Alright. How about:

"Then she received a letter from a lawyer in Florida,telling her that a) one image web site is not licensed; b) If she doesn't fix it, they'll file a law suit; and c) She needs to pay the lawyers $4,000 to "cover the unauthorised use of the single image without license"."

That happens all the time. Enough that it's fairly well known now. I think few would just lift an image off another site these days.

If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great! A few headline cases of huge, crippling fines, and few would just put out a site without accessibility, or give a tender to developers without a contract section covering it.

So the only remaining issues are whether $4k is a reasonable sum or just a lawyer trying it on, and whether she can sue OpenCart for providing a non-accessible platform.

An unlicensed image is something you consciously include - every image you don't explicitly have the license for is considered unlicensed. You can then get a guarantee in writing when you buy a license for an image. Nothing like that exists for accessibility. There is no 30 second test that will guarantee you that you are not going to get sued over accessibility problems on your website. Now imagine if that even has the possibility of bankrupting you. Would you even consider the risk of making a website? Now it's not just the people with disability that can't use the website - nobody can, because the website doesn't exist.

This has always applied in the UK since the disability act.

The chain of liability is similar, the requirement for clause in supplier contract is similar. Yet the third-party (OpenCart) appears to be where liability rests. So she needs to counter sue her supplier. That's just how it works.

So I see no difference at all for an aware store owner who wants a website.

Seems like an undue burden to place on a small business owner. Having to both defend in one lawsuit and sue another party when they likely aren't knowledgeable or willing to take the risk of either.

shrug That's the legal system. I didn't make it.

A clause in supplier contract guaranteeing whatever - accessibility or all images being licensed covers you.

Cicrcling back to

> If this is required to get sites to give a shit about accessibility once again, great!

Given how enforcement works, I can't share your enthusiasm, and in fact I will oppose accessibility regulation.

Well, for the sake of people who need accessibility I hope you won't be successful with that.

Walk the path you propose and you will get a world where chains displace all other restaurants, where police swoop in on kids' lemonade stands.

Why? When you can make sensible regulations that target the service providers like shopify, or whatever restaurants use instead and just escape the dilemma?

Sounds like whoever sold her the theme didn't bother with accessibility. I think laws like this are good, but at the same time they will end up pushing people to stick to larger sites like shopify or just listing on ebay/amzn to avoid all this.

This just sounds to me like "I like regulation, but hate over-regulation". Except that here, like potentially many other cases, there weren't any sane bounds on said regulation.

Sometimes I think it's "I like regulation, but I hate regulation that puts a burden on me."

To be fair, proposing regulation on people is really easy if you're not affected.

And individual rules can often sound nice at first glance, only to have disastrous consequences in practice. Add in the fact that repeal of regulation is an... onerous process, and things get even more tricky.

True.

And also to be fair, it is very easy to dismiss advocacy for regulations as naive ideals from inexperienced people who like things that sound nice but are ignorant of the realities of the world.

If the case the GP described is an intended outcome of the law working as designed, I don't think it is a good law.

What is wrong with a) and b)? Remove c) and this sounds like a great intended outcome: "Notice stuff is broken. Notify. Stuff gets fixed".

Because the actual outcome isn't that you now have a website that's accessible. The actual outcome is that you now don't have a website at all. I suppose that does mean that everybody has equal accessibility - none.

That is needlessly black and white and hyperbole. Out of 100 websites you will have now, some of them are currently discriminatory. Some of them will shutdown, some will stop discriminating, some never discriminated to begin with.

Instead of going for the hyperbolic "none" put an actual number to it. Is not discriminating worth it if we then only have 99 websites? 95? 50? 20?

I've seen many Shopify sites which are not ADA compliant.

That doesn't sound like a problem with a) or b) at all but purely with c).

Also, something is wrong with your example. Cost of buying the original platform is $X, sales (not revenue) for multiple years is $3,500, fixing it or replacing it by a compliant platform is $Y. A "fix" is clearly not more expensive than $X and that was much, much less than the revenue from the sales.

Also, it seems to me that the original product was defective (illegal), so why should she have to pay for the fix?

So, are you going to argue that the developer needs to now be held legally responsible for this? Because I can foresee how this makes lots of front end devs stop providing services.

The developer sold me a product that is unsuitable for its purpose. Of course they should either fix it or stop selling it.

I don't think that "If they can't sell broken/illegal stuff, they will just sell nothing" is a convincing argument or that nobody will show up to sell non-broken stuff.

The "original product" is OpenCart. As the name implies, its open source. If it's defective, who are you going to sue?

Why are you immediately jumping to suing?

I'll ask for a fix or a refund on the $X. If they can't fix it and I can't find a competing product for $X, then the price should have been $Y to begin with and I have no basis to complain.

Pure shakedown