WHEREAS, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is a comprehensive civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability; and
WHEREAS, to assist Americans with disabilities in asserting our rights under the ADA, Congress included a private right of action, which has assisted Americans with disabilities to secure landmark victories that have opened doors in employment, education, commerce, and other arenas; and
WHEREAS, under Department of Justice interpretation and court rulings, ADA Title III applies not only to physical places of public accommodation but also to their websites; and
WHEREAS, many websites are inaccessible to blind people who use screen readers to access digital content and to other people with disabilities; and
WHEREAS, a small group of plaintiffs and attorneys are exploiting the situation by filing dozens, occasionally hundreds, of lawsuits all at once or in rapid succession; and
WHEREAS, rather than acknowledging that website inaccessibility is a real and growing problem, some business groups and media outlets have focused on this behavior as evidence that the ADA is merely a tool for greedy lawyers to extort quick cash settlements from businesses; and
WHEREAS, this largely misplaced blame for ADA lawsuits has led to the introduction, and in some cases enactment, of state legislation that places onerous burdens on people and organizations who wish to bring legitimate complaints under the ADA, as well as attempts to enact federal legislation that would have the same effect; and
WHEREAS, even if litigants act in good faith and with noble intentions, blanketing a geographic area or business type with lawsuits often does not meaningfully advance the cause of accessibility because the litigants may lack the resources or the commitment to investigate each lawsuit thoroughly, and many lawsuits brought in this way are settled quickly and confidentially, thereby failing to hold public accommodations accountable for true progress toward making their websites accessible: Now, therefore
BE IT RESOLVED by the National Federation of the Blind in Convention assembled this eleventh day of July, 2019, in the City of Las Vegas, Nevada, that this organization urge members of the legal community to engage in responsible, ethical, and transparent behavior when pursuing ADA litigation, including contacting targeted entities to try to resolve accessibility issues without litigation where possible and appropriate and to draw up public settlement agreements that outline the specific steps to be taken by an entity to achieve accessibility and the anticipated timeline for those steps to be completed; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that this organization reaffirm its opposition to any legislation, state or federal, that seeks to shift the burden of compliance from the entities to people with disabilities affected by noncompliance; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that this organization continue to work collaboratively with the policymaking, legal, business, and web development communities to advance accessibility, while not hesitating to commence litigation if needed.

The only thing I could think to add to this resolution would be a clause urging people with disabilities to act ethically and responsibly regarding aDA litigation. There’s quite a cottage industry of blind people who are all too willing to participate in the unethical practices of law firms like the ones engaging in the unethical behavior highlighted here. I understand that there are several reasons for the participation of blind people, and I think there needs to be an open, honest discussion within our community around all of this. So maybe my addition should be a resolution for next year. For now though, I think the NFB deserves a lot of credit for bringing this matter up as a policy suggestion for the organization, and I really do hope it passes. Good job to whichever member wrote this, and to the organization as a whole for not dismissing it.

Both MIT and Harvard have argued in court filings that they should not be required to provide closed captions for every video they create or host on their websites. After the institutions’ first attempt to dismiss the cases was denied, there was a yearlong attempt to reach a settlement out of court. When that attempt failed, the universities again moved to dismiss the cases.
Judge Katherine A. Robertson of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts largely rejected the universities’ second attempt to dismiss the cases. On March 28, Robertson denied the institutions’ pleas for the exclusion of their websites from Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Title III of the ADA prohibits disability discrimination by “places of public accommodation.” Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs that receive federal funding.

My eyes are stuck in the rolled position, and this time I think it’s permanent. I may be missing something, but the only exception for captions in WCAG SC 1.2.2 or its “Understanding” documentation is for content which is a transcript of the video or audio. I’m not deaf, and I’m getting tired of the excuses for lack of captions or transcriptions. How many times does some variation of “it’s not popular enough” or “I can’t afford it” or “it’s too hard” have to be tossed out? People and organizations will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on audio or video equipment, only to then not caption or transcribe the content they create. And Harvard and MIT both are schools which could afford to transcribe their content, so hearing from them that they care about accessibility as long as it means they don’t have to caption all of their content is especially galling. I suppose if we’re talking about a podcast that’s just starting out, or a one-man shop, I could see why you might not come out of the gate with captions/transcripts. But even that only works to a point. If you’re pouring hundreds of dollars into a good headset or other higher-end audio equipment, then at some point you should be making arrangements for captions or transcriptions. It goes without saying that Harvard and MIT aren’t in the one-man-shop category.

Steps To Reproduce

You must be running the latest version of Jetpack. If it’s not showing up in your updates, it will soon if you have it installed. I’ve run the update on my personal site, and got the following results when testing.

I searched for Jetpack’s sharing feature by typing the word “sharing” without quotes into the search box on the plugins/add new page. I specifically have this feature disabled. What came back is the following.

Aftere searching, and the page refreshes, the first thing I find on the page when navigating by headings after searching is “Jetpack: Sharing” at heading level three, just like every other search result on the page. Next, in the list below the heading with a link, (which normally contains a link to install the plugin and a link to learn more about it), I find a button labelled “enable”, followed by the traditional “Learn more” link.

Next, there’s a description of the feature:

Add Twitter, Facebook and Google+ buttons at the bottom of each post, making it easy for visitors to share your content.

The plugin author name follows directly after this, and in this case it’s Automattic.

Next is a graphic without alternative text, which I can only assume is the Jetpack logo or maybe the Automattic logo. No matter what it is though, so far the only thing distinguishing this from a standard search result is the replacement of the “install” link with an “enable” button, and this graphic. Otherwise it looks like a standar search result. Now onto the other very minor differences.

