Comments on: Web accessibility suits: AP weighs in

By: J.T. Wenting

J.T. Wenting — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 06:17:15 +0000

porn sites are just about the only ones making serious money…

This does hit close to home for me though. I work in a company providing certain specialist web services which include graphs of stockmarket trends and things like that.
I wonder how they expect us to make those in such a way that they contain the same information for a blind person as what a seeing person can get from them…

By: Richard Nieporent

Richard Nieporent — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:37:41 +0000

Yet surfing the Internet is not always worry-free for the blind. Crista Earl, the head of Web operations for the American Foundation for the Blind in New York, said graphics that don’t contain textual labels – which can be read by screen-reading software – are a common obstacle for blind Internet users

I wonder if their next target for a lawsuit is going to be the porn sites.

By: Mark Biggar

Mark Biggar — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:36:15 +0000

What’s next a suit against J.C.Pennys, Sears and L.L.Bean that they dont’t provide braille versions of there catalogue? Or a suit aganist Sear because they don;t have braille labels on every item in the store. At some point accomidation of a disabled minority can be sufficiantly onerious to be absurd. Another example is a suggestion I heard recently that every porta-potti in the country should be outfitted to allow for wheel-chair access, even though that would likely require all of them to be twice a big and thus would likely mean only half as many at any given location.

By: anonybody

anonybody — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:13:36 +0000

I can’t wait for someone to notice that blind theater patrons might not be getting the full experience from their visit.

By: nevins

nevins — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:20:53 +0000

Web sites have massively enabled many disabled people; much content comes to people with minimal effort rather than moving the people to the information. Consider the alternative of the not so distant past of treking to the public library or university research library. Things become immensely better for so many and their next response is to bite the hand that feeds them, by demanding that efforts for these wonderful benefits be redoubled or else we’ll shut the whole thing down just to spite every disabled person in the country.

The genuinely disabled of this country need to protect their interests and smack down those who would turn public sentiment against them. Investing in the disabled was very recently a positive things for corporations, now it is has quickly become a quagmire only the insane would attempt.