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

Sometimes impossible...

[Southpaw018]

Sometimes, it's just not possible at all. My boss, for example, asks - rather, demands - that our organization's website be accessible to them in Dreamweaver. The problem is this: My pages are WAI A compliant and written in XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1, and CSS 2.1. The moment they hit "save" with Dreamweaver, it rewrites half the damn code in the page, changing indentations, switching out tags, and often changing things that weren't really any of its concern in the first place, adding CSS classes with names like "L1" instead of "bluebox" and inserting p tags everywhere. I'm left with a Microsoft-as-Borg kind of choice: assimilate and use Dreamweaver, or be defeated.

I try to create standards compliant, accessible websites, but the boss is worried about any emergencies that might pop up and require their immediate attention. Without being able to pull away from programs that change the pages around and aren't really aware of standards, I may not be able to do it at all.

(Side note: if anyone knows how to force the 'Reaver to leave my code alone, could you reply, please?)