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

CAPTCHA is a biggie

[tepples]

A major problem in the accessibility of the World Wide Web lately is CAPTCHA systems that distinguish sighted humans on the one hand from bots and blind humans on the other. For instance, Slashdot itself uses a CAPTCHA. Has anybody had success in getting a Slashdot account created through the e-mail method specified in the Slashdot CAPTCHA's alt text?

I had a friend...

[alex_guy_CA]

I roommate of mine a few years back was working for a major bureaucracy in the public transportation sector (please forgive my being coy. Normally I'd just blurt out the name, but in this case it's not my story.) She built a web page highlighting the specific work she was doing that was part of the larger corporate website. On her own initiative, she made her site compliant to the standards that blind computer users needed. Instead of being thanked for her efforts, she was ordered by her superiors to take down her page. They feared that her compliance would highlight the non-accessibility of the rest of the web site of the organization, and they were covering their asses.