Website Accessibility a Legal Issue?

geekwithsoul asks: "Target is being sued because its website is not usable by the sight-impaired. While this story from the San Francisco Chronicle is from February, I've seen surprising little coverage of it in either mainstream or tech-focused media. Is the threat of legal action the only really effective way to get companies to create accessible (and thus standard-compliant) websites?" "From the article:

'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.'

Considering how much accessibility and standards support is available in modern web browsers (well, except for that one we all know), and a rising probability of legal exposure for sites not meeting these needs, is there really any excuse for online retailers and others to not make their websites accessible to all?"

Comments

Unfortunately, yes.

[Pig Hogger]

Unfortunately, yes, suing will often be the only way.

Don't forget that too many websites are driven by marketoids whose world revolves around bullshit. Bullshit being the absence of substance, it is clear that those bullshitter will try to hide their absence of content behind smokescreens made out of Javascript and flash.

And marketoids consider themselves artists, and there are no people more willing to shove useless crap down people's throats than artists.

Re:I sort of agree but..

[Bogtha]

every time a picture is replaced, then its gonna make the site 1000 words longer

Not at all. Most pictures on websites are for decorative purposes, in which case the alt text is blank. Most of the other images are used for navigation, in which case the alt text is one or two words, leaving a very small fraction that genuinely need descriptive text of some sort - and despite the adage, it's ludicrous to think that you need to write a thousand words for the alt text - usually ten words or so does the trick. A thousand words is not a conservative estimate in the slightest.

i don't see how, for example, a graphic design company could apprioriately convey a subtle use of colour in an alt tag?

alt is an attribute, not a tag. And almost all websites aren't graphic design companies. You seem to be thinking that an alt attribute is intended to describe an image totally, this simply isn't the case. The alt attribute is intended as a textual alternative to fulfil the same role the image plays in the website. You don't describe the image, you give an alternative to the image. So if you have, for example, a photo of a bug next to a pound coin to illustrate its size, you don't have to have an alt attribute that has a thousand words describing each minute detail of the bug, you just need alt="The bug is about the size of a pound coin.".

In your examples of graphic design and porn, there really isn't any alternative text that can fulfil the same role, so the law in most places wouldn't address such instances.

Re:I sort of agree but..

[Bogtha]

It was probably a bit subtle, but "a picture paints a thousand words"..

No, I got the reference (hence "despite the adage"). It's just not relevant though. Pictures aren't generally used on the web to convey deep meaning, they are usually simple decorations and stylised text.

My point is really that the internet is a multimedia info source, and to try and jury-rig it for people with disabilities is probably a waste, at least in economic terms.

There's no jury-rigging going on. HTML is designed with accessibility in mind. It's true that the Internet is multimedia in nature, but that merely means that you have a choice of media, not that all are mandatory.