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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.
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.
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.
I'm considering adding braille to my website and building ramps between pages for those in wheelchairs.
That's the one good thing that can come out of this, I guess.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
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?
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
So we don't die from from a disease borne from unsanitized telephones.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
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.
Yahoo Finance News article has detailed information on the ruling.
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Braile displays have been available for years now. In fact, the CSS 2 spec allows you to write one stylesheet targetting, say, visual displays, and other for braile.
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
As one of these "defective" people, I've often wondered about this myself. The end result, is that much of our survival is attributed to the same religious nutjobs that are trying to push creationism over natural selection in our schools. All human life is treated as sacred, regardless of just how far gone each particular human life is. All out of fear of judgement from a god that may not even exist beyond the human mind.
Of course, this isn't performed selflessly. Often times, these same people will try to guilt us for being an unnecessary burden on society or claim that our disability is the direct result of their god's divine punishment for sins we've committed/or are about to commit. (Such as the eventual rejection of the religion that repeatedly has shunned them in some form or another.)
The fact is, neither I, nor anyone else with a similar condition *asked* to be born as flawed beings. It was forced upon us without our consideration or consent. So when the time comes where demands payment for our survival in the form of baptism under their rules and we refuse, we're seen as embittered, ungrateful asshats for rejecting their definition of god.
And, in some sense, they're exactly right. Why should I be greatful to sadistic, omnipotent being who supposed has it within their power to prevent such severe disabilities, but chooses not to under the guise of serving some "greater purpose"? After all, I never asked for it, and no one ever consulted me ahead of time to tell me about the "fine print" in the contract of life prior to my birth.
Yeah, I'm a pessimist, and will probably end up in hell assuming this god stuff is even real. But at least I'll take with me the satisfaction of god having my blood on his hands for choosing not to do anything to help me or anyone else of my kind when he had the chance.
8==8 Bones 8==8
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
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.
They don't HAVE to sell their products to blind people if they don't want to...
Actually, in the United States, they do have to even if they don't want to, because Congress and the first President Bush enacted a law to that effect.
Can you sue over designs that are so obnoxious they cause you to go blind?
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.
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Forget flash sites, have you ever tried implementing a Captcha system that was usable by the blind?
The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive.
Right.
MABASPLOOM!
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.
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.
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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.
Ah, yes. The "commerce clause." The clause that magically allows the federal government to ignore all of the other restrictions placed on it by the Constitution.
And, no, the alleged rights you mentioned don't exist, either. They're figments of the socialist imagination made possible by lying about what the U.S. Constitution actually says and clearly intends. When people such as FDR and his friends wanted to change the rules by which the republic was governed, they didn't bother with little things such as legality -- and we're still dealing with the ever-increasing consequences.
David
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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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.
The requirement will be that all websites be renderable by a reader, if Target loses the suit (all that has happened so far is that a Target motion to dismiss the case was not granted). The judge also denied a preliminary injunction to require Target to make their website accessible immediately.
This is not trivial. There are programs that will read web pages and then pump them out through a voice synthesizer. The trouble is that the reader programs can't understand all HTML. I've forgotten the details of what fails, but I remember deciding I never wanted to work on a 508-compliant web site. 508 is a separate set of accessibility regulations for government websites. Information can't be just graphic, for example. On one hand, this is essentially adding another type of browser. But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
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