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11 Comments
- trammell, on 08/27/2008, -0/+6Jim Thatcher has gone into this case in detail on his blog:
http://www.jimthatcher.com/law-target.htm
Also, Joe Clark delves into why Target and Amazon (and gets fairly well stonewalled) on his blog:
http://blog.fawny.org/2007/04/24/fishy-nfb-amazon/ - pyyhkala, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4kjcdude
Yes, the Americans with Disabilities Act ADA and various state antidiscrimination laws would be used to require web sites, especially sites of businesses, to be accessible to people who are blind and who have other disabilities. This is a growing area of disability civil rights law as the internet has become a much more integral part of American life than it was say in 1990 or before when the original ADA was crafted and adopted.
I would suggest that you read
http://blindaccessjournal.com
to get an idea of the kinds of accessibility issues that we have. - pyyhkala, on 08/27/2008, -0/+3Many in corporate America tell the nations blind to pound sand when we request web accessibility so Target is a good poster child in having to pay out $6 million plus. Usually when a person who is blind submits an accessibility complaint, the company does nothing to resolve the issue. This is especially true of large companies. Sometimes smaller companies are more responsive. For instance, both http://twitter.com/jack
and
http://www.getsatisfaction.com
voluntarily resolved issues regarding inaccessible visual only captcha relatively quickly.
Conversely,
http://MySpace.com
has refused to make its registration procedure and site more accessible including adding audio captcha or some other automated means for a blind person to register. I have personally written both to the support address of MySpace as well as to executives inside Fox, and have not gotten any response except a vague thanks for your idea and we might work on it. I hope someone sues the parent company of MySpace and also makes an example out of them.
There was also a long period of time with Google where a blind person could not sign up for a Google account because of visual only captcha. For months, if not longer, Google refused to do anything about this, and they did not even communicate their plans. Momentum got going in the blind community, and things like protests and lawsuits were under consideration. Then around the time of one of the annual CSUN technology conferences, Google announced that it would in fact install audio captcha. But sstill, you had this period of time where the company told blind people to pound sand!
http://blindaccessjournal.com
Making an inaccessible web site is akin to opening a "place of public accommodation," (ADA jargon for any place like a hotel, restaurant, shop, theatre) with no access for people in wheelchairs. In 2008 you simply cannot open a "place of public accommodation," that is not accessible to people with physical disabilities. The blind community feels strongly that these types of regulatory protections are required on the internet as a matter of civil rights. The blind also have a great deal of difficulty with devices, think touch sscreen only interfaces or devices without spoken menus. Also imagine things like cable or satalite set top boxes where the menus do not have an audio option, or even the fact that DVD media is produced without audio description and without the ability to navigate different parts of the DVD via an interface other than an on screen visual only menu. The interesting thing also is that all of these problems could be solved today, the problem is just a lack of willingness on the part of corporate America to both make it happen and pay for it. It is thus more a business problem than a technology problem.
The blind feel largely shafted by the lack of progress that we would have expected by now under the Americans With Disabilities Act ADA. We have not made as much progress as certain other disability groups relative to ADA accommodations that would benefit people who are blind. The Target settlement is a step in the right direction but there are still many steps leftt to take. The blind do not even have a basic protection like getting Braille menus in restaurants or Braille guest service information in hotels. See the comment on the ADA from the American Council of the Blind:
http://is.gd/1rZM - Goonder, on 08/27/2008, -0/+3Hey trammel: How accessible is Digg?
You ought to know. - trammell, on 08/27/2008, -0/+2Hiya, Anton. We satisfy WCAG 1.0 Conformance Level A by meeting all Priority 1 checkpoints:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
We're working to make Digg more accessible with each new feature. That said, we're only as accessible as the sites to which we link. - perre, on 08/27/2008, -0/+2Probably a hundred thousand sites commit the same accessibility errors. Target is both high-profile and made the same errors in their site implementation... makes for a good, er, target for a lawsuit.
- kjcdude, on 08/27/2008, -1/+2WTH, how did target loose this? Are there really laws that force websites to be accessible to the blind?
- glowfood, on 08/27/2008, -1/+2Any blind users on Digg support this settlement?
Oh wai... - YesImAChick, on 08/27/2008, -1/+2Good for them by why Target? Just because they're big or was there something particular that was wrong with their site?
- dannywhite1, on 12/02/2008, -0/+0what next suing a restaurant because i have no sense of smell / taste? madness - a world gone mad!
http://www.dwhitewebdesign.com/
http://www.2let2sell2buy.com/
http://www.whomain.com/
http://www.visitcamposol.com/ - surfernerd6987, on 08/28/2008, -1/+1This is about as retarded as a blind guy suing Ford because his car isn't built for a blind driver. Come on, it just seems that several people who aren't fit for normal society decided to rip off a company because they just want money so they can plop on their ars for the rest of their life. That's really pathetic, and I wish those people could see my middle finger I'm giving them..
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