Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rules Sites Can Be Sued Over Design
BcNexus writes "According to the Associated Press, a California judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought against the Target Corporation may proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The catch here is that the suit, leveled by the National Federation of the Blind, concerns the design of Target's website. Could this set a precedent and subsequent flood of lawsuits against websites? What if another design is not tractable?" From the article: "'What this means is that any place of business that provides services, such as the opportunity to buy products on a website, is now, a place of accommodation and therefore falls under the ADA,' said Kathy Wahlbin, Mindshare's Director of User Experience and expert on accessibility. 'The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive. And it provides the additional benefit of making accessible web sites easier for search engines to find and prioritize.'"
Do we let these defective people live?
This just plain scares me. In a society where a criminal can sue the homeowner of the house he broke into and got injured AND WIN. I can only see this as ending poorly for site developers. But I will hope that someone realizes how foolish this kind of lawsuit is
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
The next "target"
this will add yet another layer of craziness to simply making a website that works for everyone. Thanks standards for making our lives easy!
Not Mindshare's spin of it. Until then, we don't know enough.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Goodbye all you crapromedia sites! *sigh* wishful thinking...
Is English your handicap?
I think the general idea behind their lawsuit was good -- most websites should be as accessible as possible. However, using a lawsuit to get their intended results -- I think that was a poor idea. And target is stupid for making their site unaccessible anyways.. potentially losing lots of business.
Obliterate advertising!
Bye bye roughly 90% of flash sites.
And in other news, the National Association of the Deaf is suing Apple because iPods to not adequately provide for the music needs of the non-hearing. Also, the National Association of the Mute is suing AT&T because telephones do not adequately provide for the communication needs of the non-speaking. Multimedia and communications companies have also been informed by the National Association of the Blind, Deaf, Mute, Crippled and Crazy of their intention to file a number of lawsuits.
Should they be sued because I can't use them in Firefox (or vice versa)?
I'd at least like to know what aspects of Target's web site are considered inaccessible and how the plantiff believes they could be made accessible so I can advise clients properly. Anybody know?
Not necessarily. New versions of SWF include ways to make objects accessible. But on the other hand, it could spell doom for sites that exclusively use visual CAPTCHAs.
Smaller businesses can take years to squeeze the cost of a total site re-design out of their profits. A large, sprawling site that's been growing for years may not lend itself to anything other than a major piece of work. That's not to say the business shouldn't do it for other reasons (like SEO), but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
Of course, I smell some consulting blood in the water, here. On the other hand, one of my customers sells eyewear for sports. Somehow I don't think that redesigning their site for the blind is going to be high on their list. The irony is, they can still get sued anyway. Brilliant.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This is not a good thing, at all. How exactly do you define a 'service'? How do you define 'accessible'? The judge should have instead called for an extension of the ADA, with explicit description of what sites it applies to and what it means to be accessible.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
It's quite simple to just create 2 versions of a webpage - an eye candy version, and an accessible version. What's the big deal? Nobody gets upset when companies are forced to build wheelchair ramps...
Ironcically, I had to get someone else to read the captcha image to me so I could make this post - In the words of slashdot, "if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org".
If Firefox developers launched a version for people with disabilities. Then, site owners that refuse to offer content for non-IE browsers or rely on Flash-ridden pages could be sued!
Wasn't one of the arguments against open format in MA that FOSS tools didn't provide accessibility?
How does this ruling impact the use of OSS tools to build web facilities?
I'm considering adding braille to my website and building ramps between pages for those in wheelchairs.
This is one time where I would say that reading the article is a waste of time. In fact, the article is actually an advertisement for this Minshare outfit. There are eight paragraphs in the article and five of them are about Mindshare and nothing else. Can we please find better material for the front page of slashdot?
I bought a packet of peanuts the other day (in the UK )and being bored read the back of the packet there was a warning on the back 'MAY CONTAIN NUTS' My point is this is the same sort of thing ie excessive sensitivity
Maybe this'll get all those so called 'web designers' to realize that there's more to web sites than making them look pretty.
Your analogy falls apart. Deaf people can tunnel text over a voice channel and have been able to do so for decades, even back when AT&T had a monopoly on telephones. It's called a teletypewriter. Nowadays there's even a relay service to translate between voice and TTY modes.
It's the same situation in the U.K. The Disability Discrimination Act specifies that any place of business must be accessible to people with disabilities (including web-sites).
I see the legislation as a "good thing", the internet is the great leveller, many people who otherwise would find it hard to make purchases or converse in real life find fewer barriers.
It goes further than just visually impaired visitors however, you have to take into account things like colour-blindness, essential tremor (so big chunky web 2.0 buttons are fine!).
All of our sites and web apps (including admin backends) have been fully DDA compliant for several years now. Being compliant makes business sense, it doesn't cost much more to build it in from the start and then you increase your potential client base - plus you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you know you're not preventing people from accessing your services.
I am NaN
For example my parents run a quit shop, not in the US so this doesn't apply, however it gets me thinking. They have a large amount of fabric online you can buy. It's just pictures and sku numbers. There's not any text descriptions. Why? Well that takes time to write, time they don't have. Their web person doesn't even keep up with the load of things to be done as it is, much less have the time to write up fabric descriptions.
So to say it "wouldn't be expensive" to do this is BS. They'd have to hire someone. That's expensive, especially considering they aren't making a profit right now. It also wouldn't be worth it, there are a whole lot of blind quilters since it is a visual medium. There's nothing stopping a blind person from doing it, of course, but it's hard to appreciate your work if you can't see it.
So ya, I'm sure the expense is minimal for large companies, but you've got to think about the small businesses too. When your entire web team is one person, and your entire staff is like 6 people, hiring another person IS expensive, really expensive.
This could be the end of sites that only work with IE.
One of the local companies, with whom I USED to do business, had a site that totally wouldn't display properly on Firefox. As far as I could tell, it didn't conform to any standards. The designer couldn't design with real html. All he knew were Microsoft tools.
"The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind."
Time to patent a Braile monitor.
Another thing to think about is how this will affect other industries... Music companies being sued for not making their music accessible to the deaf? Telephone services being sued for those who can't speak?
Where will this end?
For sale: Parachute. Used once. Never opened. Small stain.
One member of a family uses sport eyewear. Another member of the family, who holds the purse strings, is blind in one eye and legally blind in the other. One of your customers will likely lose business to a competitor whose site is more accessible to blind people.
Yahoo Finance News article has detailed information on the ruling.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
Businesses can make their store/website however they want. It is theirs. If they do not make it accessible, they will lose business, and someone will make theirs accessible, to get that business. Why must we have these ridiculous laws?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
A company didn't make it's website accessable to the blind, and they're getting sued? How does that make sense? They don't HAVE to sell their products to blind people if they don't want to...
What's next, suing Target for not sending out braille catalogs?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
If a company wants to cater to the disabled (or the brown-eyed or Asians or left-handed Latinos), it should be able to make that decision for itself. But nobody has a RIGHT to do business with any particular company. What's next? Do deaf people sue every company that has a telephone and doesn't offer TTD service?
The ADA sounds good if you don't think it through logically, as do most of the stupid new laws that governments pass which encroach on the rights of individuals. When people claim a new right today, all they do is appeal to our emotions and good will. They don't bother to explain why anyone has a "right" to force me (as a business owner) to modify my business to suit THEIR needs and wants. No such right exists, but nobody has told the federal government that.
David
Or is just a "developed nation" thing? There seems to be a workable lawsuit for anything that one person doesn't like about something else. To the best of my knowledge, Target doesn't have a monopoly on any essential product. Nor do they prevent anyone from coming to their store. Suing them do the design of their website for all things is ridiculous.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I've been making a huge push for standards compliance - and it looks like those of us who still fight for it might finally have their voices heard. I just finished up a design contract for a hospital, recently - one where their current (soon to be old) website was all but easily usable by the blind.
For those of you who think that the blind don't surf, they do; Do you think TTS readers are just so you can make your computer say naughty words? There are numerous blind users on the web.
While transitioning from crap to standards compliance is a pain in the butt to do, once you are there, it is usually smooth sailing (assuming you have an experienced designer do the site). I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to manage some of my current web projects while using tables for layout, and whatnot.
Now, if only IE would catch up on the standards game..
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
We are people too!
maybe the colorblind are not disabled, but, I would surely love to get some money from the websites I have been unable to read or navigate due to poor color choices!
I would think what this judge did violates the 1st Amendment.
Are you saying Slashdot can sue Kuro5hin??
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
First, the inspirational quote: "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and Inventor of the World Wide Web
Some info for people who want to learn more:
"Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI)", published in 1999 by the "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)".
Lighthouse.org A lot of help on designing with vision-impaired people in mind.
And finally, (Please don't slashdot this poor guy's site)... online classic stories (Twain, H.G. Wells, etc.). It's called www.readeasily.com , and was setup specifically for vision-impaired, but with such good stories that I often go there myself.
The first problem of which is obviously "What am I going to do with all this free time I have now?", but what's the second?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
There are several US Government sites which "require" Windows, IE and there is no way to get what you need (e.g. fill forms) if you have other browsers or operating systems.
...but note that only the claims related to information related to the physical stores were allowed to proceed, those related to online services/information not related to the physical stores were thrown out.
And even those that were allowed forward simply allow the plaintiffs to make the case that the law was violated.
I think that it is in the best interest of a business to make themselves accessible to the widest audience possible, but it seems that the litigants want to hold the nation's businesses to standards created by the TTS industry (I'm assuming they use some variant of TTS software - I know very little about software for the blind). An international standard would be ideal, but in an age where technology changes so rapidly, it will be difficult to regulate compliance with ADA laws. If we compare this to wheelchair access ramps, we have a design that has fundamentally remained unchanged - wheels going up a ramp. It would be like requiring companies to rebuild their ramps every few years to accommodate new wheelchair designs while expecting them to maintain backwards compatibility with older models.
