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.'"
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.
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.
Maybe this'll get all those so called 'web designers' to realize that there's more to web sites than making them look pretty.
having a site be accessible is easy - provide a plain text alternative. Simple.
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
I would think what this judge did violates the 1st Amendment.
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.
Should people have a RIGHT to minimum wage or decent working conditions? Workers can always choose to work for a different company, or not work at all
Should people have a RIGHT to not have their medical records released to everybody? We can always choose to not use a health care provider that doesn't protect privacy.
Protection laws such as minimum wage or ADA were enacted to address the gaps between social responsibility and the free market.
Just look at the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Which, of course, exist.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The requirement is reasonable accomodation, businesses can apply for a compliance waiver if they feel if the requirements are impractical.
Yes, a blind person can hook the telescope up to a computer or figure out some way to make the telescope useful.
Yes, there is running equipment that would be useful for somebody in a wheelchair (weights, sweats). Also, the disabled person may intend to purchase items for somebody else
No, the ADA only addresses accessability, not require businesses sell products for the disabled
The problem is that if it isn't required, it won't be done.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
...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.
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.
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
Blind allegience to free markets to the detriment of people is absurd. An economic system is a tool for the use of resources in society. Capitalism maximizes efficient use of resources, but since labor is a resource, the maximization can result in negative impact on people.
For the most part capitalism works to serve society, there are some cases where the system fails and requires regulation (eg OSHA, minimum wage, ADA). Unfortunately the government has gone overboard and overregulates to the point where it's no longer fixing gaps, but rather, is trying to directly manage.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
i'm certainly not going to argue that the commerce clause isn't [mis|over]-used, but you don't really think any of that started with FDR, do you? at the absolute latest, Lincoln was pretty clearly ignoring the constitutional balance between state and federal rights for his entire term, and it all just fell apart during and shortly after reconstruction. while the issue of slavery tends to overshadow what the war was really about in nearly every debate (and not without reason), it's entirely probably that, as far as the constitution's concerned, the wrong side won that one.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.