Commentary

InformationWeek
InformationWeek  

Target: Not Blind, Just Dumb

A blind UC Berkeley student is suing Target Corp. for civil rights violations: The retailer's Web site, according to the complaint, is almost completely inaccessible to sight-impaired users. From Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle article:
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, said the upscale discounter's on-line business, Target.com, denies blind Californians equal access to goods and services available to those who can see. "Target thus excludes the blind from full and equal participation in the growing Internet economy that is increasingly a fundamental part of daily life," said the suit, which seeks to be certified as a class action and alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and various state statutes.

A blind UC Berkeley student is suing Target Corp. for civil rights violations: The retailer's Web site, according to the complaint, is almost completely inaccessible to sight-impaired users. From Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle article:

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, said the upscale discounter's on-line business, Target.com, denies blind Californians equal access to goods and services available to those who can see.

"Target thus excludes the blind from full and equal participation in the growing Internet economy that is increasingly a fundamental part of daily life," said the suit, which seeks to be certified as a class action and alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and various state statutes.
snip


More Windows Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Advocates for the blind said the lawsuit is a shot across the bow for retailers, newspapers and others who have Web sites the blind cannot use. They chose Target because of its popularity and because of a large number of complaints by blind patrons.

The only surprise here is the fact that Target didn't get nailed a lot sooner than it did. This is a topic almost as old as the Web itself: When I did a quick TechWeb search, I found a major feature on Web accessibility dated November, 1998, along with a steady stream of related news, reviews, product announcements, and how-to articles on the subject during the seven-plus years that followed. In fact, the last chance to hop this clue-train might have been the August, 2004 settlement between two major online travel companies and the New York State attorney general, in which the companies agreed to bring their sites into compliance with Web accessibility standards. If you design, build, or manage a retail Web site, this no longer qualifies as "news" -- it's common sense.

Or, perhaps, not so common: According to the Chronicle story, the plaintiffs in the case had been talking to Target execs since May, 2005, but finally decided to sue when the company "declined to modify its Web site."

What, exactly, did Target "decline to modify?" One of the biggest problems with Target.com is its complete lack of "alt" tags: absurdly simple snippets of plain text that allow screen-reader software to "translate" images for sight-impaired visitors. Rocket science? Not a chance -- these guys are stumped getting downhill on a Big Wheel.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links