The versions may slip out of sync. If not, and the accessible version is usable enough, then people will start using the accessible version because accessible pages are generally more usable anyway, and all the money that the company's marketing department spends on making the eye candy version look good will be wasted. Marketing doesn't want to make itself look like a waste of money.
A starting point is Section 508 of the Rehab Act.
As for the technical assistance sites, there are just too many to list.
Anyone remember: OMG! Ponies!!!
Because other Americans really love to ignore the law.
does this mean thast the website containing the article can get sued becuase it didn't read the text to me, therefore not being ADA compliant? Besides...I really don't see what a blind person is doing online, and I don't feel bad saying this becuase I know they won't be able to read it.
Because Target may be the only brick-and-mortar store of its kind in town. A lot of click-and-mortar retailers, such as Best Buy, allow customers to order goods online and pick them up in the store.
Worse, what happens when it's not Target but instead a monopoly or near-monopoly? For instance, what competitor is there to a given public utility such as electric power, natural gas, water, or mail delivery? In residential high-speed Internet access, what competitor is there to the cable company and phone company?
Can you sue over designs that are so obnoxious they cause you to go blind?
I'd rather have no alt-text then the alternative:
..."
"target-dot-com. image: transparent-dot-gif, placeholder. image: transparent-dot-gif, placeholder. store directory. image: transparent-dot-gif, placeholder. welcome to target-dot-com. image: transparent-dot-gif, placeholder. link: household. image: transparent-dot-gif, placeholder. image: transparent-dot-gif, placeholder. link: gardening supplies
<sarcasm> If you can't think of a good alt attribute value for a page's most important images, just set it to "(Security Code)", and you'll be set. </sarcasm>
(Nit: alt is an attribute not a tag or element, and its value is a replacement not a caption.)
Why should blind people be excluded from the Web, when making it accessible is such a trivial thing? Accessible design really is quite trivial, if you just know the technology.
The Web is an immensely valuable resource. There's no reason and no excuse for excluding the blind from this fantastic resource.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I see this as a good thing as long as it doesn't get carried away.
Companies that are building new websites or redesigning old ones should be standards compliant. There is no excuse not to be if you are already hiring someone to do the work as doing so improves the site in general as well as for people with a disability.
I would be concerned if websites of companies that were built before good standards came about were targeted for legal action. We are still in a time of transition of web design (a longer transition then needed thanks to IE) and I think companies with old sites should have a fair grace period to update.
Here's what I think should happen:
I can see exactly what'll happen when this case succeeds. Every newspaper gets sued because they don't publish a copy in braille, Craftsman gets sued for not making a bandsaw usable by the blind, every musician gets sued for not releasing songs that the deaf can hear, all the automakers get sued for not making a car the blind can drive, and every restaurant gets sued because their waiters don't know sign language.
Consider that the state of the world when and if this precedent gets set. Kurt Vonnegot would be proud.
Perhaps people should look at how this has been handled here in Australia. The definitive court case here was in 1996, where a website's owners were charged under the Federal Anti-Discrimination Act. The finding was that websites must include means for visually impaired people to access information and navigate within a site, unless it can be argued that it is unreasonable to expect that a person with those disabilities would not seek to access that site.
So a web site guide to microscopy would not be required to provide access and navigation for the blind, but almost any retail or public sector sites do. The guidelines are pretty simple - use ALT tags for images that are navigation elements, provide html alternatives for flash video (when it's essential for navigation, or "essential content", plus a few other sensible rules, that would be followed by most devs with good taste and sense anyway.
Charges are brought by the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner in response to compliants by consumers. The Commissioner usually informs the owner of the infringing site and allows a chance to remedy the defects before charges are laid. The fines can be in excess of $100,000AUD for Corporations under the Act.
but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
So, the rule of thumb is: If a business doesn't give a crap about alienating a customer, that's their right?
Ergo, if the disabled can't use a site, the business has the right to alienate them if they want to.
How about say wheelchair access to their brick and mortar site? If a business doesn't give a crap about disabled people, they shouldn't have to worry about disabled access and should have every right to exclude them and lose their business?
Hell, why worry about physical infirmities. If Capt'n Kracker's Army Surplus store doesn't like those damn darkies, towel heads and jews, why shouldn't be allowed to refuse them business? In a free market, they can take their business elsewhere and all he does is harm himself.
And the golf club. If they dislike negroes and women at some of the best golf clubs in the country, that should be there right. After all, if they think they can cater better to rich bigots and make more money that way, shouldn't they have the right to refuse membership to undersirables who, a free market states, can go elsewhere and support other businesses?
Then, finally, there's the Montgomery bus service. If they think black women should give up their seats for white people, they should damned well be allowed to do it. The uppity black woman should go find another bus service, start her own, walk, buy a car or any of plenty of other options. There's absolutely no reason to let something like that inspire any kind of law changing.
Every one of those situations has argued the "free market" line. In just about all of them, the United States has ultimately said we'd rather not permit exclusion, even at the cost to free market ideals.
Sure, you can decide to draw a line. You can state that "Well, the south's the south. Government shouldn't interfere." and draw the line just before black people on buses. You can state that "Golf clubs are private institutions" and draw the line just before forcing them to be open. You can state that "Stores shouldn't be forced to remodel" and draw it just before adding disabled access. And you can state "Websites shouldn't be forced to be inclusive either" and draw the line there.
The thing is, whilst people may get outraged at the time, the fact that the U.S. tends not to accept drawing that line (albeit after painful wrangling each time) is one of the things most Americans are most proud of.
The ADA has provisions written in about relative cost, about size of business affected, about reduced compliance for expensive retrofitting vs. building inclusively when new projects come up. The cost generally isn't anywhere near as bad as initial kneejerk fears tend to tout and the ultimate benefit, for the kind of nation it helps promote, is what ultimately makes most Americans damned proud.
That's not so hard. Braille displays translate the text on a page into raised pins on the display's face. To accommodate braille displays, make sure that every important non-textual cue has a text equivalent. The first step is to put a meaningful alt attribute on each img element.
Also not hard. The counterpart to stairs on web pages is links that require script, such as a lot of pop-up and pull-down menus within pages. For a list of links, an HTML list (ul or ol), each of which contains an item (li) containing one link (a), is more accessible than a select element that causes a script to execute onchange.
"According to the Associated Press, a California judge has ruled...." hehehe.... just about says it all. :)
-- Zieggenfus
Just a few years ago, a federal judge ruled that the ADA only applies to physical spaces. From the article:
In the first case of its kind, U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz said the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies only to physical spaces, such as restaurants and movie theaters, and not to the Internet.
"To expand the ADA to cover 'virtual' spaces would be to create new rights without well-defined standards," Seitz wrote in a 12-page opinion dismissing the case. "The plain and unambiguous language of the statute and relevant regulations does not include Internet Web sites."
Since you now have a couple of federal judges in different districts disagreeing with each other, the Supreme Court may ultimately decide this one.
I used to advise a major university on ADA and Rehabilitation Act issues, including issues related to web compliance under section 508 of the Rehab Act. It does not surprise me at all that Target was held responsible to make its website compliant with the ADA. This was far from the first lawsuit involving compliance with the ADA or otherwise trying to force web entities to make their websites accessible to the disabled. In fact, I did a paper for the National Association of College and University Attorneys back in 2000 that relied on a Slashdot article:
"The overall design of web sites can have a tremendous effect on their accessibility for persons with disabilities. Because the internet is predominantly a visual medium, it should be no surprise that accommodations may be needed for the blind. However, proper design of a web page can also accommodate the needs of persons who have mobility impairments or learning disabilities, or are deaf.
Guides for making the web accessible recommend the use of standard hypertext markup language (html) or, if appropriate, the new extensible hypertext markup language (xml or xhtml). (Html is the standard coding language that tells a web browser what to display on a computer screen; xml is the name for the most modern version of the coding language.) Cutting edge html can pose problems because specialized software for the disabled, such as reading software for the blind, may be unable to understand it. Also, in general a simple layout is better. Frames and tables, for example, can cause problems with reading software because that software reads from left to right, ignoring the layout of a page. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) recently sued AOL because AOL's software allegedly does not work with reading software. A copy of the complaint is attached and can also be found at http://www.nfb.org/aolcompl.htm. Curtis Chung, the NFB's Director of Technology, answered questions about the suit at http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/09/1342224.shtm l. Mr. Chung said:
'. . . the quarrel we have with America Online has to do with the accessibility of the software we *MUST* *RUN* in the Windows environment in order to use any AOL service. This is *NOT* related directly to any question of accessibility to web pages. To put it simply, the AOL software, all versions, behaves in such a way as to make it difficult if not impossible for screen access programs for the blind to understand what is being displayed on the screen. What we are asking for is to have AOL software that works well with screen access software for the blind.'
The choice of colors and typefaces, and the layout of the page, can affect the ease of reading for persons with learning disabilities, particularly those with dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. Consistent style and navigation design from page to page also helps those with learning disabilities. Sites designed for ease of navigation and with large hotlinks can accommodate the needs of persons with mobility impairments, who may have difficulty controlling a mouse. Keeping pages short means that reading software does not have to read a long page before the listener can click to something else. Reading software also may have difficulty with symbols and graphs, such as those used in math and science classes. Persons who are colorblind can have difficulty if the web site relies on color for navigation.
The technology selected to deliver the course content also can affect the disabled. For example, streamed audio or video is not accessible to persons with hearing or vision disabilities. An institution's duty to accommodate does not force the course designer necessarily to eschew these technologies, but it will require the institution to give thought to alternate means of providing the course content. For example, a course that uses streaming audio lectures will be accessible to a deaf student if a
Here are some links to stories regarding the actual ruling:
& ncl=http://washington.bizjournals.com/baltimore/st ories/2006/09/04/daily29.html
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8
Also have a disability and used to be a ex-social worker. And I think its about damn time for this ruling--its been long overdue.
