I have to disagree. Text-only is really boring. It's like a bus with no windows. Even through the dumpy parts of town, windows are preferred by most humans to no windows. Similarly, cheap graphics are often better than no graphics, as long as they are not overly obnoxious.

Our tentative plan is to keep graphics small, sparse, and vague, but we have a lot of old junk to revamp and clip out images from.

detect when [ADA] software is in use?

There is no known standard. Each "reader" vendor may send hints via HTTP header variables, but there is no guarantee they will be the same on the next version.

Plus, mirroring all the "regular" content with an ADA version is a bear. Authors would have to be diligent to keep them in sync.

Maybe if we had a clean CMS it may be possible to simply generate the appropriate content format from a single set of content (data), similar to some mobile-friendly presentation techniques, but right now we have a hodge-podge and historical baggage. Plus, if authors don't use the editor it right, it can still be out of whack, such as "fake" indenting of outlines.

Is it possible to provide an accessibility specific phone number...

We considered that, but it would probably have to be staffed 24/7 to match the website's availability. In other words, if we offer 24/7 service to "regular" readers, we must do the same for the sight-impaired callers, otherwise they could claim discrimination. It's a big org such that no one help-desk person will know everything, meaning you'd have to pay specialists to sit at the phone desk at 3am every night.

All known solutions require lots of resources we don't readily have. Management keeps pressing for an easy way out and easy, cheap answers, but I cannot give any.

Excellent questions, though.

The universe is a hall of mirrors.

I thought legal barratry had to target the same defendant repeatedly.

The iPhone got in on this somehow without all that; while Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and so forth kept their hold. Nokia went another way; Blackberry has been up and down. The manufacturers who didn't pounce on Android dropped out of the running.

It seems open-source software didn't displace those manufacturers who took advantage of the market change. What makes you think all this new technology will displace GM?

Management doesn't want to give up certain functionality. They want SOLID PROOF we must cater to the Lowest Common Denominator to not get sued more. I have none. I have no statistics on sue probabilities to give them. (This includes out of court settlements, not just court cases.)

Further, ease-of-reading is a matter of degree. Some pages if you look at raw HTML are readable verbally, but just not very "friendly". They are not outright "wrong", just not "smooth" to read that way. Such difficulty level is a continuum.

And what exactly is the lowest-common-denominator? If a brand of reader has a bug, is that the lowest?

"Regular" people usually don't know the difference, in my experience. Web designers pay more attention to the source of such images than most readers because it's their job. Maybe if your org is Gucci or BMW it matters more because such customers hone into style issues more. Either way, my org doesn't want to pay for "boosted" styling even if it were the "right" choice, marketing-wise. Not my call. They want cheap, I give them cheap. (It's mostly a side topic to ADA anyhow.)

Correction: rude tone of response, not of "request".

a simple question: "Will a blind person be able to navigate, read, and use your web site to its full extent?".

It's NOT a simple question because it depends on what software they are using, as I described. The software authors can make it do anything or not do anything they want.

Using your analogy, it would be like different brands of wheelchairs are capable of different things. When a building is being designed, it would have to target a series of wheelchair features to accommodate such wheelchairs. But if those wheelchair features are unknown and change every year, then it's a moving and fuzzy target.

And the rude tone of your request is unhelpful. It has no practical purpose. If you are an expert, then simply supply the reader with your grand knowledge rather than insult people.

It's a bit simpler than that.

There are all kinds of strategies and techniques geniuses use--the same way a woodworker uses a rotary router upon wood--to achieve maximum utility from their brain. It is a simple tool requiring skill to produce results, as you apply skill with e.g. Krita to draw a digital painting: one tool, hundreds of technical procedures to produce complex results.

One of the most primary strategies used by the greatest geniuses--not simply experts who excel in a single field of interest, but geniuses who excel at anything they attempt on a dare--is to instill motivation. They examine a problem requiring effort, understand its implications, and find a reason for interest: something they already want, or a new thing they suddenly realize a desire for, is more readily achieved by this new effort. In this way, every task, every study, every problem becomes engrossing; the individual has an unfettered desire to pursue this thing which is lain before him, and so fails to recognize the effort he puts forth, and so puts forth much effort without resistance, and so excels.

You observe simply that some things require excessive effort to gain an end not sufficiently interesting; were that end more interesting, it would be more pursued. Likewise, the closer that effort is to something interesting--if an aspect of the effort itself is discovered interesting, or if each step of progression directly translates to a useful step of progression in something else interesting--the more strongly it is pursued. Simply put: if upon completion of X you can improve Y, completing X becomes interesting because of Y; if by way of progressing toward completion of X you improve Y, X becomes interesting because it is essentially Y as well.

You observe, of course, that turning the second situation into the first is a good control for humans: if doing 10% of X grants you 10% of Y, and you do not want people interested in Y to perform X, then you must adjust the system surrounding X, Y, or both such that completing X grants Y, or such that X has less impact on Y, so as to require more effort for returns and less returns for effort.

That's true, but one product category alone is not going to keep an economy afloat. Plus, most of the money and jobs spent on their products ends up in Asia. It's not "trickle down", it's "trickle across".

China appears to gear their system (some would say "rigged") to be job-friendly rather than consumer-friendly. This is because people would riot and overthrow their dictatorial government if they had no jobs. Since they are not used to being consumers, they won't riot over lack of products. Therefore, their government subsidize exports using myriads of subtle tricks to escape the notice of "fair trade" inspectors.

Our org got hit with an ADA lawsuit recently. Our group's focus is on the web side of the lawsuit, although it encompasses many other aspects. One problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules for what an "ADA-compliant" website is.

For one, the visual-impaired assisting "reading" software is all different. Each brand reads HTML/CSS/JavaScript differently. In theory they shouldn't need to read JavaScript-generated content, but in practice they sometimes do. And building a website without reliance on JavaScript can be really tricky and limiting. If we need to accommodate all brands of reading software, we are truly F'd and might as well file bankruptcy now.

And whether an image is merely "decorative" or "informative" is fuzzy and subject to interpretation. We are starting to toss images altogether so that we don't have that risk. But our web content is growing bland, making us "look" bad to normal readers.

And we have boatloads of content that needs to be redone.

Where's the Tums! I should sue the ADA lawyers for not being "stomach friendly". Indigestion is a disability.

They wouldn't. They'd outsource that part, and keep their necessary engineers. They'd pay Apple or Google or Tesla to build their fancy displays, their self-navigation systems, and their electric battery management systems, in the same way Subaru pays Porsche to build engines and Cadillac pays Mercedes-Benz to build their suspension systems. The investment for any of these companies to build the systems of the others would be large, save Tesla who would just ensure their continuous survival by becoming the battery supplier for everyone.

It is malicious prosecution. They're setting settlement lower than cost, meaning they're not confident they can win a high-cost lawsuit. If they ever initiate prosecution, it's straight malicious prosecution; holding the threat and strategically avoiding prosecution is coercion and legal racketeering, possibly criminal directly under the RICO act, supported by pattern behavior which indicates that they believe their activities constitute malicious prosecution.

In other words: they're generating circumstantial evidence enough to demonstrate malicious intent and abuse of the legal system in court. A good prosecuting lawyer can raise a lawsuit here and argue, legally, that these people are intentionally avoiding entanglement in an actual lawsuit, and so believe themselves to be pursuing a criminal action, and are avoiding that action but using the threat as leverage for racketeering--they are attempting to extort a broad base of victims for money through illegal abuse of the courts.