Sep
8
2006

a case for accessibility

There was a federal court ruling out of California this week in a case about Web accessibility that bears watching.

A retailer can be sued for making its Web site inaccessible to the blind, a federal judge in San Francisco has ruled.

Run by the nationwide Target stores chain, www.target.com is covered by federal and state laws that entitle people with disabilities to have equal access to business and government services, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled Wednesday in refusing to throw out a suit against the company. She rejected Target’s argument that the discrimination laws prohibit only physical barriers to a company’s stores or products.

“The purpose of the statute is broader than mere physical access” and includes the removal of all barriers to “a disabled person’s ‘full enjoyment’ of services or goods,” Patel said, quoting from the Americans With Disabilities Act.

She did not decide whether Target’s Web site is accessible to the blind, and denied an injunction that would have required the retailer to make immediate changes.

(San Francisco Chronicle: “Ruling on Web site access for blind” - 09/08/06)

At SXSW earlier this year, a few of the sessions I attended underscored how Web standards, accessibility and search engine optimization are all sort of interrelated. A well-coded page is generally one that also is friendly to screen readers. And, as one panelist put it, Google is a blind user, too: You can only count on search engines being able to process the coded text that’s on the page (with very limited, if any, support for reading the contents of images, PDFs, Flash, etc.). Search engine optimization and, now, the threat of a lawsuit offer a good business case for more companies to take up these best practices.

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Posted at 2:16 PM in design

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Comments

A poster to the D.C. Web Women mailing list pointed out an interesting column which asks why Target is so stubbornly fighting this accessibility suit:

Why is it spending a mountain of legal dollars to justify keeping a large segment of potential consumers from easily using its site? And it’s doing so in a very public manner.

Let’s take a look at what is at play here. To make a large site such as Target’s accessible, it needs to add in text mouse-overs (alt-text) so that screen readers can speak what images represent.

But many highly designed sites simply don’t work without being able to see the images, so a more radical redesign is often required.

Those more substantial redesigns can cost money, but it’s not an obscene amount.

A site such as Target’s would likely cost anywhere from $800,000 to $2 million to make accessible.

Although not pocket change, it’s a one-time expense that Target could easily absorb.

Their legal costs in fighting this — not to mention the loss of business from the associated bad publicity — will surely be more.

But ROI concerns are also not the real reason for Target to not fight this.

The real reason to make those one-time changes is that it would result in a more-efficient, faster and simply superior e-commerce site for all consumers.

(eWeek: “On Handicapped Access, Target Fights the Wrong Fight for the Wrong Reason” - 09/24/2006)

Posted by alykat on September 27, 2006 3:42 PM

A new development in the Target.com case:

For nearly a year, it’s been very quiet, but Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has just granted class-action status to the lawsuit, meaning every blind person in the U.S. who has tried to access Target.com can become a plaintiff. The judge also created a separate class in the suit for blind residents of California, as the site’s inaccessibility may break not only federal law, but state law as well.

(The Web Standards Project: “Will Target Get Schooled?” - 10/05/2007)

Posted by Aly on October 6, 2007 3:07 AM

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