And this court also restricted the claims allowed to go forward to those advancing the claim that the site design impacted the accessibility of physical spaces (the Target stores), so there is no disagreement here.
What does this mean for all of the "mom and pop" websites out there that are non-ADA compliant?
Will we suddenly have thousands of little lawsuits against "Henry's Landscaping" because he used Publisher to make his website?
I could see a lawyer cleaning up on this, just hunting around for businesses without compliant websites and finding a blind person to represent. Didn't that happen with wheelchair / ramp access?
-David
Putting their best spin on recent web news, Microsoft spokesvole Andy Nonymous told reporters gathered at a press conference about M$'s radical new Interweb.
"For years we've been telling the free software terrorists that they were bad for business and their work was hurting disabled people and killing puppies, this drives the point home."
"We stood silent as Sendmail replaced the far more disable friendly US Post Office, but formulated a plan." At this he cackled like a fiend. "We made M$ Word the default editor for email, though most people rejected this. It really hurt us to see the demise of 3m word attachments as a means of conveying 1k of text."
"As Apache on Linux took over the world wide web, we were stunned and shaken that people who wanted to stay in business avoided our IIS unless we paid them to use it."
"It was in Mass. that we finally realized that our email strategy right all along. M$ Word is the only blind free format in existence and we are now pressing for it's use as a standard for all interweb pages! This is indeed the cheap and easy solution the good people at Mindcraft are talking about. Victory at last."
A stunned silence settled on the conference. One or two hands came up but and Nonymous nodded off stage.
A huge, sweaty, bald man with a chair then danced onto the stage carrying a $2,000, 75lb office chair raised over his head. "Any questions?" he asked through a truly demented grin. And there were none. He had fucking killed them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... I thought you were implying that the slashdot crowd are mentally disabled and have a hard time using Kuro5hin. I'm not sure I'd agree with it, as I don't know about Kuro5hin, but it is clear that a good third of the people posting here have some type of mental disability. Or maybe they're just stupid, which IMO, is a disability in and of itself. I'd even go so far as to say that stupid people should be allowed to park in the handicap spots, provided they are registered as stupid people with the state. But I digress.
A lot of disabilities have already been thought of. If your site works in Lynx, then existing assistive input and output devices can probably handle it. As for people with less common disabilities, groups representing such people are more likely to try to contact the web team to resolve issues amicably than to sue first and ask questions later.
A lot of engineers look to science fiction for inspiration. For example, the character Dust Puppy from the comic strip User Friendly is in shape a head with two feet attached at the neck. He has no problem playing first-person shooters by operating the mouse with his feet. In this world, there are the NoHands Mouse and keypress pedals.
There are PS/2 mouse filters to smooth out Parkinsonian tremors. But if basic interactions on your web site require the use of a context menu and cannot be performed with the keyboard, then your site may already be broken.
If the Society for the Blind is serious about access, not just their share of "damage awards", they'll offer a free toolkit that presents a crappy, but legally compliant, ecommerce system. Then instead of sites getting sued, they can get sent free software. Hosting the system would really make sense. And funding it with whatever ADA funding and damages they get would make it all make sense.
That setup would be inclusive. It would not only make a bigger percentage of sites accessible to the blind, but also just a lot more sites. With fewer hassles.
Of course the same goes for all the other organizations that represent disabled people. And remember, short of telepathy, we're all at least somewhat disabled when interfacing with computers/networks. And disabled people are enabled. We've got a lot to learn from each other. If we don't just sue each other into oblivion first.
--
make install -not war
Look at the liberalism that has become slashdot. Applauding the Stalinist efforts to force everyone to make web pages a certain way or face bankruptcy.
Gee... This site has fallen so far, its become the very thing they are supposed to be against. The stupid dictating the technology to the geeks.
The programmers here are gone. All thats left are the liberals and the trial lawyers.
So I went to the mindshare web site, turned on my M$ Narrator and it wouldn't read the site. It would only read the title bar. Does this mean they are going to sue themselves? What the hell?
2. All web sites must provide forblind.html (or whatever is chosen as the standard) to comply with ADA.
3. And the forblind.html will read out:
Press or say 1 if you want to listen to the web site
Por Espanol reinterpret_cast[spanish](press 2)
Press 2 if you wish to throttle the person who designed this idiotic phone menu
Press 3 if you wish to throttle Alexander Graham Bell.
Your visit is important to us. For quality improvement purposes (ha, ha, got you there) we might hang up on you any time.
Start elevator music.
4. FireFox will come up with an extension to automagically append forblind.html to all urls.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
us mac and linux users? Should we all sue the big websites that are only tested in IE?
Would you say that to someone who fell and is paralyzed as a result of a severed spinal cord?
And, FYI, I was injured at a former employers and can no longer work!
STFU!
I'm sick of the bias. Everyone feels sorry for the physically disabled and wants to help them, yet us mentaly challenged / disabled are just treated like stupid a-holes who get what they deserve. Being ''stupid'', my income is of course very small. A big chunk of that small income is wasted by unsmart purchases. Please stop merchants from taking andvantage of my stupidity / ripping me off.
If you use semantic markup, and you make a CSS available that uses lightness contrasts along with bold, underline, and italic to convey this semantic markup, you can still introduce some variety into a site without interfering with color-blind users. You can test your color choices by fiddling with your monitor's color calibration. Simulate protanopia by turning red all the way down; simulate deuteranopia by turning green all the way down.
Sorry to say that this lawsuit deserves being heard under the ADA regulations because they specifically indicate that commercial websites must be accessible to disable people. Basically, this means usage of proper alt.text tags for images, plain text that can be parsed by screen readers, informative link tags and a whole rash of other elements.
Note that the U.K. includes a web accessibility standard that's as stringent as the ADA and with considerablly more teeth; so anyone who designs commercial websites damn well better get with the program and make their websites accessible to disabled. Hell most of it can be easily done with CSS anyhow, such as high contrast colors, larger fonts and the elimination of Flash for the main page. Please use a static page with easy to navigate links and a simple/clean design that gives the user the choice.
One design element I'm seeing more companies forget is that in the states over 50 percent of their potential market is still on Dial Up access with a maximum speed of 56k down. Do you remember how fast those folks leave a website that takes longer then 30 seconds to begin loading? If not then maybe we need to ensure that all website designers use both a 33.6k dialup connection and a screen reader to check their designs.
So... you want to put a warning label on life? or what?
This wasn't a decision that websites have to be "accessable". The judge just refused to dismiss the suit in the preliminary stages. The judge also refused to compel Target to make the site "accessable" during the litigation. So this just means that there's enough of a question to proceed to trial. It's not a "decision". Computerworld has a better story on this.
The only store in town is by definition the only store whose web site can offer in-store pickup of purchased goods in town. This is important for larger goods where asking a family member with a truck to carry it home from the store is an order of magnitude cheaper than paying UPS or FedEx to ship it to the customer's doorstep.
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...to purchase your products, but it's also good service to have plenty of friendly cashiers at the counter. Should the government mandate that as well? When government tells private business how to operate, you can guarantee that businesses will do the minimum necessary to comply. Sometimes this is necessary with regards to fair trade and product safety, but it is *not* necessary in this case.
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Likewise, <sarcasm> that should be the company's business decision to go after the African-descent community or to disregard it - it should not be required by law. </sarcasm>
But if there are three businesses that sell a given good or service, and none of them finds it profitable to serve people with disabilities, then what happens?
Likewise, <sarcasm> even if they could gain money from making their services available to people of African descent, it should still be their own choice. </sarcasm> Would you support Jim Crow style segregation using this sort of language?
You mean a boycott? I remember when advocating an economic boycott because a business wouldn't cater to blacks was illegal, and those people got arrested. I mean I personally remember it as an old civil rights worker would remember it. I remember seeing a sign at a city boundary, welcome to xxxxville, with the signs -> kiwanis, moose, elks, no niggers allowed. Yes. for real,. saw that. That's what happens once you go that "who cares it's my business" way. In your private life, if all you want to do is hang out with left handed lutheran latvians-go ahead. If you operate a public business-be prepared to be open to the public-to people, any old people. On the web, off the web, it doesn't matter. We've already tried the other way and it didn't work *so bad* that we explicitly made some more detailed laws about it.
We have governments to level the playing field and make things a little fairer over all. Just some, because it works. Not doing it leads to..well..warlords and the middle ages scene again. Eventually anyway. One step leads to another to another to another, until you got total separation and a lot of conflicts. Don't know about you but I sure would like less conflicts. Just seems nicer.
I've heard the same complaints about human rights being "enforced" since..well a long time ago now. None of it panned out, once laws were in place,and enforced, society adapted at least enough to get on with life a little better. Believe me, you don't want to live in a society with a lot of hate and mistrust and schisms in business and local government, etc, it just sucks man, it sucks. It's hideous middle ages nasty mega suckitude. Been there, done that, breathed the gas and dodged the clubs and stupid police dogs. Kinda lucked out there, lot of my friends didn't. Civil rights-human rights-it's all tied together. Just like free speech, free speech means nothing unless you are just as passionate about it for the dude who's ideas you hate as you are for your own speech.
This disabilities act/idea/goal with the web pages is a reasonably good idea, and ya, some places will have to suck it up and code something a little simpler so that more people can navigate and use the site-so what? What's wrong with that really? We are gradually getting away from that "IE" only BS as well-double plus good. It also helps makes sites faster for those still stuck on dialup, still millions and millions of people. Alt text for images? Why is that hard or wrong? Having some regular links instead of Flash links? That's a *good* idea.
