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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: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday April 13 2021, @10:24PM (2 children)
This court decided that the ADA applies to physical spaces and not to a website. The ninth circuit decided otherwise.
But how would a website even be judged to be accessible or not? No matter how terrible the website is, it wouldn't be impossible for a screen reader to be created that did work with it (at least until the next website update that breaks everything). Did the plaintiff try every screen reader known to man and they all failed? Or did he only try it on the screen reader that his cousin made once upon a time for Internet Explorer 3.0?
It's hard to see how someone could argue that a website failed to meet a standard when a million monkeys with a million keyboards IS the only standard.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:07PM
Close eyes, make successful purchase.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:50PM
There are standards out there for how to build a website that will work with a screenreader or other accessibility software. That's been the case for decades. But, people choose to do things that break screen readers without really providing anything useful to people who can read the screen just fine anyways. It's been ages since I created any websites, but IIRC, using bold tags was discouraged because it wouldn't properly go through a screen reader, but using strong would. Both of them at the time would look the same, but for whatever reason one would work with the screen reader and the other wouldn't. Similarly, tables create huge problems for screen readers as there are various ways in which the same table can be read depending upon what you want to do with it. A screen reader wouldn't know how.
It shouldn't be the responsibility of the screen reader maker to figure out all the janky ways that a commercial website can be created in order to read it correctly. The professionals putting up the site should be able to follow the best practices for writing a site that screen readers can deal with. It's not typically that big of a deal for common formats of website.