So by that logic we shouldn't bother with wheelchair ramps because nearly the entire population has working legs. Nor should we bother with Braille on signs, since nearly the entire population can see just fine.
I've had to do the reverse... building an accessible application meeting specification requirements because it's used by government bodies. On the flip side, the core functionality of the application (reviewing scanned documents) requires a sighted person to use it.
It really does and should be determined by the specific use case. Yes, most sites should be and many are pretty accessible by default. Using Axe, Wave, Lighthouse and other tools is easy enough and should absolutely be done as part of a web application's development. That doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't do it is someone who should be ostracized and cancelled by reactionary mobs.
Any software professional knows just as well as I that these concerns are specialized and people with a particular interest in complying with these special use cases are paid for their particular interest and capability in worrying about, and complying with, regulations within the realm of assistive access.
Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly, not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised groups of people.
EDIT: Even if we were just to stick to the US, only 2.7 million people use a wheelchair here. That's 0.9 percent of the US population. That's really, REALLY freakin' specialized. Don't stoop to heaving virtue my way when the facts hurt.
EDIT#2: Perhaps you can quantify your ridiculous statement by telling me how the developer of this [0] application should be punished for not building assistive access into his GPLv2 project, and how he should have & could have actually done so.
Why wouldn't I? Your argument appears to boil down to "well not caring about blind users is the status quo, so no reason to change it". I can guarantee you there were similar attitudes among construction workers and architects before wheelchair ramps became mandatory in various jurisdictions (and hell, even after): "well the vast majority of people wanting to enter this building have working legs, so why should I be assed to build a ramp when a staircase will do?".
If you can't be assed to write software that's accessible to blind people, then that is - by definition - discrimination against them. It's not even hard to make a web page reasonably accessible; plain HTML (with or without CSS) is typically perfectly usable with a screen reader, and it's only when that gets mucked up by a tangled mess of DOM-mangling JS (or Flash or Java or Silverlight once upon a time) that anyone needs to actually put any significant effort into accessibility.
> Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly, not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised groups of people.
The whole point of the ADA (and its counterparts in some other developed nations), is that building solutions that are also usable by people with disabilities should no longer be an edge case, but the default.
> building solutions that are also usable by people with disabilities should no longer be an edge case, but the default.
should be the thing we pursue. This will happen when people who care about assistive access technologies finally make solutions that are easy to implement into normal contemporary software development workflow. Online video had the same challenges but due to corporate and commercial interests we solved that problem already, arguably a much harder problem to solve than assistive access. I know because for many years I worked on precisely these kinds of assistive access concerns in the audiobooks industry. I am certain that we are not there yet, but we will get there one day.
BUT...
> The whole point of the ADA
None of this is the point of the ADA. The only "whole point" of the ADA is to regulate particular aspects to certain commercial and government services/products.
I love automatic door openers for those days I have to heft some big dumb package in and out of the office.
... and I'm extremely confident that without the law forcing them to, no office I ever worked in would have spent $2,200 per door on that feature, no matter how useful it is to everyone on the odd day.
At this point it would be cheaper to make a large investment into Boston Dynamics to develop walking chairs, instead of continuing with ramps and other things meant to accommodate wheelchairs.
It doesn't until the robots become cheap enough, but even before that baby strollers are much less sensitive to some amount of stairs than wheelchairs are.
Do you want fewer small businesses? Do you want everything to be more expensive for everyone? There are jobs where people realistically have to be able to carry over 50 pounds. Not everyone can do that, do you want anything over 50# to simply be banned?
Why are “number of small businesses” and “price of goods and services” relevant metrics here? We don’t create accessibility laws because of economics, we do it because it’s the right thing to do. If that means fewer small businesses, so be it.
Because not everything can, or should be usable by all of the population... Should all countertops have adjustable motors to change height before you can sell a house? Someone who is 6'7" tall can't really use the same counters comfortably as someone in a wheelchair.
The fact is, nothing is, has been or ever will be completely fair. And that's okay. Everyone makes decisions based on their environment. Most accessibility laws are only applicable to organizations of a certain size, which isn't even most
You're arguing scale, and I agree that it's probably not possible to make everything accessible (not until we get those brain-controlled robots, anyway ;) ).
But if the question is "Where do you set the bar," we already have laws for that. Are they too many?
I think in some cases yes, in others not so much... I mean in Cali, there are places that literally don't have a restroom for customers because of risk of suit over buildings nearly half a century old.
For others, maybe not as much. In the end, it's a balancing game, and I keep seeing discussion (especially political) lose all sense of nuance or negotiation.