When I go to some store, and go to park the car, I can see special handicapped parking places near the door. Am I pissed about it? That I can't park there, that I have to walk further than that, that maybe what I pay for something inside is some tiny bit more expensive because they had to make a few special parking spaces? Absolutely not! If I choose I can go park at the farthest away slot and calmly walk into the store. There's folks out there would pay a million cash if they could do that-but they can't, and no amount of money would help them do that. At least getting closer to the door helps the situation-it's a compromise. This is a similar deal with the websites-it's just a human and humane and civilly cool thing to do.
Some people with disabilities are on a fixed income and can't afford to constantly upgrade all the crap necessary to run MS, so many do use open-source software for as it is more secure. And when a site can only be acessed by IE...well, that sounds like its another one for the courts. Think a lawyer would have a better answer than mine.
Braile on a DRIVE UP ATM always cracks me up...but, I guess if we are going to give ILLEGAL aliens drivers licenses, why not BLIND people?
This is an existing racket which has just been ported to the web.
k edown.htmlc le.html?storyid=5543
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_ada_sha
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/arti
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001453.asp
Question of the week, why the fuck is the outdoor DRIVE UP atm the one with braille on it? Why not the one in the bank?
Hooo god please no.. Don't tell me they will patent the "look" of web site.
1 45228
0 3
Maybe I haven't understood the fine article but still. What is One Click buy? is not a functionnality of the web site in question?
Copyright laws are killing the industries, killing arts, killings new products.. When will the killing end?
In a capitalist world, does copyright laws encourage competition or not? I mean thoses laws don't just stop people from using the product (or playing with it) but stop people from improving upon it.
Related Slashdot article:
A Working Economy Without DRM?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/30/0
Making Money Selling Music Without DRM
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/14162
That's non-discrimination laws for you. It doesn't matter that you will take the loss of potential customers if they can't find their way around you site. It doesn't matter if you don't want to sell to whites/blacks. It doesn't matter if you can't afford to widen all your doorways and build ramps etc. The fact is, we no longer have the right to own property in this nation. We can't even do buisness in "residental districts". The more you look around, the more you realise, we are extreme-socialists, and are losing our rights daily.
Maybe it is time for new browsers to be made for people with disabilities. A 'blind browser' that interprets the content of a webpage and translates to a specified output device. A blind person would be able to maintain their own equipment (don't the rest of us do this anyway) and the thousands (if not millions) of online businesses don't have to spend a fortune, constantly accommodating 100% of the surfing population. A possible problem is that the source for flash may have to be released so the browsers may interpret. Similar could work for the deaf, dumb, etc.
.
In my experience, usually all ATMs have braille, not only the outdoor ones, and plenty of people either walk up to drive-up ATMs, and they are of course just as usable from the rear left-hand seat as the front left-hand seat, so while it makes a good line for a standup comedian, there is nothing really wrong with drive-up ATMs having braille.
You mean a boycott? I remember when advocating an economic boycott because a business wouldn't cater to blacks was illegal, and those people got arrested. I mean I personally remember it as an old civil rights worker would remember it. I remember seeing a sign at a city boundary, welcome to xxxxville, with the signs -> kiwanis, moose, elks, no niggers allowed. Yes. for real,. saw that. That's what happens once you go that "who cares it's my business" way.
Which is absolutely irrelevant to the point at hand; I wasn't advocating discrimination by the government (arresting people who suggest boycotts, forbidding blacks from the town limits). That's not an outgrowth of "who cares it's my business", that's an outgrowth of government-endorsed racism, which is pretty much gone now (government-endorsed racism, not racism in general).
In your private life, if all you want to do is hang out with left handed lutheran latvians-go ahead. If you operate a public business-be prepared to be open to the public-to people, any old people.
So once you open a storefront, your property should become public property? You shouldn't have the right not to serve anyone in particular, simply because you don't like the look of them? I know over here, petrol station attendants are particularly told not to serve anyone they think looks suspicious after about 10 at night because of the risk of robbery. Do you think that should be disallowed, because it discriminates against people with squinty eyes and a sour mouth? Or even because it discriminates against black people, in that the attendant is more likely to think of a black person as suspicious?
When I go to some store, and go to park the car, I can see special handicapped parking places near the door. Am I pissed about it? That I can't park there, that I have to walk further than that, that maybe what I pay for something inside is some tiny bit more expensive because they had to make a few special parking spaces?
Really, it's nothing to do with you as a non-disabled customer. It's between the business owner, and the disabled customer. This is (AFAIK) an unregulated area that has been addressed by the market. Businesses want the custom of the disabled and elderly, so they make special provisions for them. A more apt question would be, do you think all businesses should be forced to have a certain proportion of their car spaces reserved for disabled people? I'm all for businesses being disabled-friendly. I'm not for all businesses being compelled to be disabled-friendly, especially when that entails a financial burden on the business owner.
This is a similar deal with the websites-it's just a human and humane and civilly cool thing to do.
I agree. It is civil and humane. But not doing it shouldn't be illegal, especially when people have already invested thousands of dollars developing something which, at the time, was not known to be illegal. The judge's interpretation of this law, even if valid, is far from obvious. Because of that, it means that businesses that created websites they believed to be fully legal, are now suddenly liable unless they invest thousands of dollars to correct the problem. The judge's interpretation of the law (intended for physical premesis) has essentially created a new law for websites (because nobody else interpreted the law that way, and it wasn't made clear in the text of the law). However, unlike a new law, which would only be valid against offences committed after it has passed, a re-interpretation of an old law means that people who created inaccessible sites before it was known to be illegal are now liable. It's like waiting for someone to spit on the street, then creating a law imposing a $10,000 fine for spitting on the street and charging them with it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
A blind person can easily surf the web with the aid of a non blind person. I'd say just give us the user agent of whatever browser blind people are using and we can redirect them to a purely text page that says this page is not designed for blind people.
Your assumption that a website is visual, is shortsighted.
Read this comment. The author is right on the money.
lifetime appointment judges
This is an entirely different topic, though I totally agree with you.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
How can you design a site for the blind when there are no legal requirement for what this means ? Will you specify what operating system and version it works with ? Or what browsers or browser version ? What plugins are required ? Or the minimum speed of internet connection ? This is stupid. After having web sites not work from linux I understand the issue but lawyers are too stupid to know how to correct a problem like this.
...to realise that the us-american court system is flawed by design.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
It is not as easy as you think.
I am a team lead for two web based products used by the US Government, which means they must be Section 508 compliant.
It is very very expensive and time consuming to make a website S.508 compliant. S.508 sites are plain and simple because in order to be compliant, you cannot take advantage of most of the DHTML and interactive content used on websites today. As a result, companies that want a slick website that is accessible tend to make two websites, one for disabled people and one for everyone else.
-Dan
I see a lot of comments lambasting the lawsuit, but I have to say I don't see the problem.
Making a site 508 compliant is not really all that hard and it essentially consists of making sure your site validates as XHTML 1.0 (preferably 1.0 Strict) or even better, XHTML 1.1. Do that and you are about 90% of the way there. The rest consists of actually knowing html and using it correctly. Learn to use labels, fieldsets, and other html elements that have been largely ignored, despite being quite useful. Actually use the alt tags for images of consequence. In other words, if you've designed a site that complies with web standards, you have little to worry about with this lawsuit. If you haven't, then now you know why we have and push standards. Consider it a lesson learned and move forward a wiser developer.
The only downside to writing a site to be 508 compliant is that AJAX must be used carefully. Screen readers still don't detect client-side content changes well, so client-side dynamic content is slightly more limited, requiring a few more postbacks that you would normally use. But if you know what you are doing, those sorts of "intrusions" to your normal programming work are almost inconsequential. One caveat: Don't trust that Visual Studio 2005 and IIS will give you compliant code, even if they say they will. They won't.
You need to know a little something about real web development but the end your site will be better, cleaner, and more easily maintainable. I've done it. It's ain't that hard.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
I'm sorry that you have a disability, but I don't think every business on the web needs to cater to you.
What's next? Suing book publishers for not providing braille versions of books? Suing TV stations for not having closed captioning for every single show? Suing shoe stores because amputees have to buy both shoes and not just the one they need?
Business that choose not to cater to those with disabilities will pay by bad PR and reduced patronage by disabled persons. The courts do not need to be involved.
-Dan
Here are some extracts for your general education: Canadian Human Rights Act, H-6, An Act to extend the laws in Canada that proscribe discrimination 2. The purpose of this Act is to extend the laws in Canada to give effect, within the purview of matters coming within the legislative authority of Parliament, to the principle that all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have and to have their needs accommodated, consistent with their duties and obligations as members of society, without being hindered in or prevented from doing so by discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted. 5. It is a discriminatory practice in the provision of goods, services, facilities or accommodation customarily available to the general public (a) to deny, or to deny access to, any such good, service, facility or accommodation to any individual, or (b) to differentiate adversely in relation to any individual, on a prohibited ground of discrimination. 6. It is a discriminatory practice in the provision of commercial premises or residential accommodation (a) to deny occupancy of such premises or accommodation to any individual, or (b) to differentiate adversely in relation to any individual, on a prohibited ground of discrimination. "disability" means any previous or existing mental or physical disability and includes disfigurement and previous or existing dependence on alcohol or a drug;
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Taking some time, I read the ruling, and for a large site such as Target, they deserved it. First the DRA (Disabily Rights Activist) tried to reason with Target, which in return Target dismissed them. From the ruling:
The plaintiffs originally filed the complaint in Alameda superior court on February 7, 2006. The case was removed to federal district court and assigned to Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. Target responded to the suit by filing a motion to dismiss the case, which argued in part that no civil rights laws apply to the Internet.
