At 2:08 PM -0500 2/28/01, Adam Shostack wrote:

So, this web page doesn't work without javascript. I find that somewhat ironic, because you'd think that the ABA would be aware of the Americans With Disabilities act, which requires a reasonable accomodation; in this case that accomodation would be one less line of html (the meta-equiv refresh line)

The ADA does not require writers, whether lawyers or novelists or whatever, to write their material in ways that the blind can read, that retarded persons can understand, or that the Java-less can process. (Though I admit that many of these rent-seeking vipers would of course _like_ the ADA to be extended to cover such things, if only to increase the rent they can collect in thousands of lawsuits.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

At 6:11 PM -0500 2/28/01, Adam Shostack wrote:

On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 02:48:07PM -0800, Tim May wrote: | | At 2:08 PM -0500 2/28/01, Adam Shostack wrote: | >So, this web page doesn't work without javascript. I find that | >somewhat ironic, because you'd think that the ABA would be aware of | >the Americans With Disabilities act, which requires a reasonable | >accomodation; in this case that accomodation would be one less line of | >html (the meta-equiv refresh line) | | The ADA does not require writers, whether lawyers or novelists or | whatever, to write their material in ways that the blind can read, | that retarded persons can understand, or that the Java-less can | process. | | (Though I admit that many of these rent-seeking vipers would of | course _like_ the ADA to be extended to cover such things, if only to | increase the rent they can collect in thousands of lawsuits.)

Actually, if they can do so with reasonable accommodation, I think it does. (Note that its not writers, but publishers, who I think may have the "reasonable accommodation" requirement.)

Nope. Some books are published with Braille versions, but the vast majority are not. Ditto for large print editions, editions printed with letters reversed so that lysdexics can read them, etc. (This latter point was a joke...) There have been some cases where government documents, including ballots, were ordered to be in Braille. (It came out during the Florida voting news cycle that a case in Florida had resulted in "assistance to blind voters" being acceptable over Braille ballots.) A requirement that a book publisher generate specific forms of a book would, of course, be a slam dunk violation of the First. Note that some blind folks are now complaining that the Web-based world is leaving them behind, but they are not going after Web publishers to get HTML and graphical uses changed. Rather, they are seeking to get gubment to force _employers_ (of them) to hire full-time readers for them and other nonsensical, anti-liberty things. (I hire people to do a job. I don't hire two people, one to help the other do the job...not unless they're both willing to do the job for a combined salary equal to what the one person would be paid. Less some amount for the increased overhead in having two of them in an office. I have no problem with some employer choosing to do this, or finding some good way to use blind programmers, etc. But having the gubment tell an employer whom he must hire and how he must accommodate them is, of course, profoundly anti-liberty. The more the ADA spreads to encompass such things, the more alternative Net solutions will bypass the situation.)

I'm not saying that thats a good thing, but given that the ABA is a nest of those rent-seekers, having them on the receiving side carries a certain poetry that I'm suprised you don't see.

Oh, I see it all right. I just don't _ever_ support bad laws, no matter how much the application is "just desserts." And should this interpretation be applied to the ABA, application to everyone else would follow swiftly. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:

The ADA does not require writers, whether lawyers or novelists or whatever, to write their material in ways that the blind can read, that retarded persons can understand, or that the Java-less can process.

Nevertheless it would be good practice for an organization such as the ABA, with close governmental ties and a bunch of bucks to be earned from the ADA to make their site accessible. Not doing that is sheer stupidity. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 02:12:20PM -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote: | On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Adam Shostack wrote: | | >So, this web page doesn't work without javascript. I find that | >somewhat ironic, because you'd think that the ABA would be aware of | >the Americans With Disabilities act, which requires a reasonable | >accomodation; in this case that accomodation would be one less line of | >html (the meta-equiv refresh line) | | Sorry, but I don't understand. What disability prevents you | from using Javascript? All the text-to-speech tools I've seen, which are very useful to the blind, tend to barf when given javascript generated pages. Not my actual problem, but I think that theres a tremendous opportunity to create an infrastructure which helps people with various problems, and I hate seeing bad design screw it up. | I don't enable javascript for reasons having nothing to do with | any disability. | | Ray | -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:

- Biotechnology patents are especially troubling. On the one hand one can patent a gene sequence discovered to be vaguely related to, say, breast cancer. On the other hand that gene sequence is usually derived from some volunteer's dna, but that person has no rights to the resulting value of the patent! Worse still, claims in biotech are very vague and broad simply because biotech is an emerging science. I'd bet most of you haven't heard that proteomics seems to becoming more important than genomics over the last six months...does this mean a gene sequence, including all of the proteins it interacts with, are covered by the original patent even though proteomics was unknown even two years ago??

I wonder if it would be worth filing a 'blocking patent' on your own genome and all its applications, just to prevent some other bozo from patenting it. Ray