The real problem is that the ADA has no mechanism of enforcement except lawsuits. There’s no ADA regulators out there, the way there are for food safety for instance. At least in my city, the restaurant inspectors work with the restaurants to get them up to food safety compliance, which is good for everyone. If that kind of structure had been built into the ADA, your friend’s website would have been accessible from the start, or easily fixed, because during these decades a market would have been created for the necessary software. (And a person in a wheelchair wouldn’t have to enter so many restaurants by pushing past the dumpsters and toilets and wheeling through the kitchen, which tends to dull the appetite, btw.) Instead the market has been created for assholes to exploit small businesses with frivolous lawsuits and very little benefit has gone to people with disabilities.
The real problem is that the ADA has no mechanism of enforcement except lawsuits. There’s no ADA regulators out there, the way there are for food safety for instance. At least in my city, the restaurant inspectors work with the restaurants to get them up to food safety compliance, which is good for everyone. If that kind of structure had been built into the ADA, your friend’s website would have been accessible from the start, or easily fixed, because during these decades a market would have been created for the necessary software. (And a person in a wheelchair wouldn’t have to enter so many restaurants by pushing past the dumpsters and toilets and wheeling through the kitchen, which tends to dull the appetite, btw.) Instead the market has been created for assholes to exploit small businesses with frivolous lawsuits and very little benefit has gone to people with disabilities.