I’m a software developer working on a Major Open Source learning system.

I can’t comment on the litigious nature of the US as I am based elsewhere, but I have often found the WCAG guidelines to be a bit useless.

Often you’ll find that following the required colours for contrast makes things extremely limiting in terms of the overall look and feel, and that the required focus and keyboard navigation makes the site less intuitive to use for sighted users rather than being complementary.

My biggest frustration, however, is the discrepancy between screen readers’s browser compatibility. You can follow every WCAG and ARIA guideline, but when you break out the screen reader you find that it does not behave as expected. You also find huge discrepancies between each of the screen readers and how they behave. For example JAWS, NVDA, and Chromevox all behave differently when encountering an image with an alt tag in a link with a title.

It does seem like that is getting better and they are gradually improving, but the follow up issue is that it’s pretty difficult to teach yourself how to use the screen reader when you are full stack and not designing and using a screen reader all the time. The JAWS guides are not very clear and you have to actually dig to find out what the JAWS key is because all of the documentation just refers to it as the JAWS key. They also don’t say which browsers they support best and you have to do a lot of hunting. I realise that isn’t an issue for most people but for developers whose job is not solely focused around accessibility it can be a huge hurdle.

As I say, it is improving, but it can be challenging.

Most developers coming to work with us have never heard of screen readers, and do not know what ARIA or WCAG are. They’ve heard of alt tags and titles, but they provide limited or mixed benefits.

So in terms of the over-litigious nature, whilst I think it’s good to highlight poor websites and work to improve them it is far from easy at this time, and the standards themselves are not clear or not well implemented and therefore that it’s unreasonable to expect companies to meet standards of that nature.

This firm doesn't sound like it might be any better than the litigious drive-by lawyers. It is preying on fear of litigation rather than actually suing. The law may be ambiguous but that is a function of making somewhat timeless and evolving but the standards based on existing case law are pretty clear; W3C WCAG 2.0 AA is internationally accepted as a baseline appropriate standard for public web sites. This deferral to standards is no different than the ADA relying on building codes for determination of acceptable physical disability standards.

Where is the evidence that anyone has actually been put out of business by web accessibility demands? There have been many urban legend-grade stories about the one time that some bad lawyers did it to this one restaurant or company which seem to be mostly based on stories about physical accommodations being repurposed for a new boogeyman. It sounds like a more useful sales tool or political pitch than reality.

Basic web accessibility is not super hard or expensive. Done up front it adds a small percentage to the cost of developing the website and a modest amount for basic testing. If you have followed HTML best practices than you are probably pretty accessible already. Remediation of an existing site can be more expensive but it certainly isn't 10x expensive or even 2x expensive than the cost of developing the site in the first place.

One thing to avoid is the specialized mitigation tools; "Pay us a fee and we'll install a magic plugin that makes your site accessible without any work. Guaranteed, we'll even give you a seal" These are uniformly a waste of money and provide very limited benefit if any. They can also hinder the accessibility in some cases.

If the firm is offering any form of site certification or badges that doesn't also come with indemnification then they are definitely just FUD trolls.

Accessibility Developer here. It's a crazy time to be in the accessibility world. The amount of lawsuits has tripled in the last few years and without federal legislation, or guidance from the DOJ it's the wild west. $1 might lead the way in setting some state guidelines. But as the article mentions there are so many difficult things to consider the most important being - you can have a website that is 100% WCAG 2.1 AA compliant and completely have an utterly terrible user experience for screen reader users. What then?


We all know these 'form letter' lawsuits are self-serving and not well-intentioned but at least in my experience it at least gets me the budget I need to run my audits, pay my testers and get my work done in a large company that should be doing it. The latest trend is to go after nursing home websites, whose management doesn't have the technical knowledge or budget to fix issues and that definitely feels grosser.


In this thread a few people have the sentiment that web accessibility is 'easy' and in theory that's true, good color scheme, semantic HTML and some alt tags will get you pretty far. However, due to $1, you have backend developers writing really poor div soup JSX (or really, importing someone else's componentized really poor div soup JSX) instead of a someone who actually knows HTML and knows that you can't just add an alt tag to a div (true story) and call it a day.


It's not just bad code though, there's also increased complexity in how we build things and how the screen reader technology keeps up. For example, when something on the page changes we as developers are supposed to inform screen reader users of that change, cool we've got aria-live='polite' we'll just put that attribute on things that change and it will be read to the screen reader user when it updates. Except that every screen reader supports aria-live differently and they don't chain aria-live messages, so good luck trying to get your quantity selector to let the user know why they don't qualify for that promotion anymore.

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Accessibility can be really hard, too.

If it is a service that is literally stopping us from leading a professional life, then yes, I see reason for a suit. Obviously, it would be preferable to not have to do this. The best way is for the affected parties to write the company and explain the situation, and they resolve the accessibility issues. The less we have to get involved in legal processes, the better. Not only that, but seeing a bunch of blind people yelling and screaming doesn't make us look good to the wider world. That being said, there are definitely reasons to fight for what we should have access to, and stand firm when we're not getting results. It isn't good when business solutions aren't accessible, we have problems enough finding jobs and getting hired, for there then to be barriers in the workplace... So I also have mixed feelings about it.

I'm glad that this problem is localised to only the US. My thoughts are that small businesses should not be forced to comply with web accessibility standards because these standards are 1) not even explicit in the Americans with Disabilities Act, and 2) very costly to implement correctly. Though accessibility should be the goal for every business operating a website, litigation is not the way to achieve it for very small businesses. Though I might be sad I can't go to a restaurant's website and read their menu, I realise that the restaurant has much bigger problems than "can one blind customer read my menu?" Before people start attacking my position, I want to make it quite clear that larger businesses really should have accessible websites.

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It could be a situation where the person bringing the lawsuits has to justify their position/salary. I have seen that happen many times. Personally, I am all for access but not for the bureaucracy it entails. I have found most small business owners more than accommodating. If I can’t navigate their website, I just call them. A lot of rules and regulations are unnecessary or onerous to small business owners. (My dad was a small business owner)

I don’t like the idea of small businesses being sued on my behalf. These laws are used by massive corporations to remove competition because only they can afford to comply.

Am I misunderstanding, or is the firm your fiancé works for really being pretty unethical here? Maybe she needs a new job?

I support them if they scare people in to making their sites accessible.

I’m responsible for a web site for my school (I’m the media coordinator and I teach too) and we have a very specific list of things we have to do to ensure complained with ADA. Most are adding alternative text to images and the like, but there’s a good sized list I was given when I started this gig.