Happy ADA New Year!

I just heard through an indirect channel that the government has given programmers a WHOLE NEW YEAR to fulfill the arbitrary ADA requirements.

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By this Interim Final Rule (“IFR”), the Department of Justice (“Department”) is revising the regulations implementing title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) to extend the compliance dates for the requirements for web content and mobile application (“app”) accessibility that were adopted on April 24, 2024. The compliance date for State and local government entities with a total population of 50,000 or more is extended from April 24, 2026, to April 26, 2027. The compliance date for public entities with a total population of less than 50,000, or any special district government, is extended from April 26, 2027, to April 26, 2028.

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Now I can do it right, starting from scratch and taking advantage of many new platform features (HTML5, etc) that weren’t available when I laid out the code in 2014. The existing JS was already full of kludges and special cases to compensate for browsers that disappeared many years ago, and to work with the former publisher’s proprietary LMS system. After adding more kludges and special cases for ADA, it’s sort of working but flaky as hell.

In the meantime I’ll cinch up the existing cobbled-up mess which is ready for flaky “mostly-compliant” usage. It unquestionably works BETTER for actual blind students, whether it meets the arbitrary fucking rules or not.

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It would be interesting to hear an unvarnished account of the bureaucratic moves that caused the sudden clampdown last year and the sudden release this year. Remembering what happened with the TSA torture chamber from 2020 to 2022, I suspect the initial clampdown was expressing “resistance” to Trump. Possibly the release happened because too many important Democrats OUTSIDE the bureaucracy threatened to stop donating. The tech billionaires are mostly Democrat. College admins are 100% Democrat and control vast endowments.

Later after reading more, it was the college admins, not the tech billionaires.