> 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.
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.