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.'"
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
Um, no. It isn't a judge's job to advocate legislation. It's a judge's job to apply existing law to specific cases. It's exactly the judge's job to interpret 'service' and 'accessible', and to then explain how he reached those conculsions in his opinion (thus "case law" and "precedent"). That's how the Anglo-American system of law has worked for several centuries now.
I can only see this as ending poorly for site developers.
You mean they'll have to provide a simple text only alternative to the site? Uh, oh, that's like -so- bad for everyone involved.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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
they complain about an inherently visual medium not being accessable enough
How is the web an inherently visual medium? It's based entirely on textual data, with support for graphics bolted on to make it prettier. The important things at the Target website are lists of store locations, operating hours, phone numbers, and that's what they were sued over. You don't need a picture to tell someone the address of your store. You don't need a picture to tell someone which brands of irons you carry and how much each model costs. You *should* add pictures of items to increase sales, since people generally like to see what they're buying, but blind people accept that limitation.
This is, quite frankly, a perfectly sensible ruling and something web developers have been warning companies about for nearly a decade. This is not some crazy fringe group out to cause trouble, this is a problem we've all known about for years and years but too many people ignored because it was cheaper or easier to cross your fingers than follow sound advice (although ironically enough, a well-designed (and therefore accessible) site will be cheaper and easier in the long run because of easier maintenance and adaptability).
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Check out Target's site. On the first screen, there are four words of text: "Sign In" and "New Guest." The stuff that looks like text really isn't, it's been saved as GIFs. There's also a big ol' Flash thing there. The second screen has actual text: the bulleted items are, even though the menu on the left isn't. Also the navigation panel at the bottom uses text. You can verify this by trying to select the "text." (For links, just make sure to move the pointer over a different link before you let go of the mouse button.) If you can select individual letters, it's actual text.
I'm definitely impressed by Target's committment to stupidity. Most people wouldn't bother taking the extra time to turn plain, unenhanced Tahoma text into a bunch of 1.5KB GIFs. I mean, it makes the site 500 times bigger, it makes the site unusable by people with vision problems, it takes probably 10 times longer since you have to do it in Photoshop, and I bet they had to spend hours fiddling with the code to make everything line up properly. Most people would bail when they realized precisely how stupid an idea this was, but not Target! When they were done, they just wanted to know what stupid thing they could do next! "Hey guys, let's challenge this lawsuit that we patently have no chance whatsoever of winning! We're still going to lose, but now it'll cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and a bunch of bad publicity!"