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Court rules grocery store's inaccessible website isn't an ADA violation:
A federal appeals court struck a significant blow against disability rights this week when it ruled that a Florida grocery store's inaccessible website did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ruling contradicts a 2019 decision by a different appeals court holding that Domino's did violate the ADA when it failed to make its app accessible to blind people.
[...] Winn-Dixie is a grocery store chain with locations across the American South. Juan Carlos Gil is a blind Florida man who patronized Winn-Dixie stores in the Miami area for about 15 years.
A few years ago, Gil learned that the store offered customers the ability to fill prescriptions online. Ordering online saves customers time because prescriptions are ready when the customer arrives. Gill also preferred to order prescriptions online because it offered greater privacy. In court, he testified that ordering in person as a blind man made him "uncomfortable because he did not know who else was nearby listening" as he told the pharmacist his order.
Unfortunately, the Winn-Dixie website was incompatible with the screen-reading software Gil used to surf the web, rendering it effectively useless to him. Incensed, Gil stopped patronizing Winn-Dixie and filed a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Gil argued that the inaccessible design of the Winn-Dixie website discriminated against blind customers like him because it forced them to order prescriptions in person, a process that is slower and offers less privacy.
In his lawsuit, Gil also said he couldn't access two other features of the Winn-Dixie website: a store locator function and the ability to clip digital coupons and automatically apply them at the register with his loyalty card.
[...] The ruling runs directly contrary to a 2019 decision by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, which covers California and several other Western states. In 2019, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Domino's had violated the ADA by failing to make its online ordering system accessible to blind customers. Plaintiff Guillermo Robles claimed that this violated his rights under the ADA, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.
[...] Hence, while the website itself might not be a place of public accommodation, an inaccessible website impedes blind customers' access to the Domino's restaurant—which clearly is such a place.
This situation—where two different appeals courts take divergent positions on the same legal question—is known as a circuit split. For now, businesses in Western states will be required to follow the Ninth Circuit's broad interpretation of the ADA and make their websites accessible. Meanwhile, businesses in the three Eleventh Circuit states—Alabama, Georgia, and Florida—won't have to worry as much about making their websites ADA compliant.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday April 13 2021, @09:04AM (14 children)
Because cheaper location = cheaper overhead = cheaper prices = market forces favoring inaccessible businesses while penalizing and driving out accessible businesses.
Unlike the location problem which at least has real world physical limitation and considerations especially in old historical cities, the web is an entirely man-made construct to deliver text and the price point of accessible designs and technologies is entirely artificial so it's absolutely inexcusable for the industry as a whole to promote inaccessible designs and technologies as a "cheaper" alternative.
This is even worse than opposing seat belts laws: At least seat belts have some material and testing costs to them so when a company decides to market them as "premium" it really is a question of BoM. Software doesn't work like that. The development costs reflect the industry standards and little else. If the industry defaulted on accessible tech, it would have been costlier to develop an inaccessible site. We see this with delivery of text for ePublishers where the premium is to deliver watermarked images and per-generated text-to-speech as a form of DRM and it's many MANY times more costly than just deliver simple text even if you eliminate the bandwidth costs and only consider the compute and storage overhead.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @10:37AM (5 children)
What about free market? I can choose to run my business as I want, within related guidelines. In the case of a restaurant, there are food safety regulations - other than that, get off their back. Where you eat is a choice.
Otherwise what do we get next? Some person with a fear of heights will be suing a skydiving company because they did not cater for their "disability"?
As for websites - since simple HTML back in the dinosaur age, there are now so many layers you have to have a team of devs to create one that caters for most of the crazy stuff. EU's cookie laws, blind access, deaf access, armless access, colourblind access. And most websites refuse to even load now without some massive framework, ad injection and tracking spyware. My website? If you can't access it because whatever, tough. Go elsewhere - free market.
It seems the litigant was happy to use the business for 15 years but suddenly was short of cash so sued them. Snowflake loser.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday April 13 2021, @01:21PM (4 children)
>What about free market?
It's an economist's fantasy that has never existed in the history of the world. You'll have to settle for a market economy. Either heavily regulated, or dominated by a few monopolists.
> I can choose to run my business as I want, within related guidelines.
Yes you can. And one of those guidelines is that you must be handicap accessible. Otherwise basically nobody at all would support handicapped access. Even just putting a ramp on the sidewalk so wheelchairs can get out of the parking lot is more expensive than a normal curb, and it's a rare store that will have enough wheelchair-bound potential customers to be worth caring about.
>As for websites - since simple HTML back in the dinosaur age, there are now so many layers you have to have a team of devs to create one that caters for most of the crazy stuff. .......
All of that stuff is natively supported in plain, simple HTML. If it's not supported in something more complicated, it's because they chose not to support it when when building the more complicated stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @04:05PM (3 children)
A functionally free market is one in which market participants are at liberty to make their own choices, as opposed to a command economy in which choices are imposed by a planning structure of some sort. This does not preclude regulation or enforcement of things like contract law or fair trading rules either.
Describing it as a fantasy of economists is to turn your back on pretty much the whole of the twentieth century's work on economics.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:35PM (2 children)
No, that's just a market economy.
