Accessibility failure can hurt you

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html

I'm sure they thought blind people were not their target audience since they would call to order instead of trying to use their website. Who cares, Domino's is enormous. They've got hundreds of millions to burn. :-p

 

... and this is EXACTLY the type of thing I'm brought in to fix BEFORE you get as far as the Supreme Court. But no, they're a big giant corporation and this is just one guy bitching about it, so who cares about the blind? No, it's a frivolous lawsuit over failing to meet laws like the ADA, of course it is.

... and you can bet your sweet bippy that their developers in house fed the suits the exact same LIES we've seen in our discussions here from certain parties as to why it "doesn't matter". "Everybody does it this way instead of properly", "oh it would cost more or take more time", "they're not our target audience"... JUST more lame excuses to cover up for not just ignorance, incompetence and ineptitude -- no, it's not that simple. It's part of the ongoing FRAUD that are the majority of web developers at this point!

So now they've lost a case that's cost thousands of times more than it should have cost to just do the job properly in the first place.

From the lack of semantics, to the lack of separation of presentation from content, to the scripttardery that acts as the sole means of functionality instead of providing enhancement, their site like many others is an epic /FAIL/ at web development, and is PRECISELY why these sleazy dirtbags telling businesses it's entirely acceptable to slop out pages using turdpress, bootcrap, jquery, react, angular, vue, laravel, npm, and all the other idiotic BULLSHIT that's hot and trendy are doing nothing more than saddling up clients and taking them for a ride.

Again, something made all the more astoundingly dumbass by the fact nearly every claim made about these dipshit "frameworks" and ignorance of basic semantics holds water like a sieve. "Easier", "Simpler", "faster", "makes us more productive", "Good for collaboration"... BULLCOOKIES!!!

You know what might be easier, simpler, faster, productive, and good for collaboration? Having the alleged professionals actually grasp the concepts and basics of using the underlying languages PROPERLY instead of acting like glorified secretaries transcribing works they don't even understand; much less have the mental fortitude to recognize for the utter garbage they are!

Seriously, go to their website and "view source"... It's a train wreck of inaccessible broken scripttardery CLEARLY made by people unqualified to write a single damned line of HTML. Crapping the media queries into the markup like it's still 2008? Overstuffed keywords <meta>? ZERO actual markup pertaining to CONTENT because the scripttard went and AJAX'd in all the bloody content telling large swaths of users to go F*** themselves?

Worst of all, they'll likely do what a few hospitals I've dealt with did. Refuse to change a damned thing despite the courts ruling against them, pay the initial fine, and the continue to pay fines rather than "Waste" the five to twenty k or so it should take to fix... because fixing it might require firing a few of "their boys" in-house, or admitting that their IT staff isn't actually qualified to do their huffing jobs!

 

Oh, and the laugh about this is they clearly missed the POINT of the Internet -- where TEXT is king. We say "content is king" a lot, but the first class citizen of content is TEXT... so as you said, when they think "The blind aren't in our target audience" -- they have utterly and completely missed the POINT of the Internet.

Text -- well crafted with semantic markup -- is often easier for the visually impaired given devices like screen readers, braille readers, etc, etc,... But people without afflictions don't think in those terms. THINK about it, rather than needing someone to read them the menu, or having to try and find a braille menu, they would/could/should be able to go to a website and BOOM, have a menu. Even if they were to call in the order, simply having a clean, accessible, well marked up menu -- NOT EVEN FIVE MINUTES WORK FOR A COMPETENT DEVELOPER -- is instant accessibility for everyone.

But instead, look at the scripting heavy drilldown crap you have to deal with in DimeABlow's order system. They actually have crafted it to not only be inaccessible for large swaths of users, it's near impossible to find "menu item" prices or even a flat list of what's actually available. Unless you're using one of their 'coupons' (aka normal menu price masquerading as a coupon, aka sleazy predatory marketing bullshit) you have no idea your total order price until checkout? /FAIL/ at user interface design! A failure likely driven by "marketing experts" who need to do the world a favor and go the blazes back to working in print.

It's not even a good system for sighted users. Sure, it LOOKS great... but it has severe usability issues across the board before we even get as far as the accessibility woes. In fact, the entire site interface reeks of "false simplicity" -- they've thrown so much scripting and art at it trying to make it LOOK easy, they've actually made it harder to do what people go to their site to actually do! PLACE AN ORDER!!!

Made all the worse by the fact that it's "JS for everything" on a site where the ONLY thing that should probably be scripted -- or at least "require" scripting, is the "order progress" page once people have placed their order.

Thing is, most normal users KNOW these pages are shit. They see these little problems and niggles but lack the knowledge to articulate it, or have become so accustomed to websites being shit, that the shit peddling dirtbag scam artists with their endless stream of lame excuses and bullshit claims get away with it.