Delightful!

“Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user’s disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!”

Gave me a giggle. That 100k loss has got to hurt for a user who still tries to run ‘vi’ on a classic system, I imagine.

Edit:

Another gem:

“Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.”

The ‘ed’ editor was designed for high latency networks. I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes, I would read up on ‘ed’ and related tools.

Lunchtime, doubly so!

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Ooh. Good reference! Nice!

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Your “laws” seem to have lots of exceptions when you need them to

Let it be known that I am a generous and benevolent ruler.

Yeah. I understand what they’re saying, but they’re wrong, based on past court cases.

Defining “full equal service” in a way that carves out big portions (like knowing what the lyrics are) in ways that fully able bodied people take for granted - has gone badly for companies that let it go to court.

Yeah, that could still play in court. (Serious reply. Not sarcasm.)

That’s a good point. That might actually make the case for “undue burden”.

A court case about it could be a way for Spotify to pass the problem to their licensors, in theory.

Once an organization can no longer claim an accessibility accomodation is an undue burden, then various laws kick in (can no longer be evaded during a court case or an audit) dictating how that accessibility accomodation must be managed.

As was pointed out, many radio stations do provide captions, and in doing so, fall under (no longer receive any exemption under) the same laws about how they managed those captions.

Spotify is also a big enough organization that any claim of “undo burden” would probably not hold up in court, anyway.

While a small local radio station might well be protected, and is a good example of why such exceptions exist.

You are technically correct - the best kind of correct! (Futurama quote, meaning I appreciate your correction.)

It’s probably not an issue for a station that simply doesn’t have that level of captioning, yet.

But I take your point - it would likely be a violation if they had that captioning and tried to monetize it. (In my far more informed opinion than that of a couple of asshats who were replying to me in this thread.)

You don’t need lyrics to listen to music however.

I also don’t need an elevator to move between floors of a building that has stairs, while some people do.

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will tell you if a game supports the controller you currently have plugged in

Today I learned that. It never came up for me since I do most of my game shopping on my phone. That could be really helpful later.

Thank you!

it’s their prerogative to try and get people to pay for the service.

Except that this attempt could easily be shown to largely land on folks with accessibility needs. That’s a big no-no under many laws.

An interesting comparison is pay-to-ride elevators. For most folks an elevator is a nice convenience they would not mind occasionally paying for.

But for some folks, the elevator is completely essential. This dynamic resulted in making pay-to-ride elevators illegal in most places, today.

The fact possibility that they’re unable to provide lyrics gives radio stations a free pass on this, under ADA (and most similar laws).

Edit: Correction, per correction below - options for providing radio captions do exist.

Edit 2: For anyone reading along to learn - a radio station without captioning technology is unlikely to be required to add captioning under any accessibility law I’m aware of. But a station that provides captioning is unlikely to be able to charge extra for that captioning under current accessibility laws.

Businesses are typically accountable to provide equitable accommodations at no additional charge.

A comparison that may help: a storefront with no dedicated parking whatsoever is typically not required to provide the usual required percentage of reserved accessible parking. Or rather, their zero reserved spaces meets the required percentage automatically, at it’s whatever percentage of zero total spaces.

Providing a substantially inferior outcome to someone with an ADA need absolutely violates ADA rules.

When stuff like this has gone to court it hasn’t been pretty for the offending organization.

There’s a bigger question about how much of what Spotify currently provides falls under ADA. Web services used to get a free pass. They largely don’t anymore.

Source: some of this stuff is my problem, professionally. And no, I’m not going to look up a primary source for anyone. That’s Spotify’s lawyers job.

Absolutely.

I’ve always thought those rules were mostly inspired by Aaragorn, of course. I think he’s also why we keep getting a ‘ranger’ class that never works quite right if balanced, or is overpowered.

Sure, but you know what beats all three: two swords and an axe.