Legal precedent set for web accessibility

[mdlbear]

Legal Precedent Set for Web Accessibility: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target's website ( http://www.target.com ) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target's motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

...and about bloody time!

I've been saying this for years: making your site accessible to the blind also makes it accessible to the nearsighted (like me), people using mobile phones and other handheld devices, and above all to search engines. Want to know what your site looks like to Google? Just look at it in Lynx.

(from Slashdot)

Comments

[ashi.livejournal.com]

Yay, about time indeed. Thanks for the news.

[thefrugalgamer.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, you should realise that this doesn't really set any predicent. This was a trial level decision, and is not binding on any other court. Other courts may look to it as a point of interest to see what another judge thinks, but they are not bound to follow that judge's thinking.

That said, this is the first step to making precident. If Target decides to appeal the order to the 9th Cir. Ct. of Appeals, then we will get a binding precident from the CA's decision. (Binding on all trial courts in the 9th Circuit, that is -- courts in other circuits will still be technically free to disregard it until their own courts of appeal make rulings. I say technically free because they're supposed to follow an appeals court's ruling unless they think that its incorrect, or if their own appeals court has or would rule differently.)

[mdlbear]

That's what I suspected; I just didn't feel like doing the necessary research and editing -- it was easier to just echo the article's title.

[madfilkentist]

This will help to shut down lots of small websites, if that stupid ruling establishes a precedent. In the long run, Target will win, because they can easily afford to make the necessary changes, while shoestring sites will be forced to shut down because they can't.

Will it really?

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Isn't basic HTML accessible enough? It might slow down some of the high bandwidth "bells & whistle" stuff, not to mention the difficult-to-filter-spam technique of putting all the information in pictures with word art, instead of in the text.

In other words, how difficult is it really, to use an "alt" tag?

[mdlbear]

No, it won't. First of all, it only applies to sites that are selling something. Selling something that blind people might be interested in buying, in fact. Secondly, making a site accessible is trivial -- it's mostly a matter of putting in meaningful alt tags, and avoiding flash and javascript without providing a static alternative. As I point out in my post, this is stuff that any commercial site ought to do anyway, because it makes the site more visible to search engines and hence more useful and available to everybody and increases the customer base.