A functionally free market is one where no individual buyer or seller, nor any consortium of them, holds enough market power to be able to unilaterally influence the market price of goods.
Without that, it's a captive market which no longer adheres to the assumptions made about a free market, and is unlikely to deliver the benefits normally ascribed to them.
A free market is an economist model much akin to a physicist's spherical cow in a vacuum. It's a useful simplification for some classes of thought experiments, but is not directly relevant to the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:46PM (1 child)
Antitrust/scale management regulations are a normal part of regulation. The 19th century called, and it wants its conception of normal market regulation back. In particular, if you preclude the very notion of a consortium agreeing to collective action, you run into the problem of how a consortium could be constituted, how they'd be organised and how to identify them. In principle, any free market's participants could collude to shove the market around by combining their numbers to corner a market - labour activists call it collective bargaining and solidarity.
If you're going to define it out of existence, then sure, no such thing exists but back in the real world where real people talk about real economies, a free market comes down to participants freely engaging in offer/acceptance exchanges based on mutually agreeable terms.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday April 13 2021, @06:30PM
> In principle, any free market's participants could collude to shove the market around by combining their numbers to corner a market - labour activists call it collective bargaining and solidarity.
Yes, they could - at which point it would stop being a free market.
In practice, some commodity markets are diversified enough to approximate a free market; however, most products are not remotely diversified enough - I believe I've heard that once on actor (or group) corners just 10% of a market, that market will no longer behave as a free market.
> free market comes down to participants freely engaging in offer/acceptance exchanges based on mutually agreeable terms.
Again - that's true of *any* market, not just a free market. The alternative is something like the command economy you mention, which is NOT market-based.
All of the benefits ascribed to a free market are not magically present in just any market-based economy, only in a free market where no individual or group has enough power to influence market prices. Which is to say, they are not especially relevant to any real market, aside from the most diversified commodities.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:11AM (7 children)
Your math don't work. The cheaper location is cheaper for a reason and that reason almost certainly directly affects a business's ability to compete in the market.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday April 13 2021, @12:27PM (6 children)
Because it had 3 stair steps and/or narrow entry and/or only standing toilets and/or no fire hydrants and/or no emergency exit...
Regardless, accessibility and safety overheads tend to overlap with each other in all fields so I'd rather leave the tradeoffs to the professionals. When it comes to software, I think we both know the less accessible you are, the more crap you have under the hood ready to break down while exposing your users' data one way or another. I can think of why the same would be right for construction (narrow entry limits access for fire workers and evacuation... Steps with rails will end up with someone slipping and falling on a cold day...) so if I had to guess, they're all mostly tweaks to already existing safety regs that just don't add anything meaningful to the construction costs.
Of course, if you know any long study by some professional construction engineer make a wide argument against such regs, I'd be happy to read the abstract... Otherwise, on the software side, I'm with the accessibility people.
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(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 13 2021, @12:34PM (5 children)
I expect most of that is down to either physical limitations and/or because it's an old building and nobody gave a shit at the time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Tuesday April 13 2021, @01:55PM (4 children)
The ADA has specific exceptions for existing and historic properties as well as cost caps on how much the whole thing should cost: https://www.structuremag.org/?p=7540 [structuremag.org] https://www.burnhamnationwide.com/final-review-blog/a-misunderstood-area-of-ada-compliance-existing-facilities [burnhamnationwide.com]
Look, this is details that we shouldn't go into since we're not in construction. We know tech. We know it's entirely justifiable to demand accessibility out of web crap. But when it comes to this technical stuff... I mean, it's one thing to talk about military spending where it's all bullshit and there's no science to be had. But to construction engineers we must sound like a couple of MBAs arguing on Apple vs. Samsung... Aha now I feel bad for the construction people having to read through this :/
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:34PM (2 children)
It doesn't really ensure that people won't sue and the ADA lacks any provision to require that the injured party notify the business prior to filing suit so that the violation can be fixed. In some cases, the cases are brought for minutia that are of minimal impact to anybody. A sink that's an inch too high is not likely to be an impediment to anybody as the standard is low enough to deal with eventualities like that.
And even if what the business is doing is legal, there's no guarantee that the business isn't going to be stuck paying legal fees just to determine that's the case and deal with it. Overall, the ADA was a massive step in the right direction, it's just a shame that there's been so little interest in fixing and improving it. Trying to extend a law written to deal with real world facilities to online ones is not something that's just going to happen without a lot of unnecessary pain for all those that are involved.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday April 14 2021, @02:24AM (1 child)
There is a shyster in Los Angeles who partnered with a guy in a wheelchair to find non-compliant local businesses and sue them. The fact that the businesses were grandfathered and not *required* to comply was irrelevant; these crooks used the ADA as a bludgeon to extract money, since small businesses will usually settle rather than fight it in court. Last I heard (this was about 15 years ago) these two crooks were making a nice seven-figure income.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 14 2021, @11:51AM
And, wait, let me guess...because regulation can be abused, allllll regulation is bad, and to hell with discrimination protections because these specific shitheels gamed the system. Right? Did I fill out my bingo card?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday April 14 2021, @04:39AM
No, it's not. Unless you just have developer time and money to burn, it is a fairly significant hardship.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.