"We tried to convince Target that it should do the right thing and make its website accessible through negotiations," said Dr. Maurer. "It is unfortunate that Target took the position that it does not have to take the rights of the blind into account. The ruling in this case puts Target and other companies on notice that the blind cannot be treated like second class citizens on the Internet or in any other sphere."
Another interesting note is that if you are blind, you can't access the site at all, well some, but you would not even be able to purchase anything. From the ruling again:
The plaintiffs originally filed the complaint in Alameda superior court on February 7, 2006. The case was removed to federal district court and assigned to Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. Target responded to the suit by filing a motion to dismiss the case, which argued in part that no civil rights laws apply to the Internet.
"We tried to convince Target that it should do the right thing and make its website accessible through negotiations," said Dr. Maurer. "It is unfortunate that Target took the position that it does not have to take the rights of the blind into account. The ruling in this case puts Target and other companies on notice that the blind cannot be treated like second class citizens on the Internet or in any other sphere."
Target is a big company, and therefore has a responibilty to all demographics, even the disabled. Making a site compliant is not very difficult, in fact a big part is just making ure there is a text only alternative to images, and to use text as much as possible. This does no require a complete site redesign, only some minor tweaking, unless it is flash based,even then there are work-arounds. Not every site will be sued, only those that chose to deny those unable to access there site due to disabilities.
And yeh thats it
If they all have braile, why do they all not have text to speech? I've never been to an ATM where it told me what was going on.
The funny thing is that this manouver will generate work for web designers. So why are they here, fighting it? Certainly not because they suddenly developed a love for big business.
How do you define 'accessible'.
Section 508 is what the US Government has to define "accessible" for their own stuff. They have an entire website dedicated to helping application designers meet the requirements. Here it is http://www.section508.gov/. While IANAL, I would guess that if you followed these guidelines, then you would be able to say that you made a bona fide effort and would be immune to lawsuites. If you are designing for the government (either web-apps or compiled desktop apps), then you are already required to follow these requirements (it should be in the contract).
Um.. they both have braille. Why bother making an entirely different set of buttons just for drive-through ATMs?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Except for the fact that they won't know how/when the questions appear on the screen... At least they'll know the options FOR the questions...
In a way it is, in another it isn't. We've had anti dscrimination laws on the books for awhile now here, discrimination against handicapped people is one of them, I see no reason to give websites slack thinking they could get away with blatantly not caring and being discriminatory if they are open to the public. If you want a closed site, invite only, pass protected-who cares then, your business, go for it, code however you want it. Open to the public, different story, alter your code a scosh to make it more accessible..
And yes, some places have had to alter practices before, and it cost them time and money, in fact, it usually does everytime alaw gets passed or enforced. This isn't new at all, not even close to new, it's how laws evolve all the time. It happens in a lot of businesses. Look at electrical generation. Years ago, public utilities made regular coal plants, bun coal, generate electricity with steam boilers and turbines, thick black smoke goesd off into the sky, shareholders make "profit", customers get electricity-but everyone got to breathe some rather toxic stuff.. Then it was determined that just allowing unrestricted emissions was a bad idea. Those plants now have to start to install scrubbers, etc at their expense and tough noogies because it is in the general public interesdt to dfo so.. It was legal then to operate the plant as it stood, but later they had to modify what they were doing. So how again is this website case different? It's not near as I can see, same general idea, law says such and such is a better idea and in the general public better interest. suck it up. What you are saying, if I am reading this right, is you think because the coal plant wasn't built with the scrubbers in the first place, and they don't want them, and it was legal back then, that now they shouldn't be required to change/alter what they do, even if society and laws determine that it is in the public good -which is all a law really is anyway, codfiying some alleged public do or don't do? they can just keep their old design forever? Here's another example- It used to be legal to sell cars without seatbelts-now they are mandatory for all new cars sold, and even a much older car, if driven on the street, needs to add the belts-at the owner's expense. And so on, there are any number of laws like that currently being enforced, so I don't think this is any new style of precedent.
Guess we'll have to agree to disagree, I don't have a problem with making them change based on new laws, especially when they make sense like that. some I do some I don't, in this instance I don't have a problem with it. Sometimes we re-think things and change our minds, and our government and society and laws change to reflect these new thoughts. Some times it costs you money, other times you wind up making money from it, sometimes it's a big ho hum. Just depends. It's how civilization and governments work now, and I am the first to admit there are a lot of flaws, but the alternative-no laws at all, a pure might makes right, caveat emptor hienlein styled ultra libertarian anything-goes fantasy world like that-I'll pass. Until humans evolve a little more socially and psychologically-we need some form of government and laws. Unfortunately.
Oh, as to the boycotts and whatnot-you don't understand. Not only boycotts being made illegal for a time, they were just a *reflection* of the ingrained institutionalised racism and "apartness" that lead to private violence. A lot of private violence and heartache and despair. Once people are allowed to openly and blatantly discriminate like that, it leads eventually to pain suffereing death and violence. That's what happens. To make a civil-ization, to have to make being civil the legal way to live, else it de evolves into violence. Like I said, been there, done that, seen that. Voluntary doesn't work all that well. I wish it did but it doesn't. Even on the web, I still see discrimination, I just was at a website that wouldn't let me access some content because it said I needed
But then why civil suits?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
target.com == Amazon
www.target.txt
Time for a new domain. Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night.
Why is it that is seems that common sense and reason is rarely practiced in our judical system? Better yet, why does a single person, via a judicial fiat, have the ability to force their will on the entire American population?
Idiocy like this should be pursued all the way to the federal supreme court, but I certainly don't imagine we'll see any weak-spined American corporations fighting something as outrageous as this.
I'll never understand why such tiny minorities in this country have such amazing power over the rest of us.
more accessible than a select element that causes a script to execute onchange.
This brings up a question in my mind, why haven't browsers for the blind kept up? I mean, is it really that hard for a reader to say "Jump to a forum. Dropdown box. First option: Announcements. Second option: Latest news, selected. Third option: Old news. Fourth option: Off Topic. End dropdown box list." and then give the user the option to make a selection, and then execute the onChange if the user does change it?
Depends entirely on how the fall happenned.
Floor of assigned workspace collapsed under them, well, hell yeah, sue like crazy and win.
Walk across a wet floor full of people with mops and fall on your ass, well, that's your own problem.
Severity oif the result does not (Should not) affect the assignment of fault, and the fault for clumsiness falls on the clumsy person.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
...we can get the ADA to recognize "allergy to bad web design" as a disability we can start scaring all the web designers who think [NameOfColor] text on a [NameOfColor] background looks good...
I am going to copyright "Web 3.0, it's the same as 2.0 but litigation built right in!"
1) What about the millions of glossy catalogs produced at great cost and destined for inevitable landfill waste? Will the pushers be sued for printing catalogs that are inaccessible to blind consumers?
2) Why is the ref on this ruling basically an advertisement?
3) Who defines what is fair? A billion dollar corporation can afford to come up with whatever is deemed compliant if this thing is for real. What about Joe down the street following his dream and starting up an e-business selling foo with a loan from the bank - how is he supposed to come up with the funds for this as well? He can't defend against a lawsuit and I don't buy this "just take our approach and all will be fine."
I am SO going to get a contract job writing acessible versions for p0rn sites!
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
I am not familiar with screen readers for the blind, but I did notice a few things when I went to the Target.com webpage. I am using my Linux computer just now and I tried using two different browsers to viewing their website just now. First, I used the Mozilla browzer and everything seemed fine other than the fact on my slow dial-up Internet connection it took about 5 minutes for the webpage to load. Next, I switched to using the text-only Elinks browser. The text-only webpage finished loading in only about 20 seconds this time. I then started to compare how the two webpages looked in each browser.
As I am comparing the two webpages right now I see that the text-only version is missing many of the headings and sub-headings, but in most cases the individual menu items are still there. For instance, the word "woman" is missing from the heading of one section and in a sub-section the word "clothing" is missing and the word [USEMAP] just appears in place of each missing word. But, the list of individual items such as "sweater", "tunics", "jeans", and "leggings" still appear and can be selected.
The individual items can be slected in the text-only based browser, but just out of curiosity I also tried slected where it says [USEMAP] for one of the missing headings. In that case a list on long complicated meaningless looking URL's appeared and I was expected to choose one. I randomly chose one of the URL's and the next page appeared about 25 seconds later.
My conclusion is that the Target.com website does not work very well on text-only browsers such as Links or Elinks. Well, so who uses text-only browsers anyway? Not many of us, I suppose, although I would assume that screen readers are also text-only. When I viewed their webpage with Mozilla the webpage was so slow that it was barely useable anyway. Either way, on my slow dial-up connection their webpage is almost useless. The heck with the blind, they are discriminating against people who use dial-up Internet connections! In many rural parts of the U.S. and in some neighborhoods with older infrastructure, such as where I live, it is not even possible to get high-speed Internet access yet.
I don't like the idea of possibly forcing webpage designers or struggling small businesses to pay experts to have their webpages audited for ADA compliance. I wonder if it might be sufficient if they just made their webpages compatible with text-only browsers such as Links or Elinks. Presumably, that would also result in a webpage which is not be overly dependant on Macromedia Flash or other fancy bandwidth wasting graphics technology.
\
I am a rank-beginner at site design, but from my pouring over books to help me learn, most of the mentions of accessibility mentioned that it made it much easier to get "ranked" on search engines, because search engins read text like us, not pictures. So I added little labels to our images and got good ratings on the online disability raters like the ones I found here: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abtools.html#te sting
Not like it's related, but we got good ratings on Google soon after. So it didn't hurt us at all.
