and reforming the federal law first.

Their second argument is that it 'let businesses get out of becoming fully compliant'. I don't understand. A 120-day heads-up isn't a way to get away with penalties.

And what is missing (and maybe they did say it but it is not mentioned in the article) is what they suggest as an alternative. Surely if you vow to block a reform but agree on the problem they should come up with solutions. There should be a way to both make more businesses compliant and prevent ADA shakedowns.

I am discovering how hard it is to make our laws evolve :)

What were these?

Sure, why not?

But I'm confused here. Does your website somehow feature both paintings and car insurance?

But by and large, blind people don't buy auto insurance because they don't drive and they don't buy paintings because they can't see them. Forcing these businesses to invest excessive efforts to serve 0.0001% of their potential target audience is idiotic.

And no, I'm not going to say what we sell because it's not important and this was clearly an extortion case.

It seems to me that what you sell is the central issue here, as you're claiming that blind people wouldn't be interested in it. I'm not really willing to take your word for it, given the other examples you've used.

In the case of car insurance, it's obvious that people don't only buy insurance for cars that they drive. Consider e.g. an employee of a company looking to buy insurance for company cars.

There are also lots of blind artists and blind people interested in visual arts, as you can discover from a simple google search.

It's worth remembering also that many "blind" people are partially sighted, so that they may be unable to read text but still appreciate visual arts in a direct perceptual way. On top of that, there are people who have lost their sight, and who may still have a keen interest in the visual arts formed when they were still able to see.

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.

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?

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.

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.

You've been too busy twisting my arguments and you might have missed the link I posted earlier: https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-shakedown-racket-12494...

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

"It is expensive" isn't an excuse.

I don't know why you keep referring to "edge cases" and "outliers". The two actual examples that the OP has given do not meet this description.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like, how can anyone state that "blind people aren't interested in this" seriously? Like there exists a bullet list of things that blind people like.

I believe it should be his right to just simply say my product is not for blind people, and dedicate no resources to servicing this hypothetical user base.

It's very easy to tell others to do something a certain way with a condescending tone from behind your screen if you've got no stakes and don't have to do any of the work involved.

Fortunately, in America we don't believe discrimination is acceptable, and we've codified that principle in the law.

Apparently, in America, its more important to appear to be virtuous than to actually do good.

The law of unintended consequences.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/146368.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_...

>On average over the post-ADA period, employment of men with disabilities was 7.2 percentage points lower than before the act was passed. In addition, wages of disabled men did not change with the passage of the ADA.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/J...

This one is long, and they do mention some positive impact on education later. Didn't read that far though.

>while relative disabled employment declined significantly just after the ADA’s enactment in states in which these provisions were a substantial innovation relative to the pre-ADA state-level employment discrimination regime, relative disabled employment was stable in states with ADA-like employment discrimination regimes in place prior to the ADA’s enactment

Non-exhaustive search, but the data seems to indicate that ADA reduced employment for the disabled shortly after inception. I'm not certain on the longer term effects (those are also much more annoying to model here).

https://www.nber.org/digest/nov04/w10528.html

Again, Law of Unintended Consequences.

It's perfectly acceptable to not allow someone to rent an apartment because they have a criminal history, or a poor financial or employment history. It's also acceptable for American Express to not issue black cards to people who don't make a million dollars a year.

We have codified some traits that we do not allow discrimination based on, but generally speaking, discrimination is acceptable. Unless you change the general definition of "discrimination" to the legal one, which would seem to make the argument circular (i.e. we have banned discrimination where discrimination is the things we have banned).

You might believe it, but the law apparently says otherwise. It’s ok to disagree with laws while still complying with them, and if you’re so passionate about it... it’s ok to work to change them.

I might believe that my healthcare business shouldn’t have to comply with HIPPA but if I don’t comply I should expect to be sued.

I might believe my online store shouldn’t need to be PCI compliant and that it’s unfair, but if I don’t imply I should expect to pay for it.

Through (imperfect) representative democracy, the public has decided that being sloppy with health information, improperly protecting credit card information, and providing access to your business to disabled people are important enough to enforce via the law. It doesn’t really matter what the business owner’s beliefs are at that point.

Anyone who really thinks it’s so important to deny blind people equal access to their web site is free to run for Congress or find a politician who agrees with them to vote for.

As but one example: there are blind people skiing now, with echolocation and other methods. I bet ski lift operators would have argued that they have nothing to offer to blind people, making that particular expansion of freedom more difficult.

"It's a website, which you look at, so clearly blind people aren't interested."

I'm sorry you got burned, but this is not the best way to make your point.