Eat your greens!

This is tiresome. I hate flamewars. Here’s a fragment of Chris Beasley’s blog comments, as it appears to me. Quite different from comments 17 and onwards on Chris’ blog. What I can’t figure out is, why aren’t my comments showing up?

17. Nick Cowie  Says:
    

    September 2nd, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    Assuming the US and Australian court systems are not that different:
    1 Most the damages will go in legal fees;
    2 If things go pear shaped Bruce Sexton can lose everything
    3 If it is so easy, why does not every shyster lawyer get every disabled person they can sue every commercial website in the US and make huge fortunes and retire to the Bahamas?

18. This Charming Jim  Says:
    Your comment is awaiting moderation.
    

    September 3rd, 2006 at 2:30 am

    “So unless you have something new to add why not stop being antagonistic and just put me on your list of people to hate and leave it at that?”

    Mate, I don’t have a list of people to hate. Even if I did, you wouldn’t be on it, okay? I think you’re the one that ’sees enemies where there are none’ here.

    By the way, I’m not a Socialist either. I voted Liberal Democrat in the last election.

    Re. quotes taken out of context, you really should provide a link so that people can make their own minds up. Here’s the URL of the post that started all this fuss in the first place. I believe the comment in question was number 59:

    http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346162&page=3&pp=25

    Cheerio

19. Chris  Says:

    September 3rd, 2006 at 5:52 am

    1. About 30%, to these predatory lawyers.
    2. No, unfortunately in US courts the plaintiff doesn’t lose everything if their lawsuit is found to be without merit.
    3. They do, not everyone because some people atleast have ethics. Predatory personal injury lawyers go out seeking any possible client, and many so called professional-plaintiffs engineer repeated injuries or injustices for themselves that their job is literally suing people for money. They have no other employment.

    Here are some links: 1 2 3 4 5 6

    This legal climate is directly responsible for shaping my opinion on the matter. The US is such a litigious society at the moment and it really irks myself and many others.

20. This Charming Jim  Says:
    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    September 3rd, 2006 at 7:09 am

    Hmmm, I see my most recent comment (after Nick Cowie’s, before yours) is “awaiting moderation.”

    Oh well, I posted my response on my blog. Comments are welcome (and uncensored)
    http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/archives/2006/09/alone_and_easy.html

Welcome, comrade, to a new post from the glittering proletarian utopia that is the People’s Republic of Jimbo. Yes, that’s right folks, all of a sudden I’m a socialist. Or so says avowed capitalist, libertarian (and, thus, Enemy of the People) Chris Beasley. He also states on his blog:

“…why not stop being antagonistic and just put me on your list of people to hate and leave it at that?”

My list of people to hate? I don’t have one. But I suppose my shiny new Socialist Republic needs one, if only to deal with counter-revolutionaries and other malcontents. I don’t know, precisely, what I’ll do to them but it’ll be something pretty darn nasty. Oh yes indeedy.

Chris is angry because of a lawsuit brought against the retail store Target on behalf of a blind customer, Bruce Sexton. Mr Sexton, a student at Berkeley, cannot shop online at Target because their website will not work with the screenreading software he uses to browse the web. He approached the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), who then approached Target on his behalf. The NFB negotiated with Target about making their online store accessible to blind people. Those negotiations broke down and the NFB took Target to court in California.

Under Californian State Law, a bricks-and-mortar business is required to make their place of business physically accessible to handicapped people. It is unclear whether the same law extends to online businesses. Under the Golden Rule, however, it’s possible that a court may decide that the intention, rather than literal meaning, of the law may be that businesses in California should not discriminate against whom they do business, on the basis of disability, regardless of the physical circumstance. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Chris Beasley argues that the NFB’s motive in this case is greed, not accessibility for blind people. They have brought the case to reap huge damages and live off the profits. To my mind, only one type of person gets rich off of legal action – lawyers. If this case is resolved on behalf of the NFB, I’ll bet the majority of the damages will go to covering their legal costs. Samuel Johnson, I think, said it best:

“There ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.”

It’s unfortunate that this has gone as far as a legal action. I don’t believe that suing companies under existing disability legislation is the best way to promote web accessibility. The business case for accessibility alone should be enough to convince any rational capitalist. An accessible website lowers your costs and wins you extra customers. In this case, Target were approached out-of-court about the inaccessibility of their website. When that approach failed, the next step was, unfortunately, legal action.

So young gribley, inspired by my good self, posted something a while back about youtube as “the neutron bomb of copyright violations.” Then I came across this link to somewhere in the region of 1,500 music videos from twenty years ago.

Looking through that list, I realised youtube isn’t just an archive of hair metal and androgynous new romantics – there’s a whole bunch of eighties hardcore and punk on there too. So I’ve been wasting time this evening finding ropey old videos of Husker Du, the Dead Boys, Dead Kennedys and, of course, the Minutemen. Here’s ‘A Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing’:

• Jeffrey Veen is somewhere in the region of 8345 ft tall, striding the world like a laid-back, rather casual colossus. Despite this, his publicity photo was taken from a vantage point somewhere above his head. Either a) the photo was snapped from a passing aircraft or b) somewhere out there is a photographer who is taller than Jeff Veen. Think about it.
• Molly Holzschlag moves constantly. She’s some kind of living embodiment of Heisenberg’s principle that position and velocity cannot be determined simultaneously.
• Every web design course should have at least one class where students have to watch videos of disabled people using the web. Hell, I’d like to see some education on how disabled people use e-mail, write HTML or compose Word documents.
• Jeremy Keith makes the sort of insights that, when you hear them, you think “that’s so perfectly sensible, it seems almost obvious.” Eg. Don’t use mysterious Javascript pixie magic to provide an essential function on your web page. Yet noone thinks of these things until Jeremy points them out. I really, really need to read his book.
• Eric Meyer liked my Mission of Burma shirt. Woo!
• Did you like my semantically correct use of the cite tag in the previous item?
• Lots of people made notes by typing (live-blogging, I believe it’s called by the cool kids) on expensive looking Mac laptops. How do they draw diagrams, or doodle?
• Mac laptops are shiny and desirable. Mmmmm, my precious…
• The web dev community are some of the most open, friendly and approachable people in the world. I wish I’d had the chance to speak to more people.
• Some of the accessify folks came down to Greenwich on Saturday, which gave me a chance to play with the 28-inch telescope. Photos are up on Flickr from Dan Champion and Karl Dawson.