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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?"
The best way to ensure accessibility is to simply use XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS. Too often these are seen as overly-complicated technologies, but how hard is it to close a tag once you open it, and why doesn't the ability to describe visual styling in one central location instead of thousands of files seem like a hassle instead of a blessing? Get O'Reilly's HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide and just see how much sense the elegant order and semantic meaningfulness of XHTML makes over prior markup solutions. Once you have a site up in XHTML 1.0 Strict, just make sure it validates with the W3C validator, and chances are, it'll already comply with Section 508.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of ignorance to fight. The average PHB assumes that creating a website that the blind can use is an arduous task, but this is not the case. If you build your website correctly the first time around, you essentially get accessibility for free.
If, on the other hand, your website was built by the average clueless Dreamweaver jockey, then you'll probably have to spend money retrofitting your website. But that's the clueless web developer's fault for doing it wrong in the first place. Sadly, it's in their best interests to tell the PHBs how hard it is, and the PHB's aren't qualified to know when they are being told a pack of lies.
It's only in unusual circumstances that accessibility is difficult when you include it as a requirement from the start of the project. However, typical managers go on what they've been told, and what they are told leads them to avoid accessibility unless they really need to address it. Lawsuits are a good way of getting them to address it.
Don't assume that accessibility and standards-compliance are the same thing. They are not. You can create accessible sites that don't conform to the specifications, and you can create inaccessible sites that do conform to the standards.
It's also worth pointing out that avoiding being sued isn't the sole reason to make your website accessible. It can often improve various semi-related features of your website, such as search engine rankings and usability. According to PAS 78, the accessibility guidelines published by the UK's Disability Rights Commission, Tesco and Legal & General got great returns on their investments into accessible websites.
There's more information about that last bit on Bruce Lawson's weblog. Highlight:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I use Dreamweaver as well, and faced the same problem when I first started using it years ago. What you want to do is go into Edit > Preferences > Code Rewriting and deselect everything you don't want it to do. In addition, I also always turn off the auto close tag option under 'Code Hints' on the same dialog menu.
Dreamweaver is actually very capable of turning out standards compliant and accessiblity friendly code, it just needs a little tweaking when dealing with less than clueful users. Macromedia [now Adobe] had been fairly responsive to the concerns of the standards community, specifically The Web Standards Project which had a task force focusing on just Dreamweaver and standards compliance.
Actually, "putting all your content in <div> tags" (you mean elements, not tags) is only going to harm the accessibility of a website. Properly structured HTML uses the most accurate element type available. For instance, if you use <div class="heading"> instead of <h1> , as lots of people do, user-agents will have no idea it's a heading, and it's actually a worse choice than <h1><font ...> .
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The biggest problem is the classical case of Garbage In - Garbage Out. The vast majority of pages out there on the web have no logical structure, no text equivalent content to non-text content - there's no way a piece of technology can do that without an advanced form of AI.
This isn't a problem browser and assistive technology vendors can solve on their own. This isn't a problem web developers can solve on their own. Each have to pull their weight to get the job done. Web developers need to be using structured markup, and providing alternate equivalent content when content is inside a non-text format. Assistive technology vendors can then improve their tools to render your content in a better way to the tool user.