[sevencolors]

I wish the government would make some guidelines on what accessibility means for websites. And what types of service need it.

Some of my past clients that have a marketing website for their physical store. But now they are getting emails from scummy lawyers trying to extort money from them for failing to be ADA compliant.

The changes are trivial for me but many people are forced to pay these lawyers to have someone "fix" the problem for them.

[throwawayboise]

IANAL but I would be surprised if a marketing website really fell under the ADA. It would be like saying a billboard or newspaper ad also had to be distributed in braille.

If the website provides an actual service or business transaction capability to the public, I think that is where the ADA starts to apply.

[extra88]

> billboard or newspaper ad also had to be distributed in braille.

The law doesn't require fundamentally altering a product and it doesn't require unreasonable accommodations. The difference between an accessible and inaccessible website in terms of cost and effort, especially when set as an up-front expectation, is much smaller.

A marketing website exists to serve some purpose, what purpose could there be that would only be relevant to people who don't have disabilities? That doesn't mean everything on a site has to be accessible to everyone, there can be inaccessible "fluff" meant to make customers feel good about a brand while still allowing all users perform the important tasks like reading information about upcoming sales, details about products, contact information, etc. No one's going to sue over a glamour shot having bad or not alt text.

[gnicholas]

Not holding my breath on this. The new White House website has been lauded by accessibility professionals for having accessibility features — but when I took a look I immediately saw that their high contrast mode actually creates contrast issues (when filling in a form, the red error text is very difficult to read on a black background), even for fully-sighted users.

It's also bizarre that they refer to this mode as a high-contrast mode, since overall it doesn't really offer higher contrast ratios; it's really much more of a night mode (as the icon seems to indicate).

Also, their Accessibility Statement only lists phone numbers for how to give feedback. When you call one of those numbers, they ask if you want to leave a message for the President. When you tell them why you're calling, they tell you to use the general feedback form on the White House website (which is not mentioned/linked on the Accessibility Statement page. The last thing you want to do when collecting accessibility feedback is put a convoluted path like this in front of the user. Nearly everyone will just give up.

TLDR: the government can't even get this right on its own websites.

[Rule35]

Leave a message for the president explaining that his website's instructions are broken (and that it's literally easier to contact him than a webmaster).