I'm trying to come up with good reasons for why one might reasonably advocate the exclusion of a subset of the population—whether Deaf/hearing, blind/sighted, gay/straight/etc, male/female, etc—as customers. And if a site is permitted to exclude folks for Reasons™, why can't a bakery exclude folks for Reasons™?
Ah, we're talking at different levels. You're limiting the discussion to Google/YouTube's interface for captioning videos & logging in. I'm talking at the broader level of the top article, whether a website (or business) should be able to exclude serving a subset of the population merely on “I don't want to” grounds.
I'm not sure how you can think they're not parallel. I used your own words as a template to maintain the parallelism:
You are still free to {something}, they [clarified the business being a bakery instead of website] just have no obligation to allow you to use their [clarified the use of platform] platform in whatever way you want.
Both are cases of the law requiring a business to serve a class of clientele that the business doesn't want to for some reason—whether religious or financial or laziness.
Re: Techdirt is a great example of a site that doesn't use much graphics
And just for the record, I browsed Techdirt in Lynx and had no trouble logging in and navigating articles. Posting comments left TD thinking I was a bot. ☹
HTML is a content-markup language. CSS is for the visual presentation. If an HTML document is semantically marked up and basic W3C/ARIA attributes maintained, it goes a long way to making a website accessible to users of screen-readers. Plenty of completely blind users browse the web every day despite the roadblocks thrown up by developer incompetency/ignorance. Some sites are completely inaccessible. Some sites are merely annoying to navigate with a screen reader (no structural markup means you may have to listen to 200+ links on the page before you actually get to the content). Some sites make it a breeze. There's a continuum, but it's not that hard to make a mostly accessible site.
See my other comment here about thresholding the requirement as is done with other laws. Likewise, pre-enactment works are usually grandfathered in as exempt. This combination would limit both audience and the scope to larger sites and post-enactment content, a fairly reasonable demand for equal access.
What about the small one person/part-time hobby site? Should it be required to go to the same level of effort? The risk of someone just setting up a site for fun, and somehow failing to meet all of the qualifications of the ADA are very real.
I know that certain regulations don't apply until a business reaches a certain size. E.g.
ADA & Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when a company has 15+ employees
Age Discrimination at 20+ employees
Family Medical Leave Act (at a 50-employee threshold)
massive SEC regulations when a company goes public
Fair Labor & Standards Act triggers at $500k gross receipts
A similar threshold could absolve smaller sites from onerous development (though as a web-dev, creating an accessible site is good for SEO and broadening your audience/market, so it's good from a business sense too)
Intermediaries just need some sort of Section 230 protection, passing the responsibility up-stream. Make the video-providers responsible for captioning (and providing replacement DVDs and stream-sources). This is notably less burdensome as they likely have access to the scripts used to create the media too.
Not too concerned, having installed Linux/BSD on my Lenovo laptops. The hardware used to be good, but one had a keyboard die within the first year, and the other has flaky USB & camera issues. Sigh. Not doing Lenovo again for multiple reasons. Please don't make me go back to Dell.
I can see someone sneaking in a change from "Mbps" to "Kbps" and suddenly we've got 100% broadband coverage across the nation. I mean, who doesn't have access via a 28.8 modem? ☺
Evolution isn't working fast enough. We should pre-determine the weaker species (and members of each remaining species), then simply eliminate them proactively.
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: Bakeries and websites
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: Bakeries and websites
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Bakeries and websites
Both are cases of the law requiring a business to serve a class of clientele that the business doesn't want to for some reason—whether religious or financial or laziness.
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: thank you. being hard of hearing I was already aware
Just seeing some interesting parallels between these discussions on different browser tabs.
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: Techdirt is a great example of a site that doesn't use much graphics
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: thank you. being hard of hearing I was already aware
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: Blind person on the net?? Yeah.
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: My daughter is deaf.
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: But wait, it gets worse
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: Re: My daughter is deaf.
I know that certain regulations don't apply until a business reaches a certain size. E.g.
- ADA & Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when a company has 15+ employees
- Age Discrimination at 20+ employees
- Family Medical Leave Act (at a 50-employee threshold)
- massive SEC regulations when a company goes public
- Fair Labor & Standards Act triggers at $500k gross receipts
A similar threshold could absolve smaller sites from onerous development (though as a web-dev, creating an accessible site is good for SEO and broadening your audience/market, so it's good from a business sense too)See this article on various thresholds
On the post: Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act
Re: But wait, it gets worse
On the post: Capcom Removes Advertised Offline Co-Op From Resident Evil Reboot, Updates Steam Page After Sales Begin
Re: Re: Umbrella...
On the post: Capcom Removes Advertised Offline Co-Op From Resident Evil Reboot, Updates Steam Page After Sales Begin
Umbrella...
Funny word-play there.
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Lenovo preloaded software
On the post: President Obama: I'm A Big Believer In Strong Encryption... But...
Re: Terrorists use encryption
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Re: I think this is already settled
On the post: Lawsuit: TSA Supervisor Got Traveler Arrested For Bogus 'Terroristic Threat' Charge, Lied About Incident In Court
Re: City of Brotherly Love
On the post: FCC Redefines Broadband As 25 Mbps, Angering Broadband Industry Perfectly Happy With Previous, Pathetic Standard
All about the units
On the post: Help Create Some Neil deGrasse Tysonisms: Tautologically Meaningless Solutions To All The World's Problems
Re: Re: Evolution
On the post: Help Create Some Neil deGrasse Tysonisms: Tautologically Meaningless Solutions To All The World's Problems
Evolution
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