Under the graphic without alternative text, the following text appears:

Jetpack is trusted by millions to help secure and speed up their WordPress site. Make the most of it today.

Marketing copy complete with a call-to-action.

And now, for dismissing the suggestion. There’s some text that says “Hide this suggestion”, and although this appears to not be associated with any discernible element while using a screen reader, if you press enter on it, the suggestion disappears. However, your focus jumps down to the nex item in the list, past the heading to the end of the list with the two links, so you have to press shift-H to navigate back to the heading to find out what you’re even working with.

The focus management and alternative text issues are fixable, as is the semantics of the “Hide this suggestion” thing. However, all of this seems confusing at best, requiring me to pay extra attention to what’s going on on this screen. I spend a fair amount of time in the WordPress administration panel, and I expect that between plugins, themes, admin notifications, and WordPress in general, these screens are going to change. However, needing to pay extra attention to the plugin search screen so I can avoid accidentally enabling a Jetpack feature due to something that is definitely an advertisement dressed up to look like a search result is absolutely not OK. I knew what was coming, and I still needed to focus on what I was doing to a much more greater degree. Anyone who doesn’t realize they have Jetpack installed, (and this happens a lot considering that hosts install it automatically in a lot of cases), is not going to spend the bit of extra time to pay closer attention to what’s going on, and therefore will enable a feature, at which point they then will need to dig through settings to find where it’s buried once they realize they’ve enable something they don’t want, or God help them when there’s a conflict with something on their site, as their was with the Jetpack sharing buttons markup and the Microformats 2 markup on my personal site, which prompted me to disable the sharing buttons in the first place since I prioritize correct markup over whether or not someone can click something to share my post.

All of this looks incredibly shady, even with the consideration of the stated intentions behind it, and I find myself asking: who dictated the design and development requirements of this user experience? It may be designed to be visually separate from the rest of the search, I don’t know. I haven’t gone through the CSS. But it sure as hell isn’t very different markup-wise, and yeah, that makes me kind of angry. I suspect anyone who encounters this without knowing anything about it, or any of the humans involved, is going to be angrier, never mind feeling tricked, and I really think this was completely avoidable.

If a user searches for a plugin that has a feature that is already offered by Jetpack, the plugin will insert an artificial (and dismissible) search result into the first plugin card slot, identifying the corresponding Jetpack feature.

This is so far over the line of what’s acceptable and what’s not, it’s not funny. I’d be livid if any other plugin did this, and the fact that Automattic is doing it, combined with its incredibly large amount of influence over the WordPress ecosystem, is enough to make me seriously consider uninstalling Jetpack from every one of my sites. The WordPress dashboard and administration screens are already choked with advertisements and useless nags thanks to other plugins and themes. The fact that Automattic is essentially giving this a blessing is, I suspect, going to make this problem worse than it is. The web is supposed to be independent and decentralized. Automattic is supposed to be helping to ensure that an open, independent web survives, or at least that’s what its CEO appears to be leading us to believe. Driving an ecosystem to use the features of one plugin over everything else is an attempt at centralization, which is obviously in direct opposition to an open, decentralized web. Getting back to the accessibility question, while Jetpack does some of the things it does reasonably accessibly, does this mean that Automattic is going to put some extra muscle behind making sure that every one of its features are accessible? If you’re going to exercise undue influence over plugin search results, effectively cutting off the air supply of anything that may provide a Jetpack feature more accessibly, then you take on the responsibility of ensuring that accessibility is looked after. I think I already know the answer to these questions, but I decided to pose them just in case. You know, in case I happen to be dead wrong in my supposition. At the end of the day though, I’d rather Automattic just not game the plugin search results.

Next has become the first major British high street retailer to sell more to its customers online than through its network of more than 500 stores.
The historic crossover came at the start of the new financial year in February, according to chief executive Lord Wolfson, with the gap set to widen rapidly through 2019.
It will send further shockwaves through a battered retail sector already struggling to adapt to the accelerating shift from “bricks and mortar” to digital sales.

Wolfson hails this as a thing worth embracing, saying that people in small provincial towns now have the same buying options as those who shopped on Oxford Street ten years ago. Everybody wins, right? Not exactly.

If you’re a person with a disability, Next has gone to the trouble of building a separate website which supposedly cators to the needs of those who need accessibility. Problem is, separate is not equal, and it never has been.

This is another one of those conversations we shouldn’t be having at this point in the web’s history. For one thing, as already mentioned, separate is not equal, and even law/policy, as incoherent as it is, agrees on this, at least when it comes to certain industries.

For another thing, separate websites for people with disabilities are often not maintained, (looking at you, Amazon), and are a resource vampire for both the establishment for which they’re built as well as any web design or development staff, in or out of house. If anyone seriously suggested thata we build separate websites for phones, tablets, large screens and watches, they’d be laughed out of the room by pretty much anyone who builds or designs things for the web. No one would dream of wastiing time and resources like that. So why is it still all too common to see large organizations building separate websites for people with disabilities?

Web-based discrimination is just as unacceptable as real-world discrimination. It’s not OK to build separate but equal for browsers, and it’s not OK to build separate but equal for people either, and people with disabilities are people first and foremost. Seriously, if you’re a web developer or designer and you’re being asked to build a separate site for accessibility purposes, please push back on this. I’m not going to lie, you may have to walk awa from a contract or to. We, however, are the only ones who can really change this situation. These things wouldn’t be built unless we as an industry weren’t willing to put in the elbow grease to build them. We’re not just pairs of hands, and if we as an industry could manage to move the needle from building one-size-fits-all websites to building websites responsively, then we can move the separate but equal needle too. Let’s do this already.