What I want to know is: WHY DOES TARGET WANT TO PREVENT ALL BLIND PEOPLE FROM SHOPPING ON THEIR WEBSITE? Are they just stupid? Lemme tell you, the next step after(?) a lawsuit is you'll have a hundred blind adults and kids with their canes and aide-dogs chaining closed the doors to your store. Just showing everybody else what it's like to not be allowed to shop there. You can get rid of them by sending them to jail, your choice. But you'll do it to their face, on TV, not just while they sit home on their keyboards because you figure you'll save a buck.
Kind of a pain to make it on the bus down to the actual store, but if they won't sell to me online, I guess we'll be "seeing" you in person.
This case isn't decided; I hope to hear more about it.
peace b
It's also theoretically possible to create artificial nerves to bypass damaged tissue and cure paralysis, or to fit paraplegics with robotic legs that work just as well as the real thing, making stairs negotiable. In practice, most people in such a position have to make do with wheelchairs.
Ramps, like website code that follows accessibility guidelines, are possible now.
You know...I don't really care if anyone can or can't see my web site. It's MY blog. If you don't like how it looks, or it makes your screen reader barf...read someone else's blog.
If the Target.com web site doesn't suit you, shop elsewhere. Target isn't that great anyway. Encourge others not to shop at Target and write the company to tell them why you aren't shopping there. It's a lot more effective than a law suit.
(open sarcasm and flamebait)
No, we have the people who used to be left behind as bear bait telling everyone else to march around to a specific set of rules or they'll sue. Do they pay for any of this? No...they expect the business to foot the bill and then pass the costs on to the rest of the customers. You know who that means, don't you? It means the other 99% of us. With a site the size of Target.com, that's a pretty signficiant chunck of change. Which one of you, squeezed between high taxes, high gas prices, and a few years of pay cuts, wants to pay more for anything because a relatively small group of people doesn't like the web site?
If you don't like the web site, go to the store. If you don't like the store, SHOP SOMEWHERE ELSE.
Why? So some freakin' lawyer can get his grubby mits on 1/3 or more of the settlement and some money grubbers can get their hands on the rest.
(end sarcasm and flamebait)
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
I was wondering how long it would take for something like this to happen.
http://outcampaign.org/
They do have speech enable ATMs. We have them here in St. Paul, MN. There's a headphone jack you plug into so no one else can here it.
fuck the blind, let them shop elsewhere.
Text-to-speech generally causes the ATM to announce that you are attempting to withdrawl $500.
A better text-to-speech interface would be the tellers. While they aren't 24/7 in most places...
All that junk mail I recieve, too! Offering me the ability to shop from the comfort of my home, while not letting me do so without using my eyes! Fuck 'em!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
And any web designer who didn't do it the right way has only themselves to blame, because the ADA was passed in 1990.
Who took accessibility out of the requirements before putting the job out to bid (or told the in-house developer not to bother with it as it would take too much time). Most web developers (who are worth the title) know about accessibilty, but it's a hard sell to bosses who just want to see a pretty screen.
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
Following the link yields (at least for me) a bunch of HTML displayed right on the page. I don't mean the content in the HTML. I mean it looks like a text document and I can see the HTML tags right there with text between them.
Their website isn't usable enough for people who don't know what this is. SUE THEM!!!
(The "sue them" line is a joke, but their website really is broken)
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I've seen this argument used many times recently, for many reasons. Can you cite any REAL examples?
In other news, today the entire internet circa 1995 has been sued for inaccessible design.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Okay, I'm sorry you were born blind but that isn't my problem. I don't care if I'm running a business or not, some medium weren't meant for all kinds of people. This is absolutely ridiculous. Next thing you know they'll want to sue the local paper because it isn't published in Braille. What is going to be next, those with low IQs are going to sue because they can't navigate their way around the website? I've got some suggestions here. First, for the blind people get up out your stupid house and go to the store and actually touch the merchandise. If you can't see it, and are only told about it, how the hell do you know you want it? I wouldn't trust a business to describe a product to me, its their product, they are going to put a spin on it. Get on out and touch things. Secondly, be proactive about the people with low IQs. Put a big button somewhere that says "I'm Lost" on it. That button would take them to a page with a fake loading bar and a button that says, "Click here to load faster". Each time they click the loading bar starts all over again. That'll keep them entertained till they finally give up.
However, this was before computers were as widely used as they are now. And, technology has to catch up so everyone will benefit, not just a few. As a matter of fact, in my instance, advances in technology are wonderful.
I am a traumatic brain injury survivor and due to neurological damage, I have a difficult time writing legibly w/a pen. (In addition to extremely painful headaches caused by shrill noises, problems concentrating and several other things.) So, email and computer use are great for me, as is having a cell phone, because the ringtones don't give me a headache while a land-line does. (These are some of the reasons why I couldn't work--in social work, case notes have to be written by hand and signed, the damn phones in the office never stopped ringing--I headaches and was exhausted constantly. There are others.)
Plus, computer use is more widespead today--that reminds me of a couple things. Many people with disabiities go online as there is not much else for a person on disability to do. (re: computers, many people with disabilities are self-taught by reading tech sites.) So, it seems to me that a business that has a site on the net should want to make their site accessible to as many as possible. I have a question for you about this:
One of the criteria for the ADA, Rehab Act, and more to apply to a business is that the business receive federal funds. (From my social work days, I know for a fact Target gets Federal funds.) So, why should taxpayers subsidize a business that does not allow a segment of the population to access them? If the market were truly free, there would be no need for any federal sudsidies to any business. Those are your tax dollars I'm talking about. So, why don't people get all riled up about that money being wasted on corporate welfare?On another note, the first time I booted linux, I was amazed that it didn't have all of the crap everywhere--made it so much easier for me to concentrate as I didn't get a headache after an hour or so. (Still haven't decided which one I like best. Also have some hardware problems that I'm putting off fixing--that's another story.) I enjoy writing for the sake of writing, as do many people. Here's a writing sample re: Medicare D that is only the tip of the iceberg re: how screwed up the computer system is.
Thanks for your thoughts.
-Terri
Slashdot's new frontend blinded my eyes before I could find a fix. Does this mean I can sue /. now?
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I see this as beside the point.
The web is meant as a free-for-all where everything exists, and only the worst illegal activities really draw fire.
If a business has a site which doesn't play nice with certain disability accessibility tools, they shouldn't be sued. I don't know what auxilliary benefit flows to the defendant besides "just buying my sweater", but I would be terrified if this spawned a Professional Disabled Litigator.
Wait, that makes my head spin. Isn't the definition of "disability" something that seriously impairs functioning with no clear upside? I can't BEGIN to calculate the consequences of law firms hiring every person ever tagged with a disability to begin testing sites with their accessibility tools. "Nope. This site is incoherent. Case # 1653265. Next!" We all know that Law firms have THE most abusive labor rate ever. Couple this with an unlimited caseload, and suddenly you become able to make a million dollars a year if you are disabled. "Hm. I can work at McDonalds, or I can visit Iraq, doing my Patriotic Duty, get something nasty in my eyes, and make a million a year suing companies for noncompliant websites. "
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What you imagine the web to be is far from what others intend for it or use it for. Providing disability access doesn't limit the usefulness of the internet as a communication medium. In fact, it would ensure better access to a larger population. And lawsuits brought against sites that don't comply with accessibility standards would be the same as lawsuits regarding public buildings without wheelchair access in the early 90's. This sets a legal precedent that would encourage other sites to comply with standards without litigations having to be brought against them.
Your fears are simply too absurd to take seriously.
LOL! good one.
... when I first got internet access in 1996, one of the first places I had to go was to microsoft.com to download an update. Well, someone there had just discovered FRAMES, and you've never seen a frames hell quite like this... the download frame was buried among half a dozen other frames, and was so small that I almost couldn't SEE the link I needed, let alone click it.
On a related note
So I took a screen capture and sent it off to webmaster@microsoft.com, with a vociferous complaint.
Two weeks later, the frames were gone.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The keyword here being "public". My private website is like my private house - love it or leave it.
Global warming is a cube.
thank god "funny" mods don't give karma...
A good friend of mine is blind and specifically pointed out Target's site earlier this year to me. At first, I was impressed by how well he can navigate compliant sites like Safeway.com, and iTunes by listening to the reader speak at micro-machine-man speeds. Then he went to Target's site, and his screen reader couldn't make sense of any of the critical functions like "Add to Shopping Cart". He owns two of the popular readers (JAWS, and something else), and it was impossible for him to complete a purchase with both.
For blind people, shopping online is often much easier and safer than taking a trip to the nearest brick-and-mortar. Therefore, it is imperative that the big names in web commerce comply with accessibility standards. Target had plenty of time to fix this.
I can only hope that some action is taken against web-browsers that display faulty web-pages without giving error messages. If such pages would always give an error message, then web site designers would actually start to write proper code. Implementing features to facilitate access for the disabled is then a simple step.
Therefore, there should be passed some law that would forbid the release (commercial or otherwise) of browsers that parse faulty webpages without giving error messages. The worst thing that happened to the internet is probably the first release of a browser that ignored coding errors and displayed the webpage seemingly correct. As a result, we now have many pages that look okay in browser A at resolution X, but are unusable in any other situation. Although I use here the visual description, I do think that any page with errors is much harder to make usable in non-visual environments as well.
All the ATM's at my local WaMu bank have headphone jacks, guess what they are for.
(A really really anonymous coward. you know it)
Here is the deal as I have heard rumored from my cousin at corperate:
They allege Target would love to comply with the request. They didn't comply because they simply can't. The department is a total hairball. It was first screwed up by a former head of the department who spent a good deal of time sticking their nose in and messing things up even after they were removed from the project, and a serious power vaccum/turf war broke out. The whole thing is paralysed and there's nothing they can do.
This of course makes them a perfect target for a lawsuit. Not only is the defender more or less incapable of defending themselves from sheer lack of capacity to do so, but they don't even really want to win in the first place.
That's nice. I, and I'm sure most people, could care less whether your private website is accessible or not. If you want to be inconsiderate towards the disabled community, that's your right.
