They are and there have been many rather bullshit drive-by lawsuits in regards to them too. With no leeway to give you time to fix the problem either.
Compliance is almost impossible for small teams. You can't rely on a lot of 3rd party code/widgets since many of them are non-compliant so now you require an in-house development team to recode a 3rd party widget to follow WCAG guidelines. Don't forget that you can't post any videos without transcripts! Transcripts cost money and time to create. So now people are simply denied videos altogether. [0]
These lawsuits have done far more harm to the public than good. Because they aren't focused on actually helping users, but turning a profit for some lawyer instead.
I'm the "go to" person regarding WCAG 2.0 / ADA within my company. I actually despise my job because I don't get to spend time making our websites more accessible to users but instead spend most of my time appeasing lawyers with too much time on their hands.
> You can't rely on a lot of 3rd party code/widgets since many of them are non-compliant so now you require an in-house development team to recode a 3rd party widget to follow WCAG guidelines.
We've gotten a lot of mileage out of going nuts with "UX" and styling on the web. Maybe it's time to stop thinking about whether or not we could, and start thinking about whether or not we should.
Of course you gotta get the money folks and the designers on board or you're out of luck. A lawsuit or ten should do the trick. Though, yes, "this is bad give us money" is a place these complaints probably shouldn't be able to start.
The end result of that is an internet ran by businesses and large corps capable of affording to be on the internet. Ma & Pa shops and small restaurants may not be able to afford to have a website, which could be enough to put them out of business.
Additionally I believe that if something can benefit people by simply existing it is better to have that thing than not have it at all if some small percentage of users aren't able to use that thing. For example, the Suicide Prevention Hotline website is not fully adhering to WCAG 2.0. I'd much rather that resource exist at all for those who may need it than to not let it exist because it doesn't adhere to WCAG 2.0
It's also very much accessible enough for actual people - but not quite "free from drive-by lawsuits" territory because it doesn't fully adhere to the guidelines.
> They are and there have been many rather bullshit drive-by lawsuits in regards to them too. With no leeway to give you time to fix the problem either.
Its clear these are not just "accidental" mistakes but people ignoring the problem wholesale. Commercial entities have responsibilities under the ADA. Yes it takes extra time and money to do it - so does designing in that ramp next to the stairs.
A little goes a long way here. It would be great if even just the alt text fields were filled out. Much easier than property developers have it.
The end result is appeasing 3rd party scanners like Powermapper without actually making the site any more accessible and in some cases making it less accessible. I've had to remove ARIA labels because Powermapper flags it as a problem for some screen readers. That's right. The markup we added to make the site as accessible as we could for screen readers was flagged as an issue and we had to remove it.
My job isn't to make websites more accessible because of these lawsuits, it's to put a stop to the lawsuits by any means necessary to the detriment of everyone. To quote my earlier post, I actually despise my job because I don't get to spend time making our websites more accessible to users but instead spend most of my time appeasing lawyers with too much time on their hands.
Probably a good reason for the industry to come together and make a tool that does work then. I can see how a magic number of errors is more convincing to the average person (and court) then a bunch of expert testimony saying otherwise. The industry should control the narrative.
You can bet the construction industry has people in the room when standards are set on what sort of elevators and ramps are required.
Compliance is almost impossible for small teams. You can't rely on a lot of 3rd party code/widgets since many of them are non-compliant so now you require an in-house development team to recode a 3rd party widget to follow WCAG guidelines. Don't forget that you can't post any videos without transcripts! Transcripts cost money and time to create. So now people are simply denied videos altogether. [0]
These lawsuits have done far more harm to the public than good. Because they aren't focused on actually helping users, but turning a profit for some lawyer instead.
I'm the "go to" person regarding WCAG 2.0 / ADA within my company. I actually despise my job because I don't get to spend time making our websites more accessible to users but instead spend most of my time appeasing lawyers with too much time on their hands.
[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...