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FCC mandates all mobile phones in the US to be compatible with hearing aids
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Can’t speak to PC UI, but for the web, “public good” entities and government institutions have to follow ADA guidelines on usability for differently-abled people. Weird, because the law says this but does not get specific on what exactly must be done to be compliant. The gist is that those entities are “supposed to” follow WCAG, although those are only guidelines and not mandates.
I work in healthcare and our org, although we made best effort to make our site accessible for screen readers, color impairment issues, etc, we were still sued (lawsuit was a bit of a shakedown) and are now working to address and remediate each item in the suit with a third party. We want to be fully compliant but as of yet, there isn’t a “set of rules” that we can all look to make these sites compliant (basically just a bunch of suggestions). Weird times we live in.
Same thing over on education. US government entities down to the local level have to comply with WCAG 2.1 by April 2026 iorc, with some exceptions for content created before the cutoff. The exceptions aren't clearly defined which is causing me a bit of a headache.
I mean, I'd love for all of our legacy documents and images to magically get image descriptions and quality OCR, but the archives have a terabyte of images and PDFs. It doesn't help that the ruling uses "archives" to mean "legacy stuff unlikely to be used" and we use "archives" to mean "stuff about the history of the college, which students are encouraged to consult".
Anyways, I'm all for accessibility. It's good. I'm just borrowing worries from tomorrow about implementation.
I just had the thought that some of our documents are handwritten in ye olde handwriting. That will be the biggest pain in the neck to transcribe. (Shout-out to Transkribus for making it suck less, but it'll still need to be proofread). I worry that we'll scan and post fewer of our documents going forward if we have to provide a transcription when we post them.
As I see this, it requires support (at least consideration) in used technologies\standards\frameworks.
Gopher or Gemini or webpages from year 1998 more or less have that. Today's "responsive and dynamic" Web with very complex DOM with nonsense random identifiers and bloated structure - does not.
Similar for user applications - around years 1998 the paradigm with UIs was of normal engineering and ergonomics, to keep the window open for possibilities, even when not readily usable with screen readers and such.
Considering how the early Web is remembered as a refuge for "weird" people where the "normal" people wouldn't impose their ape world upon others, and considering that the fashion that changed those industry commonalities came from bigger companies, I sometimes get conspiracy-minded and think that someone must fear or just hate ND people.