But if you actually RTFA, or even just the summary, you'd realize that this issue is about the Americans with Disabilities Act and bringing it up to date with the internet age. Title III of the ADA requires that public accomodations and commercial facilities do not discriminate against the disabled and comply with accessibility standards when readily achievable.
This is no different from stores, restaurants, hotels, and other public accomodations being required to install wheelchair access ramps, braile elevator buttons, etc. so as not to discriminate against the disabled. With the growing popularity and importance of the internet, there's no reason why web-based commercial services and digital accomodations should be exempt from this.
Oop! Im gettin yelled at from two diffrent sources here. Apparently its not really target's fault at all but a third party contractor who seems to have gone belly up in the middle of the project and no one can get at the code. Or something like that. It's garbled.
Sue Microsoft for not implementing or falsely implementing the needed css attributes for disability concerns. A proper barrier free site always fails on the problem that it has to be compliant with ie as well.
Argh apparently thats not right either. I guess I have no idea what's going on :/ Rumors suck.
...sorry, that should have been phrased as "the internet has the potential to be the great leveller", it was getting a bit late when I wrote that and I'd been working all day on fitting our new kitchen.
I am NaN
This is no different from stores, restaurants, hotels, and other public accomodations being required to X
Which is just as idiotic.
Global warming is a cube.
If you can'tdesign a website so that it's ADA compatable then you should not be in the business. Go back and learn how to do it properly. Then try again. If you are in the business of building websites then you should strive for excellence, which means following standards, making things accessible and compliant, and educating yourself as to how to do it properly if you can't. If you get sued for making a non-ADA compliant website then it's your own fault and you have nobody to blame but yourself. Don;t like the sound of what I'm saying then tough. That's the way it is.
>Capitalism maximizes efficient use of resources...
Err, no. It does things as cheaply as possible at that moment in time, which is definitely not the same thing.
For example, if it is cheaper to use more energy than to use more efficent equipment, you just use more energy. If it's cheaper to pay a load of children to make trainers, rather than heavily automate, then that's what you do. If it's cheaper to just pay compensation rather than improve safety, then you just pay out.
A Company exists to maximise profits for it's shareholders, not to be efficient with resources or good to the environment, to serve society, or anything else like that. It's the law.
Its *my* site, i should be able to with i want with it.
If i lose 'disabled' customers, so be it. Unless im accepting fedreal or state funds ( or want a governmental contract ) to hell with their 'rules'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's funny how many people bitching about the ruling here have missed that rather important point.
If your web site is reasonably well-designed in the first place, then any extra steps required to make it fully accessible to disabled people will probably be trivial. For example, simply using reasonably correct semantic mark-up is enough for things like screen-readers to work well most of the time. Providing a fall-back for Flash or Javascript-based features has been good practice forever, since a significant proportion of users don't enable those features.
Irony point for the day: I wonder how many people who are complaining here about the small extra effort required to support the disabled community are themselves Firefox users who think everything should be written to W3C standards rather than to "work with IE and screw the rest if they're not compatible".
Second irony point for the day: I wonder how many people who are complaining here actually realise how many disabled people there are in web site terms, where even something as common as colour-blindness can be a serious handicap on a site with a poorly chosen colour scheme.
What this means, as the parent post pointed out, is that web developers who have a clue and think about how their site will be used and who their target audience is will probably start doing better now, at the expense of the hacks who undercut the good guys on price by taking short-cuts, possibly without even mentioning alternatives to their clients. Personally, I'm pretty much OK with that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The biggest problem with your approach is that we've established through history that the free market doesn't do enough to cater to minorities without a little encouragement.
However, your example is a work of fiction anyway. Generally, disability discrimination laws require that companies take reasonable steps to accommodate the disabled. Adding alt tags and using a colour scheme that doesn't inhibit colour-blind users is usually going to be reasonable. Redesigning an entire site based on eyewear, at vast cost, to accommodate blind users is (hopefully) not going to be considered a reasonable obligation in a court. I'm neither a lawyer nor based in the US, but I do maintain web sites and did scan the major accessibility legislation in a few jurisdictions when it first came out, and they all seemed to have safeguards to this effect.
Moreover, such legislation was passed in several countries well over a decade ago. I find it hard to believe that any small business has "a large, sprawling site that's been going for years", which wasn't designed after the relevant legislation was in place, yet which will cost years' worth of profits to redesign. Anyone who's in that position has bigger problems than accessibility, because it sounds like their management and/or marketing people suck.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Hehe, the irony of someone too dumb to understand what the web is meant to be entitling their own post "stupid" is not lost on me - well done, sirrah!
You see, the web was actually created as a means for sharing data. Data is essentially not tied to any one medium. That data can be taken and presented visually on a page, but it can equally be converted to sound. A VISUAL website, as you say, if it requires visuals to be used, is a badly designed website totally outside the spirit and intent of the web. It is, in essence, a STUPID website, it's broken.
Some guy called Tim Berners-Lee once said "The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - but hey, what would he know about the web? I guess he's just stupid too, huh?
Freedoms are generally a good default in society, but rarely are they (or should they be) absolutes. The usual counter-example for freedom of speech/expression is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, and a more subtle one is defamation. We curtail freedom of movement and association for convicted criminals who are sentenced to jail time. We have freedom of religion, yet you may not attempt to murder someone just because they don't follow the same religion.
So it goes here. Trying to look after the less fortunate in society can be one of humanity's better traits. History and experience show that a capitalist model abuses such people if left unattended, and thus we introduce laws like the ADA in the US, the DDA in the UK, and so on. This court case appears to be the law working exactly as intended.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's M$'s fault that Funny mods don't give karma here. As their products are laughing stocks, Taco felt it would be unfair.
Friends don't help friends install MS junk.
I did indeed state the outer bounds of my conclusions, but then every time I open the newspaper I discover events taking over those bounds. There are also indeed differences in the scenarios.
I don't know the ratio, but there are far more websites than physical facilities. The access to them is also much easier.
At another level though, there really is a growing clash between anonymity and visibility on the net. We all know we frown on websites asking for personal information because of the risk of nasty results. Yet said prospective litigant wants to be known, and force costly results.
This is also a US law, so how does it affect multi-national companies?
A judge from New York might throw out a case by a plaintiff complaining about a library in Utah, but the same New York plaintiff would have a more relevant case against the Utah Library Website. He get to sit at home with a lawsuit Tommygun.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
One can only imagine the comedy viewed by some proto-chimps when they saw a group of their close relatives climb down from the trees to live their lives in the open plains. The big cats also enjoyed the comedy, but not for long.
I agree that the linked article is worthless. In fact, my story submission linked to a copy of the actual Associated Press article but for some reason Zonk chose to link to that Press Release advertisement.
As a follow up I wonder why Zonk chose that press release? It did name the California law that apply to the suit, whereas the AP article didn't, but it's still basically a dirty ad! I thought this was news for nerds, not links to ads...
TFA is not even a thinly-veiled advertisement for Mindshare Interactive Campaigns. It's a full-on advertisment, organized as a press release from said company, intended to drum-up business by promoting itself as the only solution for what it wrongly states is a ruling. Foul on you. That a company dealing in "compliance issues" calls itself "Mindshare" is foo, anyhow, presuming one knows what "mindshare" means. This doesn't take a lawyer to realize its fallacy, just someone with a brain and a reasonable reading comprehension level. I just ask that readers please stop posting promotional ads as "articles". It puts one on the level of Wiki editors who work as Congressional staffers, who edit their bosses (and political opponents') articles for political purposes.
As many people have pointed out, this is a prelimenary decision to allow the question to even be reaised, not a ruling. Furthermore, the source is Business Wire, a self-publising mechanism for PR companies, so it's ultimately just scare-mongering from this Mindshare company.
Because civil suits are the only way individuals can vindicate their rights under the law. Only the state can file criminal charges, and criminal law is only indirectly related to protecting individual rights.
Usually, they have standard headset jacks. They don't have loudspeakers for privacy reasons.
Take a look at this as a good example for someone who is blind:
& pid=601&dept=22
http://enablemart.com/productdetail.aspx?store=10
Lots of ALT text for the graphics, but still has pictures, more text based, no flash nonsense.
Kind of reminds you of a web site from 1995, not a lot of visual nonsense.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
This post is absolutely no surprise to me. In 1998 it became federal law that ADA compliance was mandatory. The problem is that the ADA was written with such absolute language that there is no hope for compliance because there is no room in the wording for any sort of reasoning. (As my roommate put it "it is worded to require fluffy bunnies and unicorns.")
I am a university professor. I teach computer science. It is routine for my students to request that I publish my lecture slides on line. In the past I have done this to accommodate different modes of learning that exist in any population of students. There are certain university mandated rules that I must follow in order to accommodate our disabled students, such as allowing for sign language translators present during my lectures if a deaf student requests it. The university however does not, and cannot, mandate that I provide lecture materials via a web page. In fact I don't even have to have a web page.
However, If I do choose to present a web page then, like Target it must be ADA compliant. Which for scientific and musical disciplines is nearly impossible to achieve. Now, it gets worse. CSU Long Beach is currently being sued for non-compliant web pages. My university has just established an administrative policy that was dictated by our president's office and not voted on by any faculty governance, a policy to prevent such litigation against our university from being successful. That policy reads, and I quote:
Read that and parse it carefully... Now we can actually be sued by a non-diasabled student who went through my class and fails due to lack of effort, stupidity or both. They can argue that they studied from my web page and failed to "get a full and complete understanding of the information". But it gets worse still. See the university has a mandatory policy. So technically it will be difficult to sue the university since they had a policy to prevent such "negligence". But in our hypothetical example my slides didn't meet policy. So I would be considered personally negligent and I could be sued personally by the student.
So I have two choices:So the instant anybody requests that I make my pages more compliant I will select 2. I will have choice 2 fully and permanently implemented within 30 seconds of the request. It takes the least amount of effort, saves me time each week and eliminates the greatest amount of risk, both personal and corporate. So no more web pages the instant anybody on campus asks me to make them more compliant.
Yes. I know how stupid this is. Yes, out of 100 students each semester I have maybe one, or two, disabled students and I am in effect punishing the other 98% of my students. This irks me a great deal because I try to be as open and helpful with my students as possible. But I cannot afford a personal lawsuit nor will I risk losing my job on the grounds of providing non-compliant pages that I am not required to provide in the first place.
To the law makers: Grow a logical, reasonable lobe in your brain. Write laws that make sense and that the public has some hope of complying with.
To my students: I am truly and deeply sorry.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I am very socically liberal but this is getting rediculous. First the cripple suing over the right to use a golf cart in a sporting event and now this. Disgusting. I don't blame the disabled but rather the lawyers and law makers and judges that implement the law. F the letter of the law, it's all about intent, and this is only hurting the cause.
I think blind/braille browsers are completely impractical. What a non-disabled person could view in a few minutes would take hours to go through on a disabled browser. Many pages on a website contain repeated information, and the person receiving the information would miss out on the structure of the page, and obviously any images. Creating web accessibility for the blind is hopeless in my mind.
I am curious about this. What is Target's responsibility to a blind person who walks in their front door? Do they have to provide an escort for that person who will describe in precise detail every item in every aisle? Or is it assumed that a blind person would provide their own "seeing eye person" for this task? I don't think too many businesses can actually staff a handful of "seeing eye people" on the chance the a busload of blind folks happen to walk in their front door. In a similar sense, you have to provide wheel chair access but you don't have to provide someone to push the chair.
Which makes me wonder... is it Target's fault that their website, presumedly, doesn't work with a particular screen reader (or with any screen reader) or is it the screen reader developers fault for not building a better screen reader. Prior to computers it wasn't the responsibility of every publisher to provide their books, magazines, newspapers, etc. in braille. Nor does every business have to hire a person to stand at the entrance to their store calling out the name of the business and the type of service to every person who walks past.
What I am hearing from all the people who say "it's not expensive/hard" is that site developers have a choice: make simple websites with very basic layout and functionality, or make two websites. One of them simple and the other rich. Maintaining two parallel sites is going to cost more and making a simple, limited site only, is going to drive customers away. I think those making such claims are just thinking about this issue in a very shallow fashion.
Those suing are trying to get something that they never had before. They are effectively saying that ever advertising circular that arrives in their (physical) mailbox must be structured such that it can be mechanically translated to braille. It should be up to the screen reader developers to solve this problem and not Target.
As many people have already pointed out, a lot of web developers have been telling their clients to use best practices, and these recommendations have fallen on deaf ears. This ruling may help developers, in that it will give them more paying work ("Agh! We need to revamp our website right away!") and perhaps more respect ("Hey, what was that you told us about separating data from presentation?").
Nobody in Slashdot would argue that the Internet hasn't become an integral part of all our lives. We use it for everything, from communicating with friends, to gathering news about the world, to making purchases, obtaining government services more rapidly, and so on.
Given that it took the government to step in with the ADA to make physical businesses make buildings accessible, why would anyone believe that market forces will somehow alleviate the difficulties faced online by people with disabilities?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Excuse me, but that's incorrect. Direct payments to a person with a disability (Supplemental Security Income) are $620.00 a month. Social Security Disability can be higher, in some instances lower, but is capped. (Tbe amount changes yearly.)
States custody/foster care is a hellhole w/administrative costs/waste that are unbelieveable. That's where the majority of the figure of $100,000.00 goes. If you do the math re: direct v. indirect payment, you'll see what I mean. Yes, in some instances it/foster care is needed, but if direct payments were made to the parents of a child w/a disability or a person w/a disability, the costs would be substaintially less, due to the administrative overhead and other bs.
The same can be said of many other agencies. Also, there is so much unnecessary crap (duplication) that it contracted out to private businesses. Don't get me wrong, there are some very good ones, but not all.
The costs of audits and compliance monitoring are another nightmare/waste, and the that is pretty hefty, as are the fines for non-compliance--an agency can be fined for non-compliance for the stupidest things, as on a case-by-case basis, the emphasis is on procedural bs, as opposed to the end result of a case that would benefit the client (and society as a whole).
With that in mind, litigation is/can be more cost-effective in bringing about any change (as opposed to working w/in the system), as that is the only thing that some businesses pay any attention to. With the costs of ligitigation, both direct and indirect, it seems to me that it makes more sense to comply in the first place.
It depends on the corporation and which ones it qualifies for, both at the State and Federal level. (In some instances, not all, it can be much higher.) Also, the cost of designing and maintaining a website would be an operating expense. That can be written off.
What if I don't know how to make my site compliant with ADA, and cannot afford to make it so?
The screen reader developers have already solved the problem for the most part. It's not hard to create websites that are accessible with screen readers. Most web designers don't even have to go out of their way to make sure their websites are screen reader accessible. What the disabled community has asked for is simply for the ADA to be applied to websites, which makes complete sense seeing as how integral the web has become to our daily lives. Your suggestion is like saying wheelchair designers should design wheelchairs that can climb stairs or can access any building without the need wheelchair ramps--that it shouldn't be storeowners' responsibility to make their stores & facilities wheelchair accessible. For a better understanding of ADA requirements, read over the phrase you quoted, particularly the last 3 words. Give it a little time to set in...
I wonder if we will ever need something like a CO (Certificate of Occupancy) and maybe the proper permits ($$$) in order to open a commercial website? Complying with disability issues is a major part of obtaining a CO. Thats how we do it with brick and mortar. You don't comply, you don't open for business. Would it necessarily be a bad thing?
Why is it idiotic to protect the disabled from being discriminated against? Is the Civil Rights Act also idiotic? Maybe it only appears idiotic to you because you can't think beyond yourself. For a vast number of Americans it's not idiotic at all, and it's the only thing that's reduced many of the hardships that they previously faced due to the lack of necessary infrastructure to accomdate the disabled in our society.
It is amazing to read all the blacklash concerning the Target suit. First if you run a business in this United States of America you cannot disallow any group from purchasing your services. Sorry no blacks allowed does not go anymore. Sorry little woman, you need to bring your husband in to make the purchase does not go anymore.
Sorry blind guy you cannot use our website has not been judged yet. But it would be reasonable to expect that Target will settle/loss this. The point of the lawsuit and I am certain that Target was selected, was to purchase anything from Target website a buyer was required to create an online account. Not a big problem, except at Target where the submit button required the use of the mouse. Two lines of code was needed by Target to fix the problem the day after they were sued. In the six months of negotiation Target said it was to difficult. That is not the only problem but that is why Target will loss the lawsuit.
Second, I am certain that to create an accessible web site or a standard based web site requires a web developer of superior skills and knowledge. Other wise you would see more of them. To mention two great web sites please see http://www.jkrowling.com/ and http://www.afb.org./
That http://www.jkrowling.com/ site uses something called Flash and it's accessible. Obviously from the various posts on slashdot that web designer must be a magician.
For the rest of you who said fuck the blind, what do you expect braille monitors, or I am a sorry ass college professor in computer science who does think I have to have an accessible web site. Get a grip and grow up. Life continues to evolve. and yes one day we will be reading about how hard it is to make web sites accessible for cognitively impaired. And from reading the various posts I think we need to start now.
The Americans with Disabilities Act has a pretty large loophole known as "Altnative Accommodation". For example, if putting in a wheelchair ramp is too expensive, all a store has to do is offer to provide service at the curb and they are off the hook. Similarly, all Target has to do is offer to provide assistance in making purchases from its web site over a toll-free phone number and I'm sure they will be off the hook as well. This really won't ammount to much.
HiSoftware® Cynthia Says(TM) - Web Content Accessibility Report
Powered by HiSoftware Content Quality Technology
Verified File Name: http://www.nfb.org/nfb/Default.asp
Date and Time: 9/11/2006 9:54:01 AM
Failed Automated Verification
There are plenty of instances where a non-graphical site is of no use. For example, what if the product in question (maybe a video game that requires vision to play) is of no use to those who can't see. If they put up a flash site (annoying, but not a crime) with no text links, should they be sued even though the product it advertises is of little or no use to the vision impaired?
As a business owner, why alienate a part of the public who would benefit from your business having a Braille sign (and their friends and family) and risk litigation when the costs for ADA complaince can be written off? That makes no sense to me.
Personal experience again: re: vocational rehabilitation: I want to take a computer class and get some type of certification, so I can go back to work. Technology caught up w/me, as explained previously. Seems to me that approval for my taking a class should be a no-brainer. Voc rehab says no so I have been filing appeals since last summer. There are administrative costs involved re: the appeals as well.
The way I see it, it would be more cost-effective for me to have taken the damn class to begin with. (I've had a couple job offers disappear due to my lacking any certification (despite the fact that the economy is tanking.) So, yeah, we do agree, but it is completely unrealistic to wait for market forces to sort the good from the bad.
BTW, think I should change my sig to something like "Yeah, I'm a liberal. Deal with it!"?
Target is a private business. They are not required to offer service to anyone or to offer any service from which they do not expect to make money. They're going to have to go to no small expense to 1) defend this lawsuit and 2) revamp their web site. I reiterate my statement from above - "Which one of you - squeezed between high gas prices, high taxes, and a few years of pay cuts - wants to pay more for anything?" You don't seriously expect Target to just "suck it up". They're going to pass it on to everyone else that shops at Target. Once again, the majority is paying a premium so that the "minority" can have something for free.
2 more cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
haha... you